5G service is hopefully coming to China in the near future
After pretty much bidding farewell to Skype, WhatsApp and a few other favoured web services, here comes some internet-friendly news for a change. China's 5G mobile network will be fully launched in 2020, with rollout to start this coming June. Look forward to faster stickers, memes and streaming.
The 5G transmission speed is expected to deliever data transfer speeds up to 100 megabits per second in major metropolitan areas, according to estimates from Variety. That's fast enough to download a two-hour film in high-definition in just 12 seconds.
According to Xinhua, the three major telecommunications network carriers, China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom, are all planning to roll out the very first standard version of 5G mobile networks next June in at least five major cities in China. There's no hard confirmation that Shanghai will be one of those five, but we definitely consider Shanghai to be a major city, so it's likely. From there, the network will scale up all across China, with a broad launch of 5G services by mobile network operators expected in 2020.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China’s mobile communication supervisor, said it has officially launched the third stage of 5G networks trials, and it's expected to replace the current 4G technology in global markets starting from 2019, reported by Caixin. Another story from SCMP also reports that China telecom handset manufacturers such as Huawei and ZTE are researching how 5G can boost efficiency for data-heavy functions like video streaming.