It has been four years since the issuance of 5G licenses in 2019. During these four years, 5G commercial use mainly depends on individual users. The industry is still expecting that 5G industry applications will bring benefits to 5G commercial use. However, Guangdong Telecom The network failure has brought vigilance to the industry, and network reliability is a major problem.
The biggest success of 5G commercial use so far is actually the mobile phone user market. With the efforts of the three major operators, the number of 5G package users in China has exceeded 1 billion, and the proportion of 5G package users to the total number of users has exceeded 60%. The development has reversed the decline in ARPU of mobile phone users caused by the 4G price war.
The performance announced by China Mobile can also be seen that individual users are its largest source of income. The performance in 2022 shows that the personal market has brought China Mobile 488.8 billion yuan in revenue, and home users have brought it 116.6 billion yuan in revenue. Those together accounted for 64.6% of its revenue.
5G mainly relies on individual users to bring revenue to operators, which makes the industry quite regrettable, because the industry has always believed that the hope of 5G should be in the field of industrial applications, and hopes to prove the bright future of 5G in the past by accelerating industrial applications, especially In the case that the individual user market has been unable to find rigid demand for 5G, it is even more necessary to prove the advantages of 5G in terms of industrial applications.
However, the network failure of Guangdong Telecom this time has alerted the industry. Can 5G industry applications really become an important boost to the success of 5G commercialization? Does it prove that 5G will change society and bring huge social value? In fact, this situation has been debated before, and now the network failure of Guangdong Telecom will undoubtedly further promote the thinking of all parties on the adoption of 5G network for industry applications.
For industrial applications, reliability is undoubtedly the first priority. However, the network failure of Guangdong Telecom shows that it is difficult for mobile communication networks to provide such high reliability. Imagine a network failure that lasts for several hours. For autonomous driving, How huge the losses caused by industrial production, etc. will be.
In fact, industry experts have warned about this before. Some well-known people pointed out that autonomous driving should not rely too much on a large communication network including 5G. The safety of autonomous driving still depends on the computer on the car; for industrial production, The environment of industrial production is very complex, and it is more difficult for the signal of mobile communication network to penetrate the complex environment, so it is naturally more difficult to ensure the safety of industrial production.
Furthermore, for industrial applications, cost comes first after all, which is why the main source of income for 5G development is still individual users; for industrial applications, the most typical example is actually the Internet of Things. The number of Internet of Things users developed by large operators has reached 1.4 billion, and most of these Internet of Things use 2G and 4G Cat1, because these communication technologies have the advantages of lower cost and lower power consumption, which can greatly reduce costs.
Finally, operators are making a new round of efforts to promote the construction of 5G networks, that is, China Mobile and China Radio and Television have basically completed the construction of 700MHz 5G networks, and China Unicom and China Telecom have jointly built 900MHz 5G networks. It is the advantage of signal coverage, but it deviates from the ultra-large bandwidth, ultra-large capacity, and ultra-low delay emphasized by 5G. The consideration of low-frequency 5G is probably to meet the pursuit of individual users for signals. This is also related to the current income of operators. Compatible with individual users.
It can be said that Guangdong Telecom's network failure may have discounted the industry application that the industry expects to prove the superiority of 5G. Operators may therefore further promote 5G for individual users. After all, operators now urgently need to obtain immediate Interests, as for those industry application interests that have not been seen, it is not something that operators can handle by themselves, and requires the cooperation of all parties.