• China ended last year with almost 4.2 million 5G base stations, according to the country’s tech ministry
• That number is set to increase by more than 7% this year
• China’s three main operators already boast almost 1.2 billion 5G connections between them

China ended 2024 with 4.19 million 5G base stations “built and put into operation”, enabling “5G in every village”, and that number is expected to increase by more than 300,000 to 4.5 million by the end of this year, according to an update shared by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) during its National Industrial and Information Technology Work Conference held in Beijing at the end of last year. 

To put that into perspective, China’s telcos are expected to build more 5G base stations this year than the US mobile operators have until now deployed between them: The US telcos had about 270,000 5G base stations up and running in total by the start of 2024, according to this report from KPMG. 

As a result of years of heavy investment in 5G infrastructure and the widespread promotion of services – the country’s three main operators were selling 5G contracts even before customers could access the services – China already boasts more than 1.18 billion 5G connections, roughly half of the estimated global total of some 2.3 billion. 

China Mobile, which had just over 1 billion mobile connections in total at the end of November last year, ended that month with 547.1 million 5G customers. 

China Telecom ended November with 349.4 million 5G customers, accounting for the majority of its total 423.7 million mobile connections, while China Unicom boasted 288.9 million 5G connections.   

But it’s not all about wireless connectivity: China now has more than 200 million active gigabit fibre broadband access lines, according to the MIIT. 

At the conference in Beijing, the MIIT also set out a number of development goals for 2025, which marks the end of the current (14th) five-year plan (a set of broad economic development goals designed to strengthen the national economy). 

Those goals include the further evolution of 5G and the “innovative development of 6G technology”, greater investment in industrial 5G private networks, and (of course) the development of general large language models (LLMS) and industrial LLMs for the implementation of generative AI (GenAI) as well as a greater focus on the combination of AI and manufacturing.  

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV