Staff members work at an exhibition booth during a media preview of the 2022 World 5G Convention in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, Aug. 9, 2022. (Photo: Xinhua)
China Broadcasting Network Corp (China Broadnet), the country’s fourth-largest telecom operator, officially launched commercial 5G network services in Southwest China’s Xizang Autonomous Region and Northwest China’s Qinghai Province, expanding its 5G services to all 31 provincial-level regions, the company disclosed on its official WeChat account.
Compared with the other three major operators, China Broadnet has the advantage of owning the 700MHz band, which is often dubbed as the “golden frequency” compared with other frequency bands like 3.5GHz and 2.6GHz.
Both China Telecom and China Unicom received 100MHz in the 3.5GHz band, while China Mobile obtained 160MHz in the 2.6GHz band and 100MHz in the 4.9GHz band, information revealed by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology showed.
Xiang Ligang, an independent tech analyst, said that compared with other spectrums, the 700MHz band has wider coverage and smaller propagation loss, which means that the cost of building a 5G network deployment in this band would be much lower compared with other spectrums.
“Almost all of China’s areas could be covered by 5G networks by building about 500,000 700MHz 5G base stations. For the 3.5GHz spectrum, operators must build many more base stations to achieve nationwide 5G network coverage,” Xiang told the Global Times on Tuesday.
China Broadnet has announced a special discount campaign that gives its customers 40 percent off when buying 5G packages this year.
(This article is published by Global Times on Sep 27, 2022 09:24 PM)