At the press conference of State Council Information Office held today, Miao Wei introduced that after going through the history of following in 2G and breaking through in 3G, China had realized the historic leap of synchronizing in 4G and leading in 5G with the number of standard-essential 5G patents ranking the first in the world. Strongly driven by information and communication technologies, the digital economy in China had reached a scale of 31 trillion yuan at the end of 2018, which accounted for 1/3 of the gross domestic production.
As for the application status of the 5G industry, Miao replied that currently there were 11 types of commercial 5G mobile phones in Chinese markets, most of which, however, were non-standalone (NSA). Nevertheless, the true manifestation of 5G performance in a cell phone depends on standalone (SA) 5G networks rather than the NSA product based on the core network of 4G. At present, the only mobile phone that is compatible with both NSA and SA is Huawei, as multiple factors such as chips and operating systems are involved. To the best knowledge of MIIT, the current 5G networks across the country are basically NSA applications. Only until the next year could SA 5G networks be formally employed on a large scale in China.
