China Telecom said that the 5G penetration surpassed 20 percent after adding 7.06 million customers in October. The total number of their connections is now at 71.9 million, merely a year after launching the service.
China Mobile’s 5G penetration hit 13.6 percent, with total package customers increasing 15.2 million last month to 128.8 million. China Unicom hasn’t released 5G numbers, but 4G subscribers increased by 14.8 million year-on-year to 268.6 million. Its overall user base continued to decline, falling by 148,000 in October to 309 million and bringing the sum lost since October 2019 to 13.1 million.
Total subscribers at China Telecom rose by 16.6 million year-on-year to 350.2 million at end-October, while China Mobile had 2.75 million net additions to take its total to 946 million. Zhang Dong, GM of China Mobile’s Department of Market Operation, noted recently 80 million of the 113.5 million subscribers on 5G plans at end-September used next-generation smartphones.
The fact many 5G customers don’t have compatible handsets helps explain a gap between the operators’ subscriber numbers and reported shipments of devices in the country. China Academy of Information and Communications Technology figures showed smartphone shipments of 63.6 million units in H1, versus 108 million 5G customers reported by operators.
Nokia and SURF, the organization for IT in Dutch education and research, have successfully reached a single carrier 800Gb/s optical transmission over SURF’s existing cross-border, multi-vendor research and education network infrastructure.