China Mobile launches commercial 5G-Advanced in Beijing

China Mobile's 5G-Advanced campaign has stepped up a gear with a commercial launch in Beijing.

The company says it's upgraded more than 7,000 5G basestations, achieving coverage across the capital and delivering peak downlink speeds of 5 Gbit/s, a five-fold increase over 5G.

The announcement at a press conference Friday follows a similar launch during MWC Shanghai in June 2024.

In both cities, the telco is promising dedicated service bundles for venues, business travel and games, as well as a 2k live broadcast service with downlink speeds of up to 3 Gbit/s.

But while it's offering a free trial for early Beijing customers, it hasn't yet announced pricing in either city, suggesting it's not quite ready to start service.

Still, the news confirms China Mobile as the world's 5G-Advanced pioneer. 3GPP Release 18, which formalizes the 5G-Advanced specs, was only frozen two months ago.

China Mobile announced in March it would deploy 5G-Advanced in 300 cities across the country by year-end.

It's a fair bet that in most of those cities the upgrade will extend to just a handful of key locations, like the airport and railway station.

Industry chain

The launches in the two biggest cities will be important for China Mobile to showcase its 5G-A capabilities and test out its commercial potential.

Executives said Friday the company is aiming to sign up 20 million 5G-A users by the end of the year. But they acknowledged they needed to work with hardware firms and developers to build the industry chain and expand the supply of handsets and new applications.

Currently, around ten 5G-A terminals from brands such as Vivo and Xiaomi are available. China Mobile hopes to increase that to more than 20 by year-end.

While China operators have enjoyed some healthy growth from cloud and digital enterprise services in recent years, they would welcome a boost from 5G.

According to Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) stats, mobile data revenue growth for the big three operators has been below 3% every year since 5G debuted in 2019. Last year, total revenue declined.

By comparison, mobile data revenue grew at 27% or above in the first four years of 4G.