As of August, the combined 5G subscribers of China Mobile and China Telecom had surpassed 150 million, while not as many 5G phones have been sold in the country, and it's clear that some of those users aren't really 5G users.
According to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a government think tank, 13.769 million 5G handsets will be sold in 2019 and by 2020 In the eight months, 93.679 million 5G phones were sold, or 107 million in total.
According to OFweek, this number is less than the number of 5G subscribers announced by mobile and telecom, and if we add in the number of 5G subscribers not yet announced by China Unicom, the actual number of 5G subscribers will be much more than 50 million 5G mobile phone sales.
The real 5G subscribers are 5G mobile phone + 5G package subscribers, which currently number around 107 million by comparison, but not all of them have access to 5G networks.
According to the operator, 600,000 5G base stations are expected to be built in China by the end of this year, which is still far from the number of 4G base stations.
China Unicom has yet to announce the number of 5G subscribers it has, but the speed at which the carrier is rolling out 5G packages may be far greater than the number of actual 5G users.
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