The Mobile World Congress Shanghai has opened and its three-day run is expected to attract 70,000 visitors. What are all those people connecting to?
The top topic on the opening day was clearly 5G technology, the fifth generation of Internet data connections. After two years of market education with 4G connections in China, many mobile equipment companies are planning for another step into the future. 5G Internet connections are 1000 times faster than 4G connections, and so with 5G access you could, for example, download an entire movie in just a few seconds.
"One is wider access for mobile users. The 5G base stations available now have four times the carrying capacity of 4G base stations. Secondly, it will enlarge the communication capacity of the Internet of Things. One single base station will be able to connect to one million devices per square kilometer. Thirdly, 5G has only a one milli-second time lag, which will greatly help real-time game players," said Xiang Jiying, chief scientist ZTE.
ZTE's 5G base stations are currently deployed by China Mobile in more than 30 cities in China, and will be put into operation soon. ZTE is also developing 5G chips for mobile phones. Xiang estimates 5G mobile phones will enter mass production in 2019.
Perhaps even closer than that is the Internet of Things. While implementation may be in an early stage, many companies are trying to get into the market and educate their customers. Huawei is one of them.
"So IoT is in its very early stage at this point. So our latest strategy is to enable people to connect as many devices as they want. In the future we will have people to people, people to machine, and machine to machine. It will change our efficiency, and it will change environmental benefits, and lots of benefits of how we live and how we work," said Joe Kelly, vice president int'l media affairs, Huawei.
Conference organizers say China is now the world's biggest market for machine to machine connections, and is also the biggest market for the mobile industry. This is probably the reason that over 8,000 companies have flooded to this show in Shanghai to showcase their latest technology.
China is now host to quite a few tech shows every year, including the famous Consumers Electronic Show Asia, which was held right here in May. So what makes the MWC Shanghai special? Well, the key word for it is mobile. Everything here is tied to your phone. And there's more than you could ever think of...
"So every industry is being transformed by the mobile, putting these little chips in every device in the world connecting them to the internet, allowing them to share data is the big trend. Every industry will be transformed, and if you don't have a mobile strategy, you don't have a future," said Michael O'hara, chief marketing officer GSMA.
Analysts say Asia will be the biggest driver of the mobile increase in the next five years. It's estimated that in 2015, mobile technology and services in Asia generated 1.3 trillion US dollars of value, and that that number will grow to 1.7 trillion dollars in 2020.
