A China Telecom employee shows the difference in download speeds of cellphones using 4G and 5G services (left) and the difference in upload speeds (right)

China officially launched commercial 5G services on October 31, with the nation’s big three telecom operators rolling out their 5G data plans. The move means consumers can now pay to access superfast 5G speeds as more than 86,000 5G base stations have already entered service in China, covering 50 cities nationwide. Chen Zhaoxiong, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology, said China has been working hard to extend 5G coverage. By the end of this year, more than 130,000 5G base stations will be in use. China is not the first country to commercialize 5G, but China leads the world in the scale and diversity of 5G services. China is set to become the world’s largest 5G market by 2025, with 460 million 5G users, according to a forecast by the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMCA), the China Daily reports.

Monthly rates for 5G services will depend on speed and data used. Although monthly prices for basic 5G data plans are higher than for 4G, the price per gigabyte for 5G is lower. In Shanghai, 5G packages start from CNY128, including 30 gigabyte data traffic, 500 minutes of calling and value-added services. The CNY599 packages include 300 GB data traffic and 3,000 minutes of calling. Extra data traffic costs CNY3 to CNY5 for each gigabyte. Existing users can enjoy discounts of 20% to 30% for switching to 5G services for six months, reducing the price of some 5G packages to less than CNY100 a month.

Huawei grabbed a record high share of 42% in the domestic smartphone market during the third quarter of this year, with an annual growth rate of 66% even as most of its rivals posted sharp declines. Huawei shipped 41.5 million handsets in the Chinese market from July to September. According to Canalys, the Chinese smartphone market still contracted by 3% in the third quarter compared to a year earlier. Huawei, however, achieved a sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth during the period. The remaining top five vendors, namely Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi and Apple, ranked in that order, all shrank further. Their combined share only accounted for 50% of the market, down from 54% in the second quarter of 2019 and 64% in the third quarter of 2018.