China is stepping up its deployment of key 5G infrastructure despite the impacts of COVID-19 according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
MIIT head Miao Wei (苗圩) said at a press conference held on 25 May that China had “accelerated the pace of construction of 5G since the start of the year” despite the COVID-19 outbreak.
While in January, February and even in March we were perhaps subject to certain impacts, all the enterprises worked hard and expanded their vigour, striving to catch up.
At present we are adding roughly over 10,000 5G stations each week. In April our monthly 5G user increase was over 7 million, for more than 36 million users in total.
Miao pointed in particular to three key areas of 5G usage at present:
- Remote diagnosis and medical treatment, via the provision of “extremely clear visual information.”
- 5G + 4K and 8K screens.
- Remote conferencing, as recently deployed by the Xinhua News Agency at the Two Sessions legislative conference to permit interactions between journalists and representatives separated by hundreds of kilometres.
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