• As you might expect, the scale of China’s 5G sector dwarfs other markets
• The country’s mobile operators have deployed more than 4.8 million 5G base stations
• Between them, the telcos have about 1.2 billion 5G subs, more than 40% of the global total

While there’s growing noise around 6G plans – expect to hear a lot more about these at MWC26 in March – there’s still a great deal of 5G activity and growth to come, even in China, where there have been aggressive infrastructure rollouts and widespread uptake of 5G service packages. 

According to the latest statistics from the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the country’s three major telcos – China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom – and minnow China Broadnet (a very minor player that joined the 5G market in 2022) generated service revenues of 1.61tn yuan ($230.6bn) between them during the first 11 months of 2025, though this was a year-on-year increase of just 0.9%. 

At the end of November, China’s operators had a total of 1.83 billion cellular connections, of which almost 1.2 billion (65.3% of the total) were 5G connections. Keep in mind that there were expected to be about 2.9 billion 5G users worldwide by the end of last year, according to the latest Mobility Report from Ericsson, so (roughly) China currently accounts for more than 40% of the world’s 5G users. 

China’s mobile users continue to switch from 4G to 5G service packages: During the first 11 months of last year, the number of 5G subscriptions grew by 179 million (while the total number of mobile connections grew by just 38.5 million). 

And the operators continue to roll out their 5G networks at a mind-blowing rate: By the end of November there were, according to the MIIT, 4.83 million 5G base stations deployed across the country, an increase of 579,000 since the end of 2024: Of the total number of mobile base stations in China, 5G now accounts for 37.4%.  

Of course, China is a vast country with a massive population – its 1.4 billion inhabitants are spread across almost 9.6 million sq km (3.7 million sq miles), making it the second-largest country by population (just behind India) and the third-largest country by land mass (behind Russia and Canada). 

But to put the 5G network rollout scale into perspective, the 27 member countries of the European Union between them had about 352,000 5G base stations at the end of 2024, according to the European Commission (EC)’s latest 5G Observatory report, though the population coverage by 5G signal is roughly the same as in China at about 94% or 95%. 

That total number for EU member states will have increased during 2025, of course, but it still gives a sense of the scale of deployment in China compared with another key region. That same EC 5G Observatory report also noted that the number of 5G base stations deployed in the US at the end of 2024 was just 140,000, while in India the number was about 465,000. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV