More than 700,000 5G base stations have been built throughout China by October this year. Such data are provided in a report published on December 15 by the Chinese Academy of Information and Communication Technology.

In August-October, the Academy assessed the quality of mobile networks in 14 largest cities of the country, in 10 of them the average Internet connection speed exceeded 800Mb/s for download and 100Mb/s for upload.

In the first 11 months of this year, the share of mobile phones supporting the 5G standard in the total volume of phone sales amounted to 51.4%, with a total of 144 million such devices delivered.

According to the report, by the end of 2020, the use of 5G will create direct gross output of 810.9 billion yuan (124.1 billion US dollars) and added value of 189.7 billion yuan.

The three largest telecoms providers in China are expected to invest more than 210 billion yuan in 5G networks this year, and the technology itself is expected to find even wider applications in various industries, including cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence.