The rapid development and popularization of 5G and the continuous enrichment of 5G application scenarios are inseparable from the accelerated construction of 5G base stations. If 2019 is the first year of the construction of 5G base stations, this year can be regarded as a year of acceleration, and the construction of 5G base stations in the country is in full swing.
But the controversy about the construction of 5G has not stopped, "wireless radiation", "the relationship between Wi-Fi and 4G", "5G useless theory" and other negative views. I don't know when, but the high energy consumption of 5G has become a widely recognized viewpoint, and many netizens have even expressed the opinion that the construction of 5G base stations should be stopped. I think these people's ideas should be corrected.
Is 5G network power consumption high? Compared to 4G base stations, 5G base stations certainly have high power consumption. An analysis provided by China Tower said that the typical power consumption of a single system of 5G base station of several mainstream 5G equipment vendors are: Huawei 3,500W, ZTE 3,255W, Datang 4,940W; while the power consumption of a single system of 4G base station is only 1,300 W. Calculated in this way, the power consumption of a 5G base station is 2.5-3.8 times that of a 4G base station.
In fact, 5G base stations are a cost of technology upgrade. Compared to 4G and 3G networks, 5G networks are indeed faster, with speeds up to 1Gbps in NSA mode. however, higher Internet speeds require multiple AAUs to achieve, which is the real reason for the high power consumption of 5G networks. Without more AAUs, 5G speeds shrink.
So it's natural and normal for 5G to consume a lot of power, and when you're trying to speed up a car from 10km/h to 100km/h, it's virtually impossible to do so without increasing power consumption.
Liu Shijin, deputy director of the Economic Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), said at the 2021 Caixin Summer Summit Forum on June 24 that "it is not appropriate to put forward too high a target for the construction of 5G base stations in the short term without fully considering various application scenarios."
This recommendation is made because the actual utilization of 5G is still low, and 5G base stations consume too much energy. 5G's advantages of high speed and low latency can only be fully realized in production areas such as industry, healthcare, transportation, ports, mines, agriculture, and other application scenarios that are not readily available. He also claimed that after the base station construction reaches a certain scale, the focus should shift to substantially expanding the application scenarios.
Enhance the construction of application scenarios based on scenarios such as autonomous driving, telemedicine, artificial intelligence, industrial IoT, etc., which is the solution to the breakthrough of high power consumption and high operating costs of 5G base stations.
In fact, 5G has long been making efforts in these areas, to give two examples
Ultra-high reliable low latency communication
In March 2019, Ling Zhipei, chief neurosurgeon of the People's Liberation Army General Hospital (PLAGH), completed a Parkinson's disease patient in PLAGH with a Relying on the empowerment of 5G technology, using the 5G network built by China Mobile, successfully completed the remote control of human surgery based on the 5G network, solving the problem of remote surgery on the network performance demand is extremely high, to meet the information transmission of very low latency, very high reliability requirements, which is 4G network can not do.
5G + AR applications in the field of intelligent manufacturing
China's large aircraft C919 internal hundreds of cables, pipelines need to be docking installation, there can not be the slightest error, at this stage, even if very experienced workers in accordance with the drawings of the connection, the efficiency is very low, the quality can not be guaranteed. Shanghai Commercial Aircraft Corporation through the "5G + AR" technology, with the assistance of edge computing servers, when the workers through the AR glasses to see which cable, the network will prompt the workers should be connected to which cable, so that even if the workers do not have special training can be correctly connected, work efficiency and accuracy has been greatly improved!
People will see the tremendous changes and opportunities that 5G will bring to human life and society as transformative and deafening, but in reality, 5G will be silent as it is being built and put to work.
5G is here and it's not going anywhere. Our appetite for data consumption is getting bigger and bigger, and it would be a fool's errand to stop the construction of 5G base stations to save energy by suppressing the booming demand for 5G. Now, how to layout in advance, promote the depth of application of 5G in production, education, government affairs and other fields, showing the great impetus of wireless, unmanned, interconnected, interactive to economic development, is the three operators and various industries to focus on the direction of exploration.