Is there an East-West telecoms divide?

I have been involved in the telecommunications industry for almost 20 years now and visiting China to see what is going on there and how the market compares to Europe has always been a personal highlight. However, in recent years there has been a gap: my last trip was actually in 2019 BC (Before Covid), when I caught up with many great people including my dear friend Ryan Ding from Huawei, who sadly passed away in 2022.

I am very happy to report that in October I returned to China as part of a larger trip across Asia. I spent a short while in Shenzhen and Hong Kong meeting with representatives from China Telecom, HKT (Hong Kong Telecom) and Huawei, including excellent discussions with new Huawei senior leaders David Wang and Victor QIAN Kun .?

As ever, it was an impressive and insightful stopover, with news of many developments in the pipeline. China really does do telecom on a different scale to anywhere else. Given its relative size as a country, this is probably not so surprising. But it’s when you start to compare the numbers in terms of network infrastructure that it hits home.?

At the end of 2022, for example, China Tower, the primary provider of cell site equipment in China, managed approximately 2.05 million tower sites , while by contrast, the United States – which has a similar land mass – had just short of 150,000 . Shenzhen, a city that is home to 16 million people, has more antennas than some European countries ??.

That is not the only difference. If we look at internet connectivity, fiber to the home (FTTH) is pretty much universal in China, while in Europe a lot of legacy connection types like ADSL, VDSL and cable are still prevalent. According to one analysis, the average fiber adoption rate across the continent in the middle of last year was 57.2% - although the range does go from 16.3% in Austria and Greece to 94.9% in Iceland.?

In addition, consumers in many European countries have continued to stick to old habits and buy lower speed packages, even where FTTH options exist. By contrast, the Chinese are data hungry. Just under a third (30%) of China Telecom’s customers – the country’s largest provider – are on plans that deliver 1Gb per second speeds, while 60% are above 500 Mb/s and only 10% fall below this.

This appetite for fast connections and data transfer makes sense when you look at how embedded connectivity is in everyday life for the average Chinese person. Smartphones, mobile apps and QR codes are everywhere you look, whether for online shopping, messaging, social networking and media sharing, food deliveries, ride hailing and public transport, navigation, fitness, or using public services.

In fact, without a smartphone, you will have a hard time doing something as simple as parking your car here, as old-fashioned ticket machines – and card payments in restaurants, coffee shops and so on– have given way to the phone. In many places, cards are not even accepted these days.

This incredible digital infrastructure is also behind China’s fast-growing electric vehicle market. In the image below you can see me and one of my colleagues from Odido sitting in the back of a smartphone on wheels watching a movie. A few minutes later, we were cruising in a self-driving smartphone on wheels…

Is it all good news, however?

The one thing that does nag me about digital connectivity becoming so ubiquitous is the undeniable danger of smartphone addiction. If you think that in Europe we are glued to our screens, in China it is on a whole different level. Couples in restaurants on a supposedly romantic evening out spend more time on their phones than enjoying each other’s company. Rather than looking at, say, a painting in an art gallery using those amazing lenses we call eyes, the default is to reach for the camera button on your foldable phone. At home, at work, at leisure, in your car, you are essentially hooked into the digital world at all times.

I’m a long-term member of and advocate for this industry, but I also believe in living a balanced life that includes interacting with other people… so in terms of screentime, I have to say I believe less is more. Having a fantastic digital infrastructure is important, and there is a lot that Europe can learn from China in that respect. However, if it’s a choice between real-world experiences and total digital dependency, I’m ready to go back to one of those old Nokia “dumb” phones (but maybe with some 5G thrown in) ??.

Photo credit: 文 邵, Pixabay