Although this is a sizeable increase, many of these new subscribers were already existing customers who have been migrated to a 5G plan.
According to Marbridge Consulting, who collected this data from the telecom operator announcements, this means China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom now have a total of 757.84 million 5G subscribers. This works out to a 5G penetration rate of 45.8%.
The report also reveals that the telcos added a total of 8.7 million new mobile subscribers in January, bringing their combined subscriber total to 1.655 billion.
The latest 5G Observatory report shows that China has one of the most extensive 5G rollouts in the world, coming second behind South Korea. The country has nearly 1 million 5G base stations, which is nine times more than the EU.
