City to become a world-leading smart city

Shanghai will be the world’s first “fiber network-powered smart city” with high-speed network coverage citywide, helping to establish it as a smart city and boost digital transformation, officials said on Friday.

Compared with mobile 5G broadband networks, F5G, or the fifth-generation fixed network, brings fiber technology and upgraded bandwidth to 1 to 5 gigabytes per second. The fiber network offers advantages such as low latency, fast access, cloud and smart operation, said China Mobile’s Shanghai branch, which operates the F5G network.

“Shanghai is now a pioneering city for F5G nationwide and globally. It’s a digital infrastructure for technology and innovations like smart city and artificial intelligence,” said Zhang Jianming, vice chairman of the Shanghai Economy and Information Technology Commission.

F5G is an essential infrastructure of a smart city, covering e-government, online medical systems, fintech, enterprise cloud, online education, livestreaming, city security and smart manufacture, industry experts said.

The new fiber network will cut network latency within one mini-second in urban regions, a key improvement in business sectors such as automatic factories and AI applications.

The global fiber market, fueled by F5G and other services, was expected to hit 1.4 trillion yuan (US$215.4 billion) in 2020, and 3.2 trillion yuan in 2025, according to an Ernst & Young report.

In the next three years, Shanghai plans to build 50,000 outdoor 5G base stations and a F5G network to improve download speeds to above 1 gigabyte per second. The city also aims to improve international Internet connection capacity, which already accounts for a third of national level, city officials said previously.