GSMA THRIVE CHINA 2020: China Telecom chairman and CEO Ke Ruiwen (pictured) backed standalone (SA) 5G to lead major changes across society, helping to power advanced IT platforms and fuel the digital economy.

During the first keynote session, Ke said SA 5G went much further than an evolution in technology and would lead to such increased performance it would create a “quantum change in communications”.

“This will provide diverse personalised businesses and services, introduces cloud-based architecture and technologies,” he said adding this would be brought about by the integration of communications technology and IT.

The resulting architecture is expected to provide the backbone for network slicing, edge computing, big data and AI applications.

“We believe that internet and cloud integration is the essential path for development of society. Currently IT infrastructure is beyond the scope of traditional communications networks,” he noted. “The relationship between cloud and network in the past was about cloud adapting to the network but now the network needs to adapt to the cloud.”

He went on to cite the critical role technologies enabled by SA 5G would play in the digital economy: “Penetration will define how fast and how developed information technology in the future will be.”

Earlier on day one of Thrive, China Telecom’s deputy MD of its 5G innovation centre Lei Can detailed progress made on the operator’s own standalone 5G strategy.

To view the keynote and other Thrive sessions, click here.