China Tower dials up on innovation

China Tower Corp, a mobile communication infrastructure company that runs almost all of the country's telecom towers, is beefing up innovation application of its digital infrastructure after the company played a pivotal role in helping the nation build the world's largest and highest-quality mobile broadband network.

Zhang Zhiyong, the company's chairman, said by leveraging its vast resources — including 2.1 million telecom tower sites, nearly 1 million equipment rooms, and round-the-clock power and maintenance support — the company has established a unique competitive edge in supporting China's digital transformation.

To date, China Tower has helped China build over 5.6 million base stations, indoor distributed antenna systems covering 17.3 billion square meters, and telecom signal coverage for 66,200 kilometers of high-speed railways and subways, Zhang said.

Since 2014, the company has doubled its annual construction scale, and is now deploying more than 900,000 base stations per year. Network reliability has reached historic highs, with significant reductions in outages and downtime.

"Through innovation and resource sharing, China Tower has saved over 100 billion yuan ($13.9 billion) in redundant investments — equivalent to eliminating the need for 1 million additional towers," Zhang said.

His comments came as China solidified its global leadership in 5G deployment, with the total number of 5G base stations reaching 4.44 million, achieving full 5G coverage in all townships and 90 percent penetration in administrative villages, according to the latest data disclosed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology earlier this month.

China's 5G mobile users have surged to over 1 billion, while 5G applications now span 86 out of 97 national economic sectors, with over 138,000 real-world use cases. Key sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, and energy are rapidly digitizing, supported by more than 18,500 "5G + industrial internet" projects nationwide, the MIIT said.

According to Zhang, moving forward, China Tower Corp will focus on innovation-driven development, maximizing resource sharing, and creating integrated, ubiquitous infrastructure, including on the ground, in the air, and underground, to further strengthen its contributions to the digital economy.

For instance, China Tower is transforming traditional telecom assets into multifunctional digital infrastructure. By repurposing communication towers into internet of things sensor hubs and converting equipment rooms into edge computing nodes, the company is accelerating its integration into China's national computing network.

"Its distributed edge computing framework aims to make computing power as accessible as utilities — on-demand, ubiquitous, and affordable," Zhang said.

Moreover, the company is advancing integrated space-air-ground networks. For low-altitude applications, its towers support drone operations with landing pads, charging stations, and maintenance services.

"For satellite connectivity, 70 percent of the ground-based augmentation stations of China's Beidou Navigation Satellite System are co-located on China Tower sites," Zhang said, adding that the company is also collaborating with satellite firms on network optimization, maintenance, and security, including establishing a terrestrial test environment for satellite communications.

China Tower is also enhancing digital coverage in subterranean spaces, upgrading traditional indoor distributed antenna systems, or DAS, into smart "digital DAS" for applications like underground navigation, autonomous parking, and infrastructure monitoring — empowering smart cities and industrial digitization.

Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Zhongguancun Modern Information Consumer Application Industry Technology Alliance — a telecom industry association, said China Tower is an example of how Chinese telecom companies keep innovating to make the best use of the resources they have and come up with impressive applications.

masi@chinadaily.com.cn