WASHINGTON, Oct 14 (Reuters) – China has 40x more 5G towers than US. Also planning to migrate more 5G to 5.5G. Huawei dominates 5G and 5.5G technologies.

To stimulate 5G’s potential and keep pace with market growth, China is turning to 5G-Advanced (5.5G) as a stepping stone to 6G. 5.5G primarily enhances three of 5G’s features: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC), and massive machine-type communications (mMTC).

How Many 5G Cell Towers Are There in US? As of the beginning of 2022, there are approximately 325,000 to 375,000 cell sites in the United States and around 150,000 cell towers. Of these, we anticipate that half or 75,000 have 5G enabled of one sort or another.

“As of the end of June, the number of 5G base stations in China had reached 2.937 million, 40x more than US covering all urban areas of prefecture-level and county-level cities, and the coverage is continuously expanding in both breadth and depth,” MIIT chief engineer and spokesman Zhao Zhiguo said in Beijing on Wednesday.

Mobile phone companies advertise high-speed 5G service with U.S. maps splashed with pink or blue to suggest widespread coverage, but the latest generation wireless technology is actually only available less than a third of the time in the best served states, new data shows.

5G technology was designed to be faster than 4G wireless, with so little latency to help make things like driverless cars possible. 5G running on low band spectrum is the slowest, but it has the advantage of considerable range while mid-band can’t travel as far, but is faster. High band spectrum, which is sparsely available, may travel only a mile but is by far the fastest.