Miao Shouye, leader of 5G co-building and sharing work team of China Unicom, told us that China Unicom has been making efforts to facilitate the withdrawal of 2G network, planning to realize the withdrawal of 240 2G local networks by the end of this year, and complete the withdrawal by the end of the next year at the soonest. 3G network will be degraded to 1 carrier frequency by the end of the year, and the development of VoLTE will be promoted to replace 3G voice, so as to promote the gradual withdrawal of 3G network and thereby form an extremely simple collaborative target network of 4G+5G.
According to Miao Shouye, 4G network is quite mature now, while 5G network is embracing a large-scale development. To accelerate the process, restraints from 2G/3G should be eliminated firstly.
He pointed out that the basic network of China Unicom is a coexistence of networks from 2G to 5G (GSM/WCDMA/LTE/5G NR), which brings enormous operation and maintenance load and needs to be simplified.