Chinese authorities are making yet another tilt at opening up enterprise 5G to private firms. Five government agencies, led by the Ministry for Industry and IT, have launched a pilot program for 5G standalone private networks for industry.
They aim to build 50,000 industrial 5G private networks and boost the value-added of industrial Internet to more than 2.5 trillion Chinese yuan ($372 billion) by 2030 – up from CNY1.67 trillion yuan in 2025, the state-run China Daily reported.
They say they will prioritize certain industries – including materials, equipment manufacture, consumer goods, transport, and energy – for state support.
According to an MIIT announcement in June, the aim of the program is to shift from the past model of a public network slice to a dedicated private network, led by enterprises and completely independent of the state-owned public networks.
It says the pilot deployments will include 5G basestations, core networks and edge computing, all of which will be integrated with new industrial network technologies such as industrial optical networks and industrial Ethernet.
Acquiring spectrum
As of the end of June, 80,000 5G industrial private networks had been deployed across China, while 26,000 “5G + industrial internet” projects were under construction, local media reported.
The underlying driver of the accelerated private 5G ambitions are the economic goals, set out in the latest five-year plan, of achieving “high-quality development” and ensuring global leadership in critical technologies such as 6G, robotics, quantum and EVs.
The other government organizations leading the pilot scheme are the Ministry of Transport, the state enterprise supervisory body SASAC, the National Energy Administration and, underlining the military importance of 5G, defense science body SASTIND.
The problem is this project follows a previous exercise that begun in early 2025 and called for “the orderly implementation” of private 5G trials with the participation of the private companies. In particular, it urged the release of spectrum to new entrants or enterprises that wanted to manage their own private networks.
Nothing appears to have come out of that, other perhaps than showing it takes a great deal to prize spectrum out of the tight grip of the MIIT’s Bureau of Radio Regulation, the custodian of all spectrum resources.
How is this latest scheme going to get around that? The MIIT doesn’t say. It may be that the radio bureau and the telcos are now happy to allow industrial firms to acquire spectrum to help them deploy on–premises 5G to upgrade their operations. But at this stage that doesn’t look the likeliest outcome.
