(Yicai) June 26 -- The trio of chairpersons of China’s major state-owned telecom operators, including China Mobile, have for the first time all delivered speeches at GSMA’s MWC Shanghai amid challenges to step into a new era of faster connectivity and artificial intelligence.

Even chairmen of China Unicom and China Telecom talked at GSMA's flagship Asia event, Yicai learned from John Hoffman, chief executive of the industry organization of mobile network operators. The MWC Shanghai 2024 will continue till June 28.

Global telecom operators are facing two challenges, said Chen Zhongyue, chairman of China Unicom. First, their conventional businesses tend to be saturated, and second, digital transformation accounts for a small share of their total revenues despite quick growth.

Most people already have access to the internet and data plans are getting cheaper. Major carriers around the world recorded narrowing user growth at less than 3 percent year-over-year last year, down from a 30 percent boost in 2014, according to Chen. Despite a steady surge in households' online traffic per month, data prices are falling so service providers fail to increase their revenues.

As the market environment is becoming more complex and the competition is getting more fierce, operators are wondering how to consolidate their primary growth point of communication networks and secondly, how to better exploit computing power to transform, Chen explained. 

Yang Jie, chairman of China Mobile, said that the firm strives to facilitate more AI initiatives. AI has attributes linked to both humans and characters as it can independently finish multiple types of tasks, gradually becoming a new entry point for information services, he added.

AI is becoming a crucial driver of innovations regarding fifth-generation mobile networks, as well as applications, said Ke Ruiwen, chairman of China Telecom. It can improve efficiency, energy consumption, as well as customer experience while enhancing the performance of 5G networks and expanding user scenarios. 

China Telecom will promote in-depth integration between traditional industries and the application of 5G with cloud computing to speed up digital infrastructure upgrading. It will construct an integrated internet of computing power nationwide and accelerate its independent development of general-purpose large language models, Ke added.

Editor: Emmi Laine