5G is an extension of 4G, but unlike 4G, 5G is not a single wireless access technology, but a real integration network. Compared with 3G/4G technology, 5G technology has high transmission rate, large network capacity, short delay, and can improve the network energy efficiency by more than a hundred times, truly opening the era of the Internet of everything. China's IMT-2020(5G) Promotion group has defined the main technical scenarios for 5G: continuous wide area coverage, hot spot high capacity, low power and large connection, and low latency and high reliability. And the International Telecommunication Union ITU definition of the three scenarios are basically the same, but our country will be further divided into mobile broadband wide area large coverage and hot spot high-speed two scenarios.

2018 is a milestone year for the communication industry, and the overall industry is in the node moment of "three phases of superposition". On the one hand, the industry is on the eve of the transition from 4G to 5G, and the business model will transition from meeting the communication needs of people to enabling vertical industries and enterprises. On the other hand, 2018 is also the starting point of resonance between the 10-year generational change cycle of the communication industry and the capital expenditure cycle of operators, and the capital expenditure of operators will bottom out and pick up in 2018. The communications industry, like other industries, also follows the rule of upstream before downstream, infrastructure before product and service. From the perspective of the management-end-cloud architecture, the stepwise development law of basic network first, terminal follow, and application and service again is also applicable to 5G. In this process, the investment body of the entire 5G industry chain has also changed accordingly, from operators and consumers to vertical industries and enterprise players. We believe there are three big waves of future investment opportunities in the communications industry based on the 5G theme.