From 8 to 9 November, the World Blockchain Conference was successfully held in Wuzhen, the venue of the World Internet Summit. On November 9th, people from three major Chinese telecom operators, China mobile, China telecom, China Unicom gathered to talk about the integration of blockchain and 5G.

The roundtable talk was themed with “ Decoding 5G + Blockchain, for Fashion, or for Practice”. ZTE Corporation, University of Science and Technology of China also took an active part in.

Q1: Why do telecom operators study blockchain technology in 5G era?

Zhao Jun, a researcher of China telecom: We hope to integrate with blockchain technology through our advantages on network resources and terminal. Operators can be upgraded from channel providers to value flow portals for users. 5G has the advantages of high speed, low latency, high bandwidth, high concurrency, multiple connections, which really changes our lives. However, 5G does not solve the drawbacks of 4G, such as privacy protection, virtual intellectual property protection, data security, for which blockchain technology can make up for.

Q2: What investment and entrepreneurship opportunities will the integration of 5g and blockchain bring?

Zheng Jinrong, a head of ZTE’s product department: First, using blockchain technology to promote the construction of 5G network infrastructure. In the co-construction and sharing of 5G infrastracture, the distributed ledger and non-tamperability provided by the blockchain can be used to supervise various information between different nodes. At the same time, the smart contract technology can provide operators with more intelligent inter-network settlement, resource sharing and value transfer capabilities, so as to provide operators with more transparent information to realize multi-benefit sharing.

Q3: What difficulties have you encountered in the process of studying blockchain?

Guo Xueman, a researcher of China mobile: Blockchain can’t solve all the problems in business scenarios, and even if some scenarios are applicable, it will involve the transformation cost of the original enterprise. We focus on consortium blockchain as we need to take its commercial value into consideration. We will evaluate some technologies provided by the open source community and its security. In addition, operators are born to construct network, infrastructure and standardization. Once put into large-scale commercial, how is blockchain-based security to reduce risk? This may be the most concern to us.

Q4：Can you introduce the blockchain mobile phone made by China telecom?

Zhao Jun: The emergence of 5G has brought about a surge in data volume, and the data assets held by ordinary individuals have shown a geometric growth. But some hidden dangers emerge, such as the leakage of sensitive information, the loss of mobile phones and identity authentication, which blockchain mobile phones can solve. It can not only cater for the daily demand of users, but also bring us new business growth points, which is the reason why we strive to develop blockchain-based mobile phones.

As 5G has come, China telecom operators hope to realize the amplification of the whole information value, a better ecological and collaborative environment through the integration of 5G and blockchain, big data, cloud computing, and AI. They hope that operators can provide the whole society with better basic service capabilities of network and blockchain. In conclusion, 5G will usher in an era of data blowout, which, together with smart contracts, will change the world.