The ongoing 31st China International Postal and Telecommunications Expo, or PT Expo China, has displayed a series of cutting-edge 5G commercial applications in a wide range of areas including the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), health, media and big data transmission.

Since China officially approved 5G commercial services in June 2019, the application of the superfast wireless technology has helped connect more sectors and services.

A dancing humanoid robot attracted the attention of many visitors to the PT Expo. The robot can complete many complex moves and have powerful functions in intelligent visual and voice recognition. The large language model stored in the robot's 5G cloud brain enables it to chat and interact with humans in a pleasant way.

Another attraction of the expo is a huge sand table, demonstrating how vehicles drive automatically under the 5G high-precision positioning network. Thanks to 5G and the homegrown BeiDou satellite navigation system - Chinese version of GPS, China has made great technological advancement in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and automatic driving.

"China takes a leading place in the world in this area. We are doing field tests in several big cities, including Shanghai and Chongqing. I believe the relevant technologies will be officially put into commercial use in the near future," said Yan Maosheng, a senior executive with China Mobile, a major telecom operator.

A 5G-powered robot doing surgery on a flower, which simulated human organ, stole much of the limelight at the expo. The surgery was actually performed by a doctor from Shanghai, which is more than 1,200 kilometers away from Beijing where the expo is held. He was remotely controlling the robot through the 5G network.

"We have performed more than 900 surgeries on human body with the robot, and they all performed well. The robot is the first four-arm laparoscopic surgical robot registered in China," said Wang Xu, a clinical training manager at the Shanghai MicroPort Medbot (Group) Co., Ltd.

A special 5G cloud broadcasting backpack was also demonstrated at the expo. The backpack, which was once used in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, can provide safe and stable signal transmission anytime and anywhere, so it has greatly improved the efficiency of on-site reporting by media outlets.

"We can synchronize several backpacks after sending the signal to the cloud platform, which enables us to produce programs remotely," said Li Fulei, an engineer with the Beijing International Cloud Broadcast Technology Company.

Another exhibitor showcased their latest achievements in big data transmission with the help of 5G technology. The company has successfully conducted a high-computing-power super-fast data transmission experiment over a distance of more than 5,000 kilometers.

"Our transmission distance has increased by five times than before, however, the time delay caused by transit is 20 percent of that before, which is an important indicator for engineering calculation. This is also the first time in the world that such an experiment has been done," said Wang Xiang, senior vice president and chief strategy officer of Chinese telecommunications company ZTE.

This technology will greatly improve data transmission efficiency, which will serve the construction of a national computing power network and the "east data, west computing" project - a key part of China's digital infrastructure aiming to coordinate the computing capabilities of the country's eastern regions, where the need for computing is high, with inland western regions, where abundant renewable resources are optimal for the construction of data centers.

With leapfrog growth of AI and the Internet of Things (IoT), the requirements for network capacities have been increasingly intensified.

The expo showed many companies rebooting the development of 5.5G, an evolution based on 5G technology achievements.

"The main difference between 5.5G and 5G technologies is that 5.5G has 10 times better network capabilities than 5G," said Cao Ming, president of the Wireless Network LTE Product Line at Huawei, a Chinese tech giant.

At present, China has built the world's largest and most advanced 5G network. By the end of April, more than 2.73 million 5G base stations had been built, 5G services had covered all prefecture-level cities and downtown areas of counties, with the number of 5G mobile subscribers hitting 637 million.

The PT Expo China, a major information and communications technology event in Asia, is sponsored by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

It is held in Beijing from Sunday to Tuesday, gathering over 400 Chinese and foreign companies to display their ingenious products.