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With the strong support of Tianjin Municipality, Tianjin Mobile has built and activated over 500 5G base stations across the city. In 2019, Tianjin Mobile’s investment will exceed 1 billion yuan, to be used for building large-scale infrastructure and ensuring 5G coverage in all 4,500 residential communities across Tianjin, serving 4.6 million households. On June 6, 2019, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued official 5G commercial licenses to four companies: China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Broadcasting Network. China skipped the pre-commercial license stage and issued official 5G commercial licenses directly, becoming the fifth country after South Korea, the United States, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom to announce 5G commercialization – thus joining the first tier of 5G countries! Unlike the data related to the emergence of 2G, the development of 3G, and the growth of 4G, 5G is a technology that represents a new era. In addition to offering an even better user experience and higher data capacity, 5G will also usher in an era of interconnected devices, penetrating various industries. In the Internet of Things era, the energy meter reading industry still faces the following \"pain points\". First, the network coverage is poor. Smart meters are usually installed in enclosed environments, where network signals are often difficult to maintain. If a solution involving network signal amplification is used, it will introduce new problems such as signal interference. Second, massive access. Currently, there is a high demand for meters related to water, electricity, gas, and heating. Traditional cellular networks have a limited number of devices that can be connected to each base station, which makes it difficult to meet the needs of connecting such a large number of smart meters. Third, the security is poor. The smart metering devices widely used in the market today still face numerous security challenges, such as the theft and copying of IC cards, communication security during transmission over public networks (data theft, cyberattacks, data tampering, etc.), the difficulty of adapting energy companies’ proprietary transmission protocols, and low levels of security protection. Although the Internet of Things faces many challenges in the field of smart metering, all these issues will be resolved with the advent of 5G. Leveraging the advantages of 5G such as high speed, wide coverage, low power consumption, and low latency, Xintian Technology applies 5G technology in the fields of smart water management and smart gas management. This enables live streaming of real-time data from energy operations sites as well as data synchronization, allowing energy management companies to make informed decisions promptly. It also accelerates the advancement of information technology in areas such as smart metering and intelligent energy management, enabling companies to fully benefit from the digital and intelligent services that IoT technology offers for energy management. Currently, matrix-type NB-IoT smart water meters based on 5G networks are being installed in the Fenghuangcheng residential complex in Hexi District, Tianjin. This will enable cloud-based monitoring of water usage data and smart meter reading; moreover, with just a simple touch, various services related to daily life such as purchases and warranty requests can be handled through a mobile app. In recent years, driven by factors such as policies and the market, smart metering has seen rapid development. In the \"Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Development of Smart Grids\" issued in 2015 by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Energy Administration, it was clearly stated that support should be provided for the centralized reading of water, electricity, and gas meters, that an integrated platform for dynamic data related to energy distribution across different industries should be established, and that sharing of energy and information infrastructure should be encouraged. Therefore, companies in the energy sector are turning to the field of smart metering; for example, **the power grid has listed the implementation of a system that enables centralized and automatic collection of data from meters for water, electricity, gas, and heating as one of its top ten priorities. It can be said that in the 5G era, the markets for smart meter reading and smart energy management, represented by smart water meters and smart gas meters, hold great prospects. Source: Changhui Instruments http://yunrun.com.cn/