China Tower’s membership builds further momentum behind the GSMA Tower Forum, a new initiative that convenes mobile network operators and tower companies to collaborate on areas including energy efficiency, policy and permitting and technology evolution – with a focus on practical outcomes that improve deployment, performance and resilience.
At MWC Shanghai, the GSMA announced that China Tower has joined the GSMA as a new member, bringing the world’s largest telecommunications tower company into the GSMA’s global ecosystem. Last year, China Tower completed a national upgrade across China, converting its 5.6 million base stations and 2.1 million tower sites into intelligent edge-computing hubs to meet the needs of the AI era.
Tower companies are playing an increasingly strategic role as operators prioritise network resilience, energy efficiency and the infrastructure foundations needed to support next-generation connectivity. China Tower’s membership builds further momentum behind the GSMA Tower Forum, a new initiative that convenes mobile network operators and tower companies to collaborate on areas including energy efficiency, policy and permitting and technology evolution – with a focus on practical outcomes that improve deployment, performance and resilience.
The GSMA Tower Forum is structured around four core activity areas: Knowledge Sharing, Industry Outreach, Advocacy and Technology & Innovation. These activities include research and benchmarking on topics including sustainability and energy, as well as joint engagement through events and outreach. Additional focus areas also include policy modernisation around permitting and power access, technology roadmaps, and best-practice guidelines for digitisation and network AI inference.
As demand accelerates for AI-enabled services and AI-native network operations, infrastructure providers are evolving beyond traditional “grass and steel” assets into intelligent platforms that can host compute-adjacent capabilities, deliver resilient power and enable new forms of edge intelligence. China Tower is advancing this transformation at scale, including the roll-out of digital towers powered by 5G, AI and big-data models and the development of hundreds of AI algorithms to support monitoring and operational use cases.
“This year, the GSMA has newly established the Tower Forum, creating a platform for tower operators worldwide to collaborate and exchange ideas. This initiative carries great significance for advancing global digital and intelligent new infrastructure. Through this Forum, China Tower stands ready to deepen cooperation with global partners in technological innovation, standard-setting, security governance, and the integration of digital and real economies. We will jointly strengthen digital and intelligent new infrastructure and march hand in hand toward an intelligent new era.”
– Zhang Zhiyong, Chairman, China Tower
“We are delighted to welcome China Tower to the GSMA. As AI-era demand intensifies, infrastructure is becoming a strategic differentiator, not only for coverage and capacity, but for power, resilience and the ability to support new compute-adjacent requirements. China Tower’s experience and scale will bring valuable perspective to operators and the broader GSMA community, and we look forward to working together through the GSMA Tower Forum to build more productive infrastructure partnerships across the ecosystem.”
– Vivek Badrinath, Director General, GSMA
Tower infrastructure and related companies interested in shaping this agenda are encouraged to join the GSMA and participate in the GSMA Tower Forum, helping to ensure the industry’s passive infrastructure layer is fully represented in the next era of mobile and AI-driven connectivity.
