The city also plans to launch 5G for commercial use by 2020, according to the city’s bureau of industry and information technology.

Enterprises based in the tech hub are expected to launch 5G terminal chips in the first half of this year.

Smartphones and tablets featuring 5G will be launched gradually from the middle of this year, according to Xu Zhibin, deputy director of the bureau.

“Shenzhen is leading the world in 5G research and development,” Xu said.

The city is also actively promoting the deep integration of 5G with other technologies and products to build a sound and competitive cluster of 5G industry, he added.

Shenzhen said in January that it would launch a pilot project for 5G commercial use in 2019.

Chinese cities are adopting the 5G network to meet public demand.

In late January, the Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport in southern China’s Guangdong province launched a 5G base station. An indoor 5G network will be installed in the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station by the end of this year.

In an effort to improve information accessibility and reduce telecommunication costs, the ministry will provide 100 gigabytes of data per bus every month for public use. Buses with Wi-Fi services will have a ministry-issued sticker attached for easy recognition.

Public Wi-Fi services are available at some 13,000 designated areas across the nation, such as community centres and traditional markets. However, the need to expand the service to public transportation was apparent for network users on the move, the ministry explained. The initial plan is to roll out 4,200 city buses with Wi-Fi services this month, and equip another 19,800 buses by the second half of this year.

While the ministry will monitor the quality and security of the public Wi-Fi services, it is still not advisable to do financial transactions or release personal information while using it, the ministry cautioned.

A total of 310.8 million smartphones were shipped globally during the first three months of this year in a 6.6 per cent decline from the same period in 2018, according to preliminary data from the Chinese-owned International Data Corporation.

It was the sixth consecutive quarter of decline for global smartphone shipments, the market tracker added.

IDC saw the results as a sign that 2019 will be another down year overall for smartphone shipments, apart from strong growth by Huawei.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that Huawei is laser focused on growing its stature in the world of mobile devices, with smartphones being its lead horse,” said IDC mobile device programme director Ryan Reith.

“The overall smartphone market continues to be challenged in almost all areas, yet Huawei was able to grow shipments by 50 per cent.”

South Korean consumer electronics behemoth Samsung saw smartphone shipments drop 8.1 per cent to 71.9 million in the first quarter.

Huawei, meanwhile, weighed in with 50.3 per cent growth to ship 59.1 million smartphones and put it within “striking distance” of Samsung, according to IDC.

Apple had a challenging first quarter, with iPhone shipments dropping by a “staggering” 30.2 per cent from a year earlier to 36.4 million units, IDC reported.

Price cuts in China along with favourable trade-in deals were not enough to coax people into upgrading to new iPhones, the market tracker said.

Apple delivered stronger-than-expected financial results for the past quarter as gains in services helped offset slumping iPhone sales, sparking a rally in shares of the technology giant.

An overall slowdown in the high-end smartphone market has been seen as a symptom of people waiting longer to upgrade to new models and a lack of the kind of captivating innovation that inspires them to do just that.

“Consumers continue to hold on to their phones longer than before as newer higher priced models offer little incentive to shell out top dollar to upgrade,” said IDC research manager Anthony Scarsella.

“Moreover, the pending arrival of 5G handsets could have consumers waiting until both the networks and devices are ready for prime time in 2020.”

The new personalised services include Cobo Wallet-as-a-service and Cobo Staking-as-a-service. The former aims to help lower barriers for new blockchain business, and the latter is designed to provide institutional customers with digital asset storage services and value-added digital assets services, the company said.

Cobo’s chief technology officer Jiang Changhao said as the blockchain sector is still at the early stage of development, many entrepreneurs need to spent a huge amount of money on the construction of basic infrastructure.

“The Cobo WaaS aims to reduce 90 per cent of the costs for those blockchain entrepreneurs,” Jiang said. “It will help blockchain startups streamline operations and build the infrastructure.”

Combining the application of distributed data storage, encryption algorithms and other advanced technologies, blockchain offers an open and decentralised database of any transaction involving money, goods, property and more.

It provides a high level of security by creating a record whose authenticity could be verified by the whole community.

Cobo said the Cobo WaaS and Cobo StaaS are innovative services based on its custodial service, dubbed Cobo Custody. Through the decentralised storage of private keys in North America, Europe, Oceania and other regions in the globe, the new services will help protect the digital assets from the physical and systemic risks.

“Currently, staking has become the next target for many big name investors,” Jiang added. “More than 80 per cent of proof-of-stake blockchain projects and 40 per cent of token suppliers have participated in the staking economy.”

Mao Shixing, Cobo’s chief executive officer, said with the booming staking economy, professional services digital assets custodial services will go mainstream.

Founded in 2017, the Beijing-headquartered company aims to be a one-stop shop for everything crypto. Its flagship software wallet, Cobo wallet, offers proof-of-stake pooling services. And the company also has also released an advanced military-grade cryptocurrency hardware wallet.

Last year, the company raised $13 million in its latest Series A financing, led by Danhua Capital and Wu Capital.

China will launch a special campaign to upgrade the network infrastructure, improve IPv6 service and make the terminal equipment better support IPv6, said an official with the MIIT.

“We decided to finish transforming 13 internet backbones to the IPv6 network by the end of 2019”.

The country will strengthen the security in the IPv6 network and support relevant companies and institutions to carry out research on the prevention of risks in the IPv6 network in emerging industries, including the Industrial Internet, Internet of Things and car networking, the ministry said.

The IPv6 is considered the next generation of the internet, allowing much higher theoretical limits on the number of IP addresses than the current IPv4 system. China in 2017 issued a plan to encourage large-scale adoption of the IPv6 network.

According to the plan, by the end of 2025, network and terminal devices will fully support the adoption of IPv6 in China, and it will have the largest number of IPv6 users in the world by the end of 2025.

The company said the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology’s AI Lab in Montreal has been incorporated into the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila) by recently moving into Mila’s building.

Founded by professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, Mila is one of the best research centres in the field of deep learning and has a partnership with the University of Montreal and McGill University.

Samsung is the first Korean business to be located at the Canadian institute for deep learning, which hires globally renowned AI experts.

By moving into Mila, Samsung has expanded the size of its AI Montreal lab, whose workforce will additionally focus on development of new system chips that are necessary for AI, especially in the fields of unsupervised learning, generative adversarial networks, new deep learning and on-device AI algorithms.

To support such efforts, this AI Lab has recruited leaders in deep learning research, including Simon Lacoste-Julien, a professor at the University of Montreal, who recently joined as the leader of the lab, the company said.

Samsung also plans to dispatch R&D personnel from its device solutions division to Montreal over time and to utilise the AI lab as a base for training AI researchers and collaborating with other advanced AI research institutes.

“Samsung’s collaboration with Mila is well established already and has been productive and built strong trust on both sides,” said professor Yoshua Bengio.

“With a new SAIT lab in the midst of the recently inaugurated Mila building, and many exciting research challenges ahead of us in AI, I expect even more mutually positive outcomes in the future.“

SAIT and Bengio have collaborated on deep learning algorithm research since 2014, successfully publishing three papers in academic journals.

“SAIT focuses on research and development – not only in next-generation semiconductors but also innovative AI as a seed technology in system semiconductors,” said Hwang Sung-woo, executive vice president and deputy head of SAIT.

“SAIT AI Lab Montreal will play a key role within Samsung to redefine AI theory and deep learning algorithms for the next 10 years.”