ZTE President Proposes Token-Based Telecom Billing and Model Exchange Rates

At the 2026 China Unicom Partners Conference, ZTE President Xu Ziyang proposed that telecom operators shift billing metrics from raw bits to AI tokens. He introduced the concept of a "token exchange rate" to reflect the differing economic value of output generated by high-capability AI models compared to basic ones. This proposal addresses a major shift in network consumption as machine-to-machine AI traffic overtakes human-generated data usage. If telecom providers adopt token-based billing and value-based pricing, it could reshape monetization strategies across the telecommunications and cloud computing sectors. Xu noted that nearly 60% of internet traffic is now machine-focused and token call volume has grown a thousandfold in recent years. He also stressed that multi-agent coordination requires deterministic networks with significantly higher uplink capacity and lower latency.