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Yesterday a journalist wrote me asking to write an article on “Applications of 5G that are useful for citizens”. I replied that I wouldn’t know what to write since I cannot think of an application -useful to citizens- that could only become possible with 5G. 4G is providing plenty of whatever you may need. Even considering bandwidth, the problem is not 4G per sé, rather the investment that an Operator is willing to put on 4G in a specific area. Low latency comm for self driving vehicles? Automotive industry is not waiting for 5G to find a solution, besides before 5G can be trusted to be pervasive it will take ages…
The day before the CEO of Vodafone in an interview to an Italian newspaper stated that 5G will be a revolutionary event bringing new amazing services improving the life and wellbeing of citizens. He didn’t offer any specific, just some generic involvement of IoT. May be the request from the journalist was prompted by that interview, by the curiosity to discover what these services might be. Well, I don’t know. And I am not alone!
Few days ago the GSMA has disclosed at the Barcelona MWC a forecast on the expected penetration of the various systems, 2G to 5G: interesting to note that this year the number of 4G users will exceed the ones of 2G (by the way 3G has not overcome the number of 2G users, it will do that next year but not because its users number will increase but because of the fading out of 2G).
Also interesting, and a good reality check, to notice that 4G is expected to keep growing at a faster rate than the growth of the 5G that by 2025 will earn less than 15% of customer base, with the lion share taken by 4G with over 60%.
Just by looking at this forecast you can understand my difficulty in finding a killer application at consumer level, a set of applications that will improve the life and wellbeing of citizens. If there were some one might expect a far speedier uptake of 5G.
The amount of money invested in 4G in the next five years will be greater than the one foreseen for 5G, and the reason is straightforward. Operators want to leverage on their 4G investment and you deploy services (and make money out of them) if you follow the path leading to the broadest possible market. You can bet that services developers will look at that very same market for developing services!
Now, 14% of the customer base is not peanuts: the number of wireless unique subscriber by 2025 is expected to be 5.9 billion, hence we can expect around 700 million 5G unique subscribers (with total 5G lines reaching 1.2 billion by 2025 taking “things” into account). That’s a really “big” market. However, the penetration will be quite different in different areas and if you start looking at smaller areas, like a city -which is where you should be looking for citizens’ services- the difference in penetration between 4G and 5G is such that the interest of developers of services will be skewed completely towards 4G. This also means that the “network effects” (Metcalfe law) will be favouring enormously 4G over 5G.
Hence, it is not surprising that telco equipment manufacturers are scrambling to find “graceful” evolution to 5G, meaning to exploit 4G investment adding on some pieces here and there of 5G equipment, possibly fitting into a 4G evolution. Massive MIMO (multiple antennas for I/O) is becoming part of 4G, as an example.
5G may be a revolutionary step in terms of commoditization of the transport infrastructure, with the Operators handing over the control of their networks to the edges but I am pretty sure that is the very last things Operators want to do and they will fight tooth and nail to avoid that (without success, eventually … but it will take possibly 10 more years unless the regulatory body forces them, also pretty unlikely).
The next decade is going to be an interesting one.
A nice set of articles on 5G and its relation with 4G has just been published as special number of Mondo Digitale: http://mondodigitale.aicanet.net/2018-1/