December 11, 2018
5G: The new network arrives
Although it will take years for 5G to replicate 4G’s marketplace dominance, its speed, capacity, latency, and penetration make 5G an opportunity many telecommunications operators can’t—and won’t—refuse.
DELOITTE Global predicts that 2019 will be the year in which fifth-generation (5G) wide-area wireless networks arrive in scale. There were 72 operators testing 5G in 2018,1 and by the end of 2019, we expect 25 operators to have launched 5G service in at least part of their territory (usually cities) with another 26 operators to launch in 2020, more than doubling the total. Further, we expect about 20 handset vendors to launch 5G-ready handsets in 2019 (with the first available in Q2), and about 1 million 5G handsets (out of a projected 1.5 billion smartphone handsets sold in 2019) to be shipped by year’s end. One million 5G modems (also known as pucks or hotspots) will be sold, and around a million 5G fixed wireless access devices will be installed.
At the end of 2020, we expect 5G handset sales (15–20 million units) to represent approximately 1 percent of all smartphone sales, with sales taking off in 2021, the first year in which retailers will sell more than 100 million 5G handsets. The most noticeable benefits of these first 5G networks for users will be faster speeds than today’s 4G technology: peak speeds of gigabits per second (Gbps), and sustainable speeds estimated to be in the hundreds of megabits per second (Mbps).
Deloitte Confirms What MobilityView Said Early Last Year : 5G Represents Considerably More Costs For Operators…
- More expensive chips
- More expensive antennas
- More spectrum, at more cost
- More tower work at more cost
Do you think the Global Operator community is going to eat these incremental costs; or will they pass them to end customers both consumer and business. We predicted last year a very major price differential between 4G and 5G.
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