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- Mobile-network providers touted 5G as a tech revolution when it hit the US market in 2018.
- But five years on, the promise hasn't borne out, largely because of 5G's nontraditional rollout.
- Experts told BI network-infrastructure changes were underway and would make all the difference.
- This article is part of "5G Playbook," a series exploring one of our time's most important tech innovations.
5G swept onto the US mobile scene with great fanfare in 2018. In TV ads, online banners, and radio spots, mobile-network providers touted gigabit download speeds, zero latency, and the ability to connect everything from autonomous vehicles to robot surgeons. So far, the technology hasn't delivered on those promises.
In the US, some 5G-smartphone users have reported inadequate service and speeds, while others remain convinced that 5G spreads the COVID-19 virus (it does not).
Still, the industry remains confident that the promise of 5G will bear out. Indeed, Qualcomm, a wireless-technology company, suggests that 5G will significantly influence the global economy, with it generating $13.1 trillion of economic output and creating 22.8 million jobs by 2035.
While your 5G phone may not be changing your life just yet, the mobile technology is already showing promise in rural areas, hospitals, and some "smart" cities. With changes to the network's infrastructure underway, experts told Business Insider they expected to see it adapted on a significant scale in the near future.
5G wasn't introduced to the market in the same way as previous mobile networks, and the effects are clear
Unlike moves to previous generations of mobile wireless technology, the shift to 5G has been much more fraught. Many issues have had to do with 5G's deployment.
While there has typically been one path forward as we've moved from one mobile-wireless standard to the next, such as from 3G to 4G, the route for 5G has been bifurcated between stand-alone and non-stand-alone networks, a decision made by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, the standards commission for mobile-broadband technologies.
This bifurcation meant that instead of a transition directly from 4G to 5G, as has previously happened, 3GPP decided to create an interim step (the non-stand-alone network) that would allow time for telecommunications operators to upgrade their infrastructure to meet the 5G requirements.
How mobile networks work — and what made the 5G rollout so different
Mobile networks have three components: the radio access network (the physical towers required for a signal), the transport network (what moves the signal from the core infrastructure to the towers), and the core infrastructure (the servers and software for the technology). The decision to first deploy 5G in a non-stand-alone fashion meant that the radio towers first got upgraded to the 5G standard but continued to use the 4G standard of core infrastructure. With radio towers and core infrastructure working on different standards, non-stand-alone 5G offered little benefit to existing 4G connections. The absence of widespread stand-alone 5G has resulted in many unmet expectations.
Stand-alone 5G is slowly being rolled out across the US, Canada, and parts of Asia, with Europe not far behind. For those using stand-alone 5G networks, the use cases are many, which will continue to increase as more telecommunications companies are able to move away from their non-stand-alone networks.
Will Townsend, a vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, a global company focused on high-tech research and advisory, estimates that 2024 will be the year that most mobile networks are able to shift to stand-alone 5G or, at the very least, make significant progress toward that goal.
Experts expect stand-alone 5G to make all the difference
As an advisor, Townsend is often asked about the most impressive use cases for 5G. For him, the most obvious is fixed wireless access, which uses a base station connected to a fixed network to bring 5G connectivity to areas where telecommunications companies have historically struggled to provide affordable, high-quality internet service.
In these areas, where traditional wired internet access can be patchy or nonexistent, homes and businesses can more easily obtain a 5G base station and get internet beamed in from 5G towers. In 2022, T-Mobile and Verizon added over 3 million fixed wireless subscribers, up from over 700,000 in 2021.
"Once we get to stand-alone, it's going to be really cool to see what these developers come up with," Townsend said of the potential of 5G networks. "5G's superpower over 4G is latency, the lag that it takes from point to point. Today on a 4G network, latency can range anywhere from 40 to 50 milliseconds. 5G stand-alone is sub-five milliseconds, so an order of magnitude that's just mind-blowing."
However, Neils Kalnins, the director of development and custom management at the electronic-communications office of Latvia and the program director of 5G Techritory, said that despite 5G being five years into its journey, the challenge is not necessarily just infrastructure; it's a matter of understanding why 5G technology isn't being used appropriately.
5G Techritory, Europe's leading 5G forum, is trying to address this issue, which Kalnins said was more about society than the technology itself.
"What is the understanding of this technology?" he said. "What is the capability of various industries to absorb this technology? I think it's pretty clear that 5G is not about how to connect us better via Zoom; it's about how to link massive Internet of Things, how to steer IoT systems by using artificial-intelligence tools."
What the future holds for 5G
Fifth-generation wireless technology is already being deployed in hospitals across the US. Cleveland Clinic Mentor Hospital in Ohio is using a private 5G network, the first in the country to do so (though the first 5G-enabled hospital was the Department of Veterans Affairs' Palo Alto Health Care System in 2020), and hospitals across Asia have also rolled out 5G-enabled healthcare. The tech is also beginning to power smart cities, such as Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Las Vegas.
Kalnins said he believed 5G's low latency, which allows machines to talk to each other more effectively, would lead to greater automation and digitization. He said factories were a good example of an industry that would be enhanced by 5G, since the technology can easily provide wireless internet coverage at scale.
As someone engaged in discussions with policymakers, businesses, researchers, and founders, Kalnins believes a key reason 5G is not seeing widespread use just yet is that "society is not yet in a position to receive the goods and technology; companies are not yet wise enough to deliver those goods in the right way," he said.
Yet both Kalnins and Townsend believe that the hype around 5G is warranted and that the potential is huge, especially for consumers.
"The exciting thing about 5G is that we don't know what's around the corner for consumers," Townsend said.