Last week, Japanese business daily Nikkei reported the country’s three leading mobile service providers — NTT Docomo, KDDI and SoftBank Group — were expected to invest a combined $45.7 billion to roll out 5G wireless communications services, starting in parts of Tokyo and other limited areas ahead of the 2020 summer Olympics in Tokyo.
In a note last week, Jefferies analyst Edison Lee said he expected Chinese telcos to invest as much as $180 billion in 5G between 2019 and 2025, amounting to about 13 months of industry revenue. Lee wrote Jefferies expected China to spend twice as aggressively on 5G than Japan.
5G is still in its infancy, with the telecom industry still carrying out trials and setting standards, but the promise underpinning the technology is big: It is expected to support the burgeoning Internet of Things market, comprising billions of connected devices.
Ericsson estimated there will be around 18 billion connected devices related to IoT by 2022, including connected cars, machines, meters, sensors, consumer electronics and wearables. The nature of the devices, and the functions they perform, require low latency connectivity and high data throughput — something 5G is expected to provide.
The report also pointed out other potential use-cases for having 5G connectivity: for example, it can theoretically load 4K or 8K high-resolution videos on mobile quickly and enable AR/VR, or augmented reality and virtual reality, gaming.
In the manufacturing space, it can allow remote control of robots to perform tasks, while in the healthcare industry, it can facilitate remote robotic surgery.
There’s an advantage for companies that roll out 5G services early, according to Ewerbring. They can attract the early adopters, shape the market and drive a perception of being the leader. But before companies can roll out services, regulators need to work quickly on allocating frequency space for 5G, he said.
“We are striving to get a system that’s extraordinary for us, responsive and can transfer lots of data volumes in order to cope with the future of the internet,” said Ewerbring. “Therefore, the system requires more spectrum compared to earlier standards.”
He added, “Our big encouragement to every regulatory body is to work … on releasing 5G spectrum and large amounts of it. Any country that, for whatever reason, is not able to do so, runs the risk of setting back the local community because 5G cannot be launched.”
The report said that the speed of 5G network deployment will depend on the growth of the complete ecosystem, including the availability of 5G-enabled devices and decisions on spectrum allocation.
“It is expected that many operators will deploy 5G commercially from 2020, in line with the time plan for 5G standardization,” the report added.