Mobile World Congress And 5G Progress

Mobile World Congress emphasises just how far we are to achieving 5G

19:45 10 March 2019

From network deployments to handset readiness, we are nowhere close to the biggest thing since “electricity or the automobile.”

 

If there was one big question that the industry had to provide an answer for at the Mobile World Congress last week, it was to determine if 5G, dubbed as the biggest thing since “electricity or the automobile”, was almost upon is. Analysing how far we have come in terms of network deployments to handset readiness, data suggests that 5G isn’t coming earlier than some have thought.

 

Still, 5G will remain to be the most important thing in the tech sector in many years to come. This is because it covers many new technologies and opens up so many new business use cases. But for the next 18 months, the focus will be on debugging exercises and on industrial and enterprise use cases. D2D analyst Jay Goldberg noted how "operators are very nervous about rolling out 5G". So much is new or not yet working.”

 

He added: "During the show we tried to count use cases. Unfortunately, many of the use cases failed the very basic question of 'Couldn't we do that with 4G?' In all we found a few dozen use cases that could credibly claim to be both dependent on 5G and actually useful."