5G is Really Going to Accelerate Mobile Substitution

Mobile or wireless substitution has been a major trend in the communications industry, and will likely accelerate in the 5G era.

“By harnessing more spectrum and achieving ever greater efficiency, wireless technology will not only continue to support pervasive mobile computing, it will also rapidly displace many fixed broadband connections,” says a report by Rysavy Research/5G Americas.

“Using small cells and mmWave radio channels, a 5G network built for capacity will deliver 1 Tbps/km2 or higher, enabling 5G to compete with wireline broadband services,” the report argues.

Simply, 5G connections could reach 20Gbps in the downlink, with user-experienced rates of 100 Mbps or more, fast enough to compete with other networks in the consumer space.

source: 5G Americas

This will be especially important for cable operators, as hybrid fiber coax networks have about a two-to-one advantage over telco fixed network broadband accounts, and HFC networks now are getting at least 100 percent of net new additions.

Rysavy Research suggests millimeter wave networks “can compete with or even exceed the capacity of Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) networks, although HFC networks can also densify to increase capacity.”

Also, 5G is part of a complex of changes affecting access speeds, features and bandwidth. There will be far more spectrum, small cell and new network architectures,  network function virtualization and software-defined networking, plus new means to employ unlicensed spectrum.

Looking only at capacity and speeds, the cost of delivering a gigabyte of data should drop from $1.25 with 4G to $0.16 with 5G, the report suggests, an order of magnitude improvement that will allow pricing of wireless access that is close to the cost of fixed access.

The 5G challenge is not historically new, however.

Among the earlier transitions, wireline telephony was displaced largely by mobile telephony.  Cabled Ethernet was replaced by Wi-Fi, while some Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and coaxial cable connections arguably have been displaced either by fixed wireless, satellite systems or mobile-only connections. In the U.S. market, perhaps 20 percent of homes already are “mobile only” for communications.