Will service provider executives and firms be significantly better at predicting 5G use cases and new revenue streams than they were at predicting 3G and 4G use cases and revenue streams? Probably not.
What probably matters more is that there are practical, affordable reasons to deploy 5G networks that do not rely on new use cases or revenue streams to drive deployment. And that is precisely what is happening.
Service provider executives, expecting nearly all the early value to come from supporting existing data services, are almost uniformly keeping their 5G plans within the limits of existing capital budgets, even if many observers (most, actually) have expected huge increases in spending.
In fact, some estimate 5G capex could be lower, far lower, than was the case for 4G. Better technology is part of the reason for lower capex than some had feared. Phased deployment also will help, with 5G being most valuable in a minority of total cell sites where capacity demand is greatest.
That is true for Telenor, Verizon and AT&T, Swisscom and Three UK, for example.
The point is that mobile capacity has to be increased--in many cases vastly increased--every year. And we are reaching a point, in many markets, where 4G will not support what is needed. So 5G can be viewed as “merely” a way of supplying that capacity supply. So long as capex budgets do not increase, all the other new use cases are opportunity at no extra cost.
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