5G is Not a Race

5G often is positioned as a “race,” with winners and losers. That way of looking at information and communications technology has been repeated over and over again over the last several decades about any number of consumer-facing innovations.

The “race” metaphor is no more relevant today than it was then.

It was probably inevitable that some would claim the United States is falling behind in the “race” to 5G.

After all, it has been argued that the United States was behind, or falling behind, in use of mobile phones, then smartphones, use of text messaging, broadband coverage, fiber to home, broadband speed or broadband price.

Some even have argued the United States was falling behind in spectrum auctions.  All of those prior characterizations have proven temporary, or wrong. What such observations often miss is a highly dynamic environment, where apparently lagging metrics quickly are closed.

Just what winning or losing the 5G race could mean is not simple. Some people think “winning” is a matter of which countries deploy and obtain high adoption first. Others would argue that access does not matter as much as the ability to innovate and create in terms of connected business models, apps, services and processes.

On that score, very few observers would challenge the claim that innovation leadership in the next phase of applications and technology development is going to happen in China and the United States, at scale. That is not to discount the formidable work going on in Israel, Japan or South Korea. It is simply to note that, globally, at scale, few would doubt that the at-scale progress will happen either in the United States or China.

What matters with 5G is not the speed or ubiquity of supply or demand, though that is not immaterial. Instead, what always matters is the ability of people, firms and nations to harness those innovations for economic growth.

National rankings of adoption of any access technology are likely to prove ephemeral. And even when not ephemeral, there is not a very good correlation between supply, adoption and economic value.