5G is Skating to Where the Puck Will Be

Hockey great Wayne Gretzky was known for saying his skill on the ice was based on the ability to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” One might give the same answer when asked “why do we need 5G?” 

5G is about solving problems we will have in 10 years, not problems we necessarily are having “right now,” at least in terms of using mobile phones. 

source: Statista

Mobile and fixed service providers must contend with a continual need to sell more data usage, at faster speeds and lower latency, to customers who stubbornly refuse to pay more for the capabilities. In that sense, 5G is not about ARPU (average revenue per user). 

So one often-unstated reason for replacing a mobile network platform every 10 years is that the cost per bit has to decrease by an order of magnitude to preserve the business model.

So 5G’s “business purpose” is to create a network that will be able to sell 10 times more data usage to customers who will not pay more than they already do for 4G. Of course, new networks are never justified that way. There always is the promise of new use cases, revenues and value. 

5G might be--or maybe has to be--different from all prior mobile platforms, though. Traditionally, mobile service has been about people using phones. 5G, by design, has new features to support dense sensor networks, ultra-low-latency applications in health, autonomous vehicles or augmented and virtual reality use cases. 

In other words, 5G intentionally is built to support business-to-business, or business-to-business-to-consumer applications and use cases. 

If 5G does not necessarily increase the total number of people with subscriptions, people using mobile data or the amount people spent on data, 5G should create many new use cases for computers communicating with other computers, in some cases to support applications with latency or bandwidth preconditions 4G cannot support.

5G is “skating to where the puck will be.”