Of Course There is a Business Model for Millimeter Wave

When service providers talk about "5G business models," they usually are referring to something else: the financial return from investing in the 5G network, right now. At a high level, the business model for 5G is largely the same as for 4G, 3G or 2G: mobility services.

That is not to deny some incremental upside from new use cases and applications such as internet of things, edge computing or private networks. Still, the larger point is that the mobility business model hinges on lower costs per bit over time, as customers continue to consume ever-more data, but can be enticed to spend more only with great reluctance.

The same reasoning applies to use of new spectrum resources. The high-level justification for mid-band spectrum (2 GHz in the 3G and 4G era) is that it allows mobile operators to supply more bandwidth for existing customers, while reducing the cost of providing that bandwidth. 

The cost per gigabyte delivered can be reduced by up to 75 percent with millimeter wave spectrum, compared to sub-6 GHz solutions, according to Nokia Bell Labs. 

Millimeter wave was a bit different, as it requires smaller cell sizes than used by mid-band spectrum. But that is not a qualitatively new problem, either. Mid-band required smaller cells than low-band spectrum required. 

Going forward, every mobile next-generation network--from 5G on--is going to require use of millimeter wave spectrum because it is the only unconstrained, unallocated set of spectrum resources left to use in the radio frequency domain. 

Also, millimeter and teraHertz spectrum are the only radio frequency resources able to support the increases in expected data demand (higher frequencies can supply more bandwidth, per megaHertz.