5G growing far faster than 4G

3 years ago 1

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The achievements made by 5G in its first three years of operation are equivalent to what 4G achieved in its first five years regarding global user penetration rates.

This is according to Huawei’s president of ICT strategy and marketing, Peng Song, who added the technology will see further success if its value is realised in the ToC, ToH, and ToB sectors.

According to Song, several operators have reported more than 20% of 5G user penetration during the first round of deployment and, as a result, have seen significant growth in mobile revenue.

Devices, content, and business models have diversified as more operators and partners embrace the technology.

“This is evidence of a market shift from risk-based to revenue-based decision-making for even more assurance of business success,” Song said.

According to Huawei, the rapid migration of users and traffic to 5G is critical to realising revenue growth.

“If an operator migrated 30% of traffic to 5G eMBB in three years, it would take less than four years to see ROI,” it said.

“This duration would be even shorter if the operator also deployed FWA and ToB services.”

Huawei notes that 95 operators had commercially launched 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) services by the end of 2022. It added that FWA services had connected more than 10 million home users globally.

“With its fast deployment, good experience, low cost, and high energy efficiency, 5G FWA sunsets old copper lines in developed markets and enables home broadband access in emerging markets,” it said.

“Operators in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have reported outstanding results,” it added.

Song said he believes operators have the opportunity to set up extensive service connections with enterprises through private 5G networks, which would create a market space for enterprise digital transformation three to ten times larger than the market for private networks themselves.

This could also help to drive the sale of other value-added services such as cloud, data centre, and fifth-generation fixed network (F5G) services.