5G is surely a popular topic for media and bloggers, in no small part because it’s seen as the salvation of both service providers and the vendors who sell to them. A recent article in Fierce Telecom raises some good points on just who might benefit from 5G, points that deserve a close examination based on my own input from users and enterprises. The teaser for the article says that users will benefit from 5G, but the benefit for operators is less clear. That’s true, but with a caveat.
Users expect 5G to make wireless connections faster, and that’s probably the only certain benefit of 5G to users. Even here, though, you have to qualify the “certain” part. 5G certainly could deliver faster wireless connections than 4G, but one interesting truth about broadband is that the speed of the connection is rarely the limiting factor in the quality of user experience. That quality is what users actually perceive, so the speed benefits of 5G may depend on just what users expect to do with it.
Users who talk to me about 5G are almost universally expecting it to improve the quality of video streaming, and in some areas it’s very likely that will happen. The reason isn’t as much “speed” of connection as it is consistency of connection QoS, which 5G improves by improving the number of users that can be supported on a cell. In areas where local cell sites are likely to be overloaded at various times, 5G could relieve the congestion and improve the QoS for video delivery, which would be a powerful benefit to those users who want to view streaming video where no WiFi is available or where WiFi is itself overloaded by other video-hungry users.
Broadband speed itself is probably not as much an issue. If a user can get video at 500 Mbps versus 50 Mbps, or even 5 Mbps, most probably couldn’t see any difference in the quality on a phone or tablet. That raises what I think is the most important truth of the Fierce Telecom article: it’s almost surely OTT applications that will drive, and win for, 5G service providers.
There is a tendency, as the article says, for users to expand their usage to fill available bandwidth, but of course it’s not really the users doing the expansion but the OTT experience-delivery outfits. There will be a certain amount if new streaming usage with mobile 5G because of improved QoS, but overall any big gains are likely to come from more complicated and newer delivery models and even experiences.
“Connected car” is an example; if you presumed that you could download videos at over 100 Mbps with 5G, then you could use 5G to a vehicle to drive an in-vehicle WiFi connection and let everyone in it stream to their heart’s content. Similarly, 5G mobile to a dongle could support a group of laptops, tablets, or phones in a home or office, or in a hospitality location. All of these could exploit 5G connectivity.
But probably not drive it, at least not drive it to quick ubiquitous adoption. For that, we probably need things that 5G could do that standard 4G can’t, applications like virtual and augmented reality. Gaming seems a likely driver, for example, because you need a combination of enough bandwidth to ensure the game experience is realistic and that, for massive multiplayer games, the users of the game are properly synchronized in both experience and collective behavior. Virtual reality added to gaming only increases the potential need for higher bandwidth because it’s likely players would expect to be able to see a broader swath of their environment by turning their heads. Games can easily become more immersive, more demanding.
AR is a topic I’ve blogged on before, and it represents the broadest set of potential 5G drivers out there. I’ve suggested in past blogs that IoT and other contextual/location services should be visualized as a set of “information fields” that users intersected with as they moved around, changed goals and missions, etc. These fields could then contribute to the visual field of users, creating a highly flexible and customizable experience. Since AR of this sort would demand some close synchronization between “reality” in the sense of what the user actually sees, and the “augmentation” that’s being presented, this could well be a two-way exchange of information, more demanding and especially more latency sensitive.
IoT could in theory spawn a whole set of applications, but I’m still skeptical about the way the necessary sensor deployments could be made profitable. There’s no question that if we had 5G-equipped sensors available for OTT access at little or no cost, we’d generate a lot of applications quickly. There’s a big question of whether getting those sensors under those terms has any chance of happening. OTTs, you recall, fight bitterly against having to pay for access to broadband users to deliver video content and other for-pay experiences. Why would they accept paying for sensor access, and how would sensor deployment (and 5G service) costs be paid with no compensatory revenue?
What everyone would like to believe is that simply having 5G in place will spawn the same kind of competitive frenzy to exploit it that we had with broadband home Internet services a couple decades ago. That would be true if all that was needed to make the 5G ecosystem work is the bandwidth, but that’s not the case. 5G needs applications, missions, that probably demand things like IoT sensor deployments that are themselves massive capital investments. Even if we presumed that somehow we established a utility-like framework for deploying those sensors and then sustaining their operation, we’d still have to earn enough to generate a profit on them.
The question the article raises most clearly is related to that “utility-like framework”. Who is more utility-like than a telco, a successor to a regulated monopoly or even an arm of a government? If the telcos were to have a clear path to successful OTT service deployment relating to 5G, they could surely justify investing in it. However, if the telcos had a clear path to that goal, they’d be IoT and OTT kingpins already. Part of the problem is cultural, part is regulatory, but all of the problem is clearly hard to solve because we haven’t solved it yet.
5G will happen, for sure. Whether what happens with it is little more than a radio-network upgrade to what we have today, or a massive shift in how we conceptualize and deploy mobile and even wireline infrastructure, depends on whether we can make 5G-specific services happen. The jury is still out on that one.