5G forecasts have been arriving steadily with many different figures. Here are some numbers:
| Date | Predicted by | Number of Connections | Year | Any other comments |
| 23-Aug-16 | Strategy Analytics | 690 million | 2025 | "690M Connections and 300M Handset Shipments" |
| 15-Nov-16 | Ericsson | 500 million | 2022 | "North America will lead the way in uptake of 5G subscriptions, where a quarter of all mobile subscriptions are forecast to be for 5G in 2022." |
| 30-Nov-16 | ABI Research | 500 million | 2026 | "500 Million 5G cmWave and mmWave Subscribers Will Bring $200 Billion in Service Revenue through 2026" - what about non mmWave/cmWave 5G subs? |
| 12-Apr-17 | CCS Insight | 100 million | 2021 | "Smartphones sales will rise to 1.90 billion in 2021, when smartphones will account for 92 percent of the total mobile phone market." |
| 26-Apr-17 | GSMA | 1.1 billion | 2025 | "5G connections are set to reach 1.1 billion by 2025, accounting for approximately one in eight mobile connections worldwide by this time." |
| 16-May-17 | Ovum | 389 million | 2022 | "Ovum now forecasts that there will be 111 million 5G mobile broadband subscriptions at end-2021, up more than fourfold from Ovum’s previous forecast of 25 million 5G subscriptions at end-2021" |
| 14-Aug-17 | Juniper Research | 1.4 billion | 2025 | "an increase from just 1 million in 2019, the anticipated first year of commercial launch. This will represent an average annual growth of 232%." |
| 17-Oct-17 | GSMA | 214 million in Europe | 2025 | "30 per cent of Europe’s mobile connections will be running on 5G networks by 2025" |
| 23-Oct-17 | CCS Insight | 2.6 billion | 2025 | "1 Billion Users of 5G by 2023, with More Than Half in China", "broadly similar path to 4G LTE technology...more than one in every five mobile connections." |
If we just look at 2025/2026, the estimates vary from 500 million to 2.6 billion. I guess we will have to wait and see which of these figures comes true.
I wrote a post earlier titled '4G / LTE by stealth'. Here I talked about the operators who still had 3G networks while most people had 4G phones. The day the operator switched on the 4G network, suddenly all these users were considered to be on 4G, even if they didn't have 4G coverage just yet.
I have a few questions about what 5G features are necessary for the initial rollout and when can an operator claim they have 5G? In fact I asked this question on twitter and I got some interesting answers.
Question: How many 5G sites does an operator have to deploy so that they can say they have 5G?— Zahid Ghadialy (@zahidtg) October 18, 2017
Just having a few 5G NR (new radio) sites enough for an operator to claim that they have deployed 5G? Would all the handsets with 5G compatibility then be considered to be on 5G? What features would be required in the initial rollouts? In case of LTE, operators initially only had Carrier Aggregation deployed, which was enough to claim they supported LTE-A. Would 100MHz bandwidth support be enough as initial 5G feature?
Please let me know what you think.
And that is the reason why Apple aren't always using the latest Radio Baseband, the world simply aren't ready.
ReplyDeleteIf Apple decide to use 5G baseband in their next iPhone, by 2020 you would have at least 500M of 5G iPhone users, and if we count a similar number from Huawei and Samsung this number will likely reach 750M+ Million 5G ready users.
So I think the reality is a large portion of consumer can adopt to the latest wireless tech much faster then Telecom Equipment and Operator can adopt them. Changing Phones is fast, upgrading those equipment is a much slower process.
We need more bands, ( Regulation and Political Issues, the slowest of all ), we need more sites, ( Planning and testing, very slow ), Upgrading all site to 5G....
I wonder if it would be better to settle on the current LTE-A, and make a larger leap towards 5G in 2-3 years time.