5G. Right.

Please enjoy the following {slightly edited) excerpts from “2019: The Year Telecom Went Doolally About 5G”, which confirms what I have been saying for a while about 5G.

Doolally about 5G

4G quietly cleaned up 3G’s mess, but 5G is neither fixing a consumer problem nor delivering a new experience.

And therein lies a big issue. For all its failings, 3G sounded exciting back in the 1990s, when mobile phones were for only calls and texts and even fixed-line Internet services were young.

To match that excitement, 5G would have to promise something just as revolutionary… for the average person or business customer of today. Does it?

How it will end?

5G will be ubiquitous a decade from now, with billions of users. [But most of them, both consumers and businesses], will adopt 5G as they adopted 4G: simply because it was what was heavily pushed to them in stores, not because they actually needed it.

5G probably won’t reinvigorate the telecom industry. In countries such as the UK, 5G services are already priced at 4G levels.

Of course, 5G will gradually replace 4G in machine-based connectivity, helping to make factories, mines and offshore oil rigs more productive and secure. But IoT offers little in revenues from pure connectivity.

[Finally], if a network technology exists for seven to ten years before its successor arrives, then 5G seems unlikely to power self-driving cars or allow surgeons to operate on patients from thousands of miles away. For the wackier services, the world may have to wait for 6G.

If all this is correct…

I (Marco) see it as more proofs that 5G will burn a lot of money for no good reason, delivering much less than it promises (even to those who would actually need it), before being shelved.

Machine to machine connectivity? Internet of Things? Driverless cars? Machine to Machine connectivity surely is a service that would need something like 5G to work, at least inside factories. But 5G will pay for itself for those reasons only if:

• there will be enough demand, and enough resources to satisfy it, for lots of machines and products that really need 5G to work as advertised (possibly WITHOUT polluting way more than plastic)
• driverless cars enabled by 5G will not turn out to be a half-dangerous, half-unfeasible (or unnecessary) idea

Those are big IFs, and are just the two that came up to my mind first. But you may have already heard also about complaints for unregulated installations, or for lack of innovation and sensible city planning.

As far as “seven to ten years” go… indeed, we already have forecasts of COMMERCIAL 6G (SIX G!) launches in 2030! Hmmm…