Most users are willing to pay more for 5G: Gartner

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PHOTO: Wilson Wong for Techgoondu

Three-quarters of end-user organisations are willing to pay more for 5G mobile services, according to a global survey released yesterday by research firm Gartner.

Though most of them don’t expect 5G to help them cut costs, the respondents see the new technology as a network evolution and an enabler of digital businesses.

The results come from a survey of 200 IT and business leaders selected by Gartner in the second quarter of 2017.

Though the news might be a boost to telecom operators readying 5G networks in the coming years, the research firm also cautioned about the misconceptions that users have for the new technology.

For example, 57 per cent of those surveyed said their organisation’s main use for 5G will be to drive the Internet of Things (IoT).

“This finding is surprising, as the number of deployed ‘things’ that need cellular connectivity won’t exceed the capacity of existing cellular IoT technologies before 2023 in most regions,” said Sylvain Fabre, a research director at Gartner.

He noted: “And even once fully implemented, 5G will suit only a narrow subset of IoT use cases that require a combination of very high data rates and very low latency.”

“In addition, 5G won’t be ready to support massive machine-type communications, or ultra-reliable and low-latency communications, until early 2020,” he added.

Interestingly, some 84 per cent of those surveyed believed that 5G will be widely available by 2020. Many telcos are only predicting this to be in 2022 or later, pointed out Gartner.

By its own predictions, only 3 per cent of the world’s telcos that own their own networks will have 5G set up commercially in 2020. It called for telcos to share more realistic roadmaps for coverage and performance with customers.