Will 5G be Adopted Faster than 4G?

Will 5G subscriptions grow slower than 4G, faster or at the same rate? It is anybody’s guess right now. Researchers at CCS Insight believe 5G subscriptions will grow slightly faster than 4G. Others believe the uptake will be noticeably slower.

But even the CCS estimate anticipates that the number of 5G mobile connections will surpass one billion in 2022, taking a year less than it took 4G connections to pass the same number.

If I had to guess right now, I’d err on the side of slower uptake of 5G, for several reasons. Handset prices now are higher than when 4G first launched, so that is slowing handset replacement cycles.

source: CCS Insight

source: The Edge of the Cloud

Also, the performance advantage of 5G, though perhaps as much as an order of magnitude over 4G, does not arguably enable new apps that most users will want to engage with. In part, that also is because 4G speeds are getting fast enough to support streaming video easily, and that seems to be the one consumer app that really drives bandwidth consumption and is most affected by slow speeds.

But many users will find 4G getting so much better than 5G will not actually produce a noticeable difference. In other words, the app value or use case enablers are not so clear, for most users.

It actually is not clear to some of us that mobile 5G actually provides noticeable advantages in experience for users in the markets where it is being deployed. It is a bit like gigabit fixed network speeds. It is a bragging right and is “nice to have,”  but does not actually enable any new consumer app anybody can point to.

For mobile 5G, that might well be the case as well. The one area where 5G really could produce a new use case is fixed 5G, as a substitute for a fixed internet access connection. That might also be true for some mobile connections as well.

“Right now from a 5G standpoint, what we're seeing in terms of adoption tends to be business,’ said Randall Stephenson, AT&T CEO. “In fact it's exclusively business for us right now.”

In keeping with the mobile substitution framework, AT&T finds early business buyers often are using 5G as a substitute for fixed network access.

“It’s serving as a land replacement product,” said Stephenson.