5G: Less Impact than You Expect Now, More than You Expect Later

New technologies almost always have less impact than expected at first, and important new technologies almost always have greater impact than expected later in their adoption cycle. Get ready for that to be true of 5G as well. 

According to Gartner, after a period of building hype, 5G is about to enter a possibly-inevitable period of disillusionment that might last for a few years or more. 

Perhaps some of that explains the productivity paradox, which sometimes includes the observation that the introduction of advanced technology can lead to lower productivity for a period.

For that reason, one would be right to remain skeptical that 5G, in and of itself, will dramatically boost productivity beyond the benefits of fast 4G. The hoped-for advantages of 5G-related edge computing and internet of things use cases will require rethinking and retooling the way organizations and people work. So we might not see clear advantages from those technologies until 6G is well underway. 

That said, productivity often eventually does show up, after a decade or more. The productivity paradox was seen very prominently in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s when there was a big uptake of information technology, but productivity growth slowed down over the same period.

Labor productivity growth came down from about three percent in the 1960s to about one percent in the 1990s despite the increase in computing and information technology investment. 

source: Gartner

One possible explanation is that productivity is increasing, but we simply cannot conveniently measure it. It is difficult to quantify the value of better computers that cost the same, but increase in performance, for example.

Another possible explanation is that it takes organizations and people a while to adjust to much-better technology. In that view, organizations have to retool the ways they work before the IT investments actually can help.