Has Pandemic Really Slowed 5G?

There is a tendency to input causation whenever there is correlation, and permanent changes caused by big--yet transitory--phenomena.We never act as though any single volcanic eruption or hurricane will “forever” change business and life in the affected area. Rather, our assumption is that life will return to normal over a period of months to years.

And yet it is most common to hear arguments that global life and business will never be the same after the Covid-19 pandemic, even as life already is returning to normal levels and behavior in many countries that are further along the recovery curve. 

An analysis of the way 5G is being used to ameliorate pandemic problems might be interpreted as conventional wisdom suggests, namely that the pandemic has slowed down all economic activity and 5G roll outs. 

In fact, the report suggests slowdowns and accelerations both have happened, the World Economic Forum suggesting that fixed wireless efforts have accelerated. One might have made that case before the pandemic, though. 

source: Maximize Market Research

Likewise, some infer and believe that bandwidth consumption patterns are permanently altered by the pandemic. That might be the case, but not for the “because of the pandemic” reason often cited. Every next-generation mobile platform since 2G has resulted in higher mobile data consumption. 

So we should not be surprised to hear that per-user mobile data consumption has increased 300 percent since 5G was commercially launched in South Korea. That is what we should expect. It has almost nothing to do with permanent changes directly caused by the pandemic, though people forced to stay at home from work and school have boosted their video streaming hours. 

That will change as they go back to work and school. 

It is likely more accurate to say that the pandemic and forced stay-at-home rules accelerated some already-occurring changes, ranging from a shift to video streaming from linear TV, more gaming, more work from home and online shopping. Pushing volume “up and to the right” is a permanent change, to be sure, but not a new trend; simply an acceleration of what had already been happening. 

We might ultimately be surprised that many predicted permanent changes did not happen in a way we will be able to capture quantitatively. Though the Great Recession of 2008 caused a massive change in economic activity, it was not “permanent.” Activity more than rebounded. The internet bubble burst of 2001 caused massive asset value changes. But valuations of new and surviving firms rebounded. Smooth out the data by looking at a decade or two worth of data and one can detect no permanent change. 

Neither 5G or other ongoing trends will be immune from that reversion to mean.