How will we know either fiber to the home or 5G has been successful? As with anything else, what one hoped to achieve matters. As always, there are many possible answers: minimum case and best case.
For policymakers, either FTTH or 5G policy succeeds once the networks are built. Even for service providers, FTTH and 5G succeed if they enable fixed and mobile network operators to remain in business: they are competitive with other service providers, for example.
Policymakers can claim victory if the networks are built. Nothing else really has to happen.
Service providers win if they are not driven out of business; if they maintain or slightly increase revenues; if they maintain profitability.
Infrastructure providers win as they are able to fuel sales for one more generation of networks. App providers win as the new networks help create more room for feature and performance advantages.
Consumers win if their experience includes lower latency and high speeds, for about the same price as the older platforms supplied.
There are likely to be some new use cases and revenues, to be sure. But none of those use cases will match the importance of the "minimum" outcomes outlined above.
One must ask what the “real value” is from several vantage points. Most fundamentally, mobile operators need more capacity to keep up with growing customer data consumption, only some of which can be satisfied by the other traditional mechanisms of creating smaller cells, using better radios, offloading traffic and shaping demand.
From a mobile operator’s perspective, 5G arguably succeeds if it simply allows operators to keep pace with end user data demand, while operating with higher cost-per-bit efficiency.
In other words, 5G succeeds if it allows mobile operators to supply more data at about the same retail price. Some might complain about the need to keep reinvesting, but that is foundational to the business.
About every decade, we have found, a new block of spectrum is required and a new network has to be built.
In part, that is because of saturation of the available capacity on the existing networks and in part because technology advances typically provide an order of magnitude improvement in capacity and latency performance with every next-generation network.
All that helps mobile operators maintain or improve their core businesses in terms of revenue, profit margins, equity prices and market share. Fundamentally, 5G is about “keeping your business.”
Of course, there are other ways to look at outcomes. How do mobile operators and others in the untethered ecosystem convince regulators to release additional spectrum? Economic growth; protection of supply chains; support for domestic industries; consumer and business benefits; educational and social benefits and jobs are outcomes governments want, so mobile operators almost have to argue that 5G supports such outcomes.
Perhaps looking at 4G will help with the assessment. Questions about payback were relatively frequently expressed early in the global rollout of 4G mobile networks, even as proponents emphasized possible new applications.
Capacity and lower cost per bit always seem to be among the key values of any next-generation mobile network, even if such platforms are pitched as “new application” drivers. The reasons are fairly pedestrian.
To convince regulators to allocate significant new spectrum, mobile advocates must emphasize all the potential benefits for economic growth, national security, innovation leadership and so forth.
It simply does not sell well to argue “you need to give us more spectrum so our business models remain intact” or “so we can lower our cost per bit.”
Nor should we discount the eventual emergence of new apps and use cases made possible because of lower latency and faster speeds.
But we do not need 5G to do anything more than sustain the existing mobile business model to claim success. All that other hype about new apps is simply the best argument mobile operators have for convincing regulators to release more spectrum.
Infrastructure suppliers, likewise, have every incentive to convince mobile service providers that they are in danger of falling behind, or missing out on revenue growth, if they do not upgrade.
In such circumstances, we can simply assume that 5G succeeds if mobile operators still have a positive business case. Everything else is nice, but not essential in the short term.
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