Advanced technology often does not get adopted as rapidly as the hype would have you believe. In fact, most useful advanced technologies tend not to go mainstream until adoption reaches about 10 percent. That is where the inflection point tends to occur. That essentially represents adoption by innovators and early adopters.
One often sees charts that suggest popular and important technology innovations are adopted quite quickly. That is almost always an exaggeration. The issue is where to start the clock running: at the point of invention or at the point of commercial introduction? Starting from invention, adoption takes quite some time to reach 10 percent adoption, even if it later seems as though it happened faster.
Consider mobile phone use. On a global basis, it took more than 20 years for usage to reach close to 10 percent of people.
That is worth keeping in mind when thinking about, or trying to predict, advanced technology adoption. It usually takes longer than one believes for any important and useful innovation to reach 10-percent adoption.
That is why some might argue 5G will hit an inflection point when about 10 percent of customers in any market have adopted it.
