5G market predictions for 2019
Posted by TechRepublic on December 19, 2018:
The importance of 5G continues to grow and to find out what's in store for next year, TechRepublic talked to several 5G experts to discuss the top 5G trends and more.
Participants in the roundtable included:
· Chris Penrose, president of IoT solutions, AT&T
· Kishen Mangat, vice president and general manager, mobility and automation at Cisco
· Jeff Black, director, Verizon Ventures
· Dan Hays, principal, PwC
· Alok Shah, vice president, networks strategy, BD, and marketing, Samsung Electronics America
· Peter Linder, head of 5G marketing, Ericsson North America
· Volker Held, 5G market development manager, Nokia
· Jason Elliott, 5G market development manager, Nokia
· Glenn Lurie, president and CEO, Synchronoss
· Toby Redshaw, senior vice president, 5G ecosystems, innovation and product development, Verizon Ventures
· Ian Campbell, CEO, OnScale
· Babak Behesti, Ph.D., IEEE member and interim dean, College of Engineering and Computing Sciences, New York Institute of Technology
· Andrew Fray, managing director, Interxion
· Neil Anderson, practice director, network solutions, WWT
· Ken Tsai, global vice president, head of cloud platform and data management, SAP
TechRepublic: How important will 5G be to the US, and the world, in 2019?
Neil Anderson:The rollout of 5G will take time, starting with islands in 2019 and evolving over the next 3-5 years to broad coverage. It will take longer to upgrade mobile infrastructure because many new microcell towers and base stations have to be built for 5G, it's not a matter of just updating radios on existing towers.
TechRepublic: In 2019, do you think there will be a few smartphones, or many smartphones, with 5G capabilities?
Anderson: We may see a handful of smartphones with 5G capability in 2019, but most mobile infrastructure systems won't be capable yet, so most likely real consumer adoption will not start until 2020. Early adopters of 5G smartphones may have inconsistent experiences, for example some may see poor battery life while others may see dramatically improved battery life.