What’s holding the 5G rollout back?

A quo­ta­tion attrib­uted to Amer­i­can-Cana­di­an sci­ence-fic­tion writer William Gib­son surges to mind when assess­ing the scarci­ty of active use-cas­es of the fifth-gen­er­a­tion mobile net­work and the asso­ci­at­ed tech­nolo­gies and indus­tries required to enable 5G at scale. “The future is already here; it’s just not even­ly dis­trib­uted,” the father of cyber­punk com­ment­ed decades ago.

Evan­ge­lists promise 5G will pro­vide super-speed broad­band con­nec­tions, up to a hun­dred times faster than 4G, and flash the green light for autonomous vehi­cles, among a panoply of oth­er plus­es. It will start the inter­net of things (IoT) rev­o­lu­tion and make cities tru­ly smart, final­ly. What needs to hap­pen, then, to improve the dis­tri­b­u­tion and adop­tion of 5G?

“The oppor­tu­ni­ty to take advan­tage of advanced cel­lu­lar tech­nolo­gies to dri­ve dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion across the board – indus­tri­al and robot­ics, auto­mo­tive, aero­space and defence, smart cities and more – is unprece­dent­ed,” says Rob Jones, the UK-based strate­gic alliances region­al direc­tor at multi­na­tion­al soft­ware and ser­vices provider PTC. “Advanced cel­lu­lar capa­bil­i­ties have the poten­tial to fuel the fourth indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, but only if the ecosys­tem co-oper­ates to enable 5G.”

It’s a size­able “if”, giv­en there remain con­cerns around the readi­ness and reli­a­bil­i­ty of sup­port­ing indus­tries and ser­vices, includ­ing col­lo­ca­tion, big data, cyber­se­cu­ri­ty and edge com­put­ing, to deliv­er and enable 5G en masse. Indeed, the finan­cial and eco­log­i­cal cost to build the nec­es­sary infra­struc­ture is colos­sal, says Thomas Spencer, tele­coms lead at soft­ware firm R3.

“Mobile net­work oper­a­tors (MNOs) face an uphill bat­tle to enable 5G,” he says. “It is esti­mat­ed they need to invest up to $1 tril­lion in upgrad­ing net­work infra­struc­ture for 5G, while already hav­ing to man­age sprawl­ing net­works of tow­ers, cables and switch­es just to sup­port their ongo­ing oper­a­tions.”

No ‘big-bang’ moment for 5G

There are fur­ther com­plex­i­ties. “The chal­lenge of how to finance and opti­mise infra­struc­ture usage extends to MNO plans for 5G roll­out and in par­tic­u­lar how to roll out small cell sites,” says Spencer. Next year in the Unit­ed States alone, there will be some 400,000 small cell sites locat­ed on pub­lic infra­struc­ture, restau­rants, offices and homes. “Deter­min­ing who owns, oper­ates and finances these sites pos­es a sig­nif­i­cant and oper­a­tional chal­lenge,” he adds, hint­ing that blockchain might pro­vide a solu­tion.

Richard Car­wana, Dell Tech­nolo­gies’ UK tel­co and ser­vice provider direc­tor, is sim­i­lar­ly ambiva­lent about what must hap­pen to enable 5G. “We are still join­ing the dots on how this will be built out,” he con­cedes. “There won’t be a ‘big bang’ of 5G that some had expect­ed, rather a grad­ual intro­duc­tion of ser­vices and oper­a­tors mov­ing into the tel­co space. Part­ner­ship and col­lab­o­ra­tion will be piv­otal to make sig­nif­i­cant progress and dri­ve imple­men­ta­tion.”

He points out that “5G requires dense fibre con­nec­tiv­i­ty to under­pin use-cas­es, where­as 4G and 3G did not” and calls for “tele­coms providers, indus­try lead­ers and gov­ern­ments to come togeth­er to under­stand require­ments and build solu­tions for spe­cif­ic use-cas­es”. As an exam­ple, Car­wana notes how the Ger­man gov­ern­ment is col­lab­o­rat­ing with tel­co providers to build new motor­ways with autonomous-only lanes.

Clos­er to home, the UK gov­ern­ment has acknowl­edged the ban of China’s trail­blaz­er Huawei is like­ly to delay wide­spread 5G roll­out by at least two years, notes Robert Pock­nell, intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty part­ner at Key­stone Law in Lon­don. “Euro­pean Union research shows Huawei is the num­ber-one leader for patents that are fun­da­men­tal to 5G roll­out,” he says.

Strong cybersecurity measures needed to enable 5G

Pol­i­tics aside, cyber­se­cu­ri­ty readi­ness is one of the fun­da­men­tal issues hold­ing up the advance­ment of 5G. Is it any won­der, when achiev­ing 5G’s lofty goals relies on bil­lions of inter­con­nect­ed devices, remote work­ers and the growth of cloud infra­struc­ture? “Add to this the increas­ing­ly heavy com­pute and net­work infra­struc­ture that is need­ed to sup­port 5G appli­ca­tions, devices, data and ser­vices,” says Mar­tin Rudd, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at Tele­soft Tech­nolo­gies. “Secu­ri­ty, 5G and IoT are inex­tri­ca­bly linked.”

The recent AT&T Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty Insights Report: Secu­ri­ty at the Speed of 5G high­lights the con­sid­er­a­tions that stake­hold­ers must address. “A key take­away is that 76 per cent of the respon­dents expect whol­ly new threats to emerge as a result of 5G and the increased attack sur­face,” says There­sa Lanowitz, head of evan­ge­lism and com­mu­ni­ca­tions at AT&T Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty. “The remain­ing 24 per cent of par­tic­i­pants expect a vol­u­met­ric increase in exist­ing threats.”

Shahzad Nadeem, head of smart cities at design and engi­neer­ing con­sul­tan­cy Plex­tek, agrees and says: “On top of secu­ri­ty, there are con­cerns around the own­er­ship of data, along with com­pat­i­bil­i­ty and inter­op­er­abil­i­ty with exist­ing sys­tems.”

Security and trust issues – spooking investors?

Addi­tion­al­ly, erro­neous claims that 5G is con­nect­ed to the spread of the coro­n­avirus has fur­ther ham­pered its progress, says Amelia West­er­berg, asso­ciate strate­gist at R/GA Lon­don. “Con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists are the biggest threat to the uptake of 5G,” she argues. “Anti-5G attacks on phone masts and gen­er­al nation­al secu­ri­ty and health con­cerns have caused 5G rol­lout to be delayed in most mar­kets.”

As of mid-Sep­tem­ber, just shy of 300,000 peo­ple and organ­i­sa­tions from 220 nations had signed the Stop 5G on Earth and in Space appeal, and investors might be get­ting spooked. It’s a tricky sell in the first place, with all the mov­ing parts. As Nadeem says: “Because the tech­nol­o­gy is still evolv­ing and its val­ue poten­tial split across its dif­fer­ent uses in dif­fer­ent domains, there are dif­fi­cul­ties in jus­ti­fy­ing the busi­ness case and return on invest­ment.”

Also in Sep­tem­ber, it was report­ed that in Greno­ble, France’s answer to Sil­i­con Val­ley, may­or Éric Piolle, a ris­ing star in The Greens polit­i­cal par­ty, is in no rush to pro­vide access to 5G, ques­tion­ing the impact it will have on the envi­ron­ment, espe­cial­ly if mil­lions of new hand­sets are required.

While it is evi­dent that to max­imise 5G’s vast poten­tial there is a reliance on a con­flu­ence of upgrade tech­nolo­gies, as well as mul­ti-stake­hold­er col­lab­o­ra­tion and enor­mous invest­ment, could it be there are more basic hur­dles to over­come first? “For peo­ple to adapt and trust 5G,” West­er­berg con­cludes, “it needs to estab­lish itself as a pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tion to cul­ture as well as the econ­o­my.”