The frenzy is relentless: Hardly a day passes without Mobile World Live (MWL) receiving a press statement about some new 5G pilot or innovation centre being set up somewhere around the world.

This year the scope of the announcements broadened beyond mere proof of concept trials to everything from 5G enabling new entertainment experiences, a vendor tipping network slicing to drive 5G services and yet another country planning a cross-sector 5G working group.

According to an Ericsson study, operators have stepped up their 5G preparations over the past year and are now much further along in addressing the technical challenges of the technology. The vendor’s 5G Readiness survey found 78 per cent of operators were trialling 5G technology, which is more than double the number in 2016 (32 per cent). The report, however, was based on a sample of just 50 executives from “37 operators globally that have announced publicly they are working on 5G”.

Ericsson CTO Erik Ekudden said recently initial standards will clear the way for “pre-commercial system launches and, in some cases, commercial launches” in 2018 and 2019. That’s certainly ambitious since 3GPP won’t release the Non-standalone version of the 5G New Radio standard until March 2018.

On the demand side, Jefferies Hong Kong in June predicted China will have 588 million 5G subscribers in 2022: 40 per cent of the country’s total mobile users. China Mobile is talking of having nationwide 5G coverage in 2021.

CSR enabler
The hype seems to have reached a new high recently. The head of Cellcard, a mobile operator in Cambodia, recently told Disruptive Asia 5G can help mobile players drive their corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes. Cellcard CEO Ian Watson said he thinks this aspect is the most underrated quality of 5G.

That’s right, the next-generation mobile standard will enable companies to behave better and push CSR projects, covering elements including literacy, financial inclusion, healthcare and education. It is unclear why existing 4G networks, which will soon be nearly as fast as the predicted speeds of early 5G in 2020, can’t support such efforts.

The point is nearly every sector is looking to 5G for huge improvements in efficiency which will cut billions of dollars from the bottom-line or create substantial sources of new revenue.

There is little doubt we’ve entered, or are nearing, what Gartner refers to as the peak of inflated expectations. According to the research company, the next phase is the trough of disillusionment, which is followed by the slope of enlightenment.

Concerns
Tempering the hype at a 4G/5G event in Hong Kong last week, Mike Wright, MD of networks at Australia-based Telstra, insisted mobile operators must make the switch to 5G as seamless as possible.

His biggest concern with the aggressive push to 5G is setting it up properly and not rushing: “What we don’t want to repeat is the 3G story, where we built 3G over 2G and when you fell off 3G you fell so far in speed it was almost not usable. We need to build 4G a layer up, so when we build out 5G and transition, we can basically sell the pre-5G use case on the 4G layer,” he explained.

Phil Marshall, chief research officer at Tolaga Research, told MWL it is clear we will repeat history if the economics of wideband channels are untenable and we rely on technologies like millimetre wave (mmWave) to provide enhanced mobile broadband services. He suggested mmWave be positioned as a capacity offload solution to enable greater performance in the sub-6GHz spectrum bands.

Industrial focus
Besides the hype, it seems the industry is backing away from two of the three key 5G scenarios (enhanced mobile broadband and massive machine type communications, which many experts now are saying can be handled by fast LTE-Advanced and NB-IoT networks respectively) and focusing more on mission-critical use cases, particularly in industrial applications.

The challenge for the telecoms industry is whether this will provide sufficient scale to justify massive 5G investments, Marshall noted.

At the recent 5G Asia event in Singapore, operators on a panel on new business models in a 5G world agreed the biggest opportunities will likely be in industrial applications, connected cars, healthcare and robotics. In a presentation, SK Telecom senior manager Park Jong-han said the company is gearing up to support ultra-reliable mission-critical services with a latency of less than 10 milliseconds. LTE-A delivers a latency of 50 milliseconds.

Richard Swinford, a partner in consultancy Arthur D. Little, said at the event the real interest is in enterprise, with companies searching for higher efficiency, greater productivity and faster time to market.

In the enterprise space the projections can be even bolder. For example, IHS Markit estimates 5G can help generate up to $12.3 trillion of revenue across a broad range of industries. In a report commissioned by Qualcomm the research company forecast 5G could create 22 million jobs by 2035.

Clear heads will certainly prevail in the longer term: the question is how long until we plunge into the trough of disillusionment.

The editorial views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and will not necessarily reflect the views of the GSMA, its Members or Associate Members.