5G: Expectations vs. Reality 

From the corridors of Westminster to the server rooms of MNOs, 1GLOBAL Senior Technical Product Manager Oliver Pink argues that it’s time to sober up and have a conversation about what telecommunications really needs  now.

Speaking to Marketing Manager Raghav Rajpal, here's what Oliver had to say...

"Now that the confusion, excitement and panic have settled down, one thing about 5G is for sure. Even if you had barely heard of it a couple of years ago, you’ll know about it now. It morphed from narrowly reported but wide-eyed enthusiasm at MWC19 to a major news story to a everyday essential. 

From worries about its impact on 'the health of all species' to South Korea’s KT beating its US rivals in rolling out a functioning network, this nascent technology even had diplomatic relations with China hanging in the balance and the UK government scrambling to regain its international reputation following the dismissal of defence secretary, Gavin Williamson. 

The hype train 

The director general of the GSMA, Mats Granryd said at time of launch that 5G “is more than just a generational step; it represents a fundamental transformation of the role that mobile technology plays in society.” Other observers have touted its potential to realize the pipe-dreams of some of the most disillusioned IoT device makers, to reshape how rural communities engage with telecommunications and to be a democratizing force in communications. 

It was easy to get excited for the simple reason that it promised significant advances. Faster bandwidth and lower latency always feature in the conversations about how 5G is changing the face of AI, or is helping move us towards a future with autonomous vehicles.

Now, with 5G a reality in many of our devices and smartphones, it’s time to reflect on how the technology met its potential   and realized its limits. 

What about 4G? 

One of industry’s biggest gripes with the 5G hype is that developers and authorities opted for glamour over practicality and need. 

According to The Register, former Director of UK regulator Ofcom (more on them later) Professor William Webb warned before launch that there was no clear rationale for 5G’s boasted 100x faster speeds, and potential 1000x capacity. 

The reality is that in many regions 4G coverage still isn’t good enough to be thinking about the next generation up. A report on 5G by the National Infrastructure Committee (NIC) in 2016 found that 4G coverage in the UK is worse than that of Albania. It called on the government to address the 4G 'digital deserts' on roads, railways, and city centre 'not-spots'. 

Commenting on the report the NIC’s Chair, Lord Adonis acknowledged the potential of 5G but warned “none of this will matter unless we bring our mobile network up to speed.” 

The following year, however, all seemed to be well. In its annual International Communications Market Report, Ofcom estimated that the UK had 99% 4G coverage. When I first read this, I wondered how unlucky I must be that the places which I regularly travel to are almost always in the one per cent black spots. 

I soon found my answer. Firstly, I discovered that it only refers to good coverage from ‘at least one operator’ — practically useless to people who like to move around a bit. Secondly, although the 99% statistic is half-true, it’s reached by such an absurd metric that it told us absolutely nothing. 

The 99% referred to a percentage of residential and commercial premises that can connect to a 4G network, which rather misunderstood the fundamental point of mobile networks. What good is it that I can use 4G at home (where I most likely have a fixed-line connection) if when I’m on a train from Birmingham to London I can’t so much as make a basic Google search for half the journey? 

Deflating 5G  

By 2019, Ofcom seemed to have come to its senses. In April, its CTO Mansoor Hanif revealed to the Scottish Parliament that “geographical coverage… is a revolution in the way we measure coverage because we would only target coverage to where people actually lived, to houses.” 

The actual percentage of UK landmass with good 4G at the time of that report? Just 66%. 

Oversight underperforms  

In 2019 the UK government set a target of achieving 95% landmass 4G coverage by 2022, but as Hanif conceded to MSPs that same day, “I think we are very clear that we are not going to get to the 95%.”

This was accurate, and a report published in March 2024 by the UK Government entitled 'Rural Mobile Coverage in the UK: Not-spots and Partial Not-Spots' (available here) pushed that goal back to late 2025.  

Essential innovation 

There are hundreds of new ways to improve global connectivity and yet the industry has its collective sights on making things faster. How boring. 

Advertising industry veteran Rory Sutherland once described this folly in relation to high-speed rail: 

“The question was given to a bunch of engineers, about 15 years ago, ‘How do we make the journey from London to Paris better?’ And they came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend six billion pounds building completely new tracks from London to the coast and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time… it strikes me as an unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter.”  

Similarly, the conversation around 5G deployment tends to glaze over the use cases for the technology. We need to be more granular about the areas it makes sense to implement 5G and those in which it doesn’t. It has, for example, created opportunities for augmented reality, virtual reality and immersive video production that requires high data volumes and low latency to function at full capacity. 

But, as for the IoT space, it’s sometimes difficult to see how 5G is helping. This is, after all, not a speed or volume-based challenge in most circumstances. 

Just as you don’t need to put a Formula 1 engine in a taxi. you also don’t need 5G to run tech that already operates well on LTE or older- gen networks. More important for these industries is a renewed focus on what these devices actually need. NB-IoT and LTE-M are still not readily available, yet crucial to the rollout of many estates. 

Spotty 5G 

A report from Gartner notes that the current 5G rollout will achieve 90% coverage in Europe and North America by 2026. It will take another half-decade before the networks become ubiquitous in other parts of the world. Furthermore, it will be largely focused on urban centers, making it far from the democratizing force it promised to be. 

5G is already a fairly common connection standard with European and American smartphones and connected devices, but there's no meaningful global footprint yet. Carriers have struggled to come up with the right business models. 

This is not unusual when new needs are created. Traditionally, networks have been built for a revenue-per-subscriber of over €20. So, economically speaking, if you pay a licence fee of €0.50 per subscriber per month, the model works because the average revenue per user (ARPU) supports it. 

But what happens when there is a proliferation of devices (e.g. asset trackers) that can often form huge estates but traffic per device is typically very low? Now, instead of the €20 ARPU, you’re talking about €1 ARPU and a €0.50 license fee, so some core network elements become completely unsustainable. 

We, as an industry, need to build a next-gen network which supports many more subscribers at much lower ARPUs. It’s not impossible. We know, because we’ve done it before. 1GLOBAL has reduced its licensing costs on our network by 87%, and there’s more to come with scale. 

5G currently provides one answer, but it’s not the only answer and it’s certainly not a universal one for all markets and regions. 

Access vs. speed 

MVNOs should be clamoring for equal access, not speed. With 5G not having singlehandedly revolutionized connectivity, it’s clear that the focus needs to be on low-power technologies like LTE-M and NB-IoT. All the frequency bands in the low-power chips being built now rely on them, and while most carriers are rolling them out, support for MVNOs is still limited. 

This is baffling. LTE-M is essentially just a software patch  so very easy to provide access. NB-IoT is a little more complicated but orders of magnitude less complicated than building a 5G network. 

The big question is, how do MVNOs get access? And they need access. If we don’t, and similar carriers which work across borders don’t , then this industry will never evolve. 

Global future 

The future for the IoT has to be global. It has to be single SKU devices that can be shipped to and used in every country in the world. And that means connectivity in any market, anywhere in the world. This requires collaboration, it requires more MVNOs with access, not fewer. It means more direct agreements with Mobile Network Operators, not fewer.  

There has to be interoperability and equal access to these technologies. There has to be a refocusing of our attention away from the potential and toward the possible. 

The future is already here. Let’s use it."