Ericsson’s new ConsumerLab report ‘5G Consumer Potential’ debunks industry myths surrounding the value of 5G for consumers and outlines the opportunities available for communications service providers.
The report highlights the potential of 5G benefitting consumers, uncovering certain realities about them to bust the four common myths, that are: 5G offers consumers no short-term benefits; there are no real use cases for 5G, nor is there a price premium on 5G; smartphones will be the "silver bullet" for 5G: the magical single solution to delivering fifth-generation services; current usage patterns can be used to predict future 5G demand.
The key findings of the study include the fact that consumers expect 5G to provide relief from network congestion in the near term – mainly in the megacities, where majority of the smartphone users have reported facing network issues in crowded areas. The respondents also anticipate more home broadband choices to be available with the launch of 5G.
The report has dismissed the ICT industry myths that consumers are unwilling to pay premium on 5G. In fact, smartphone users are willing to pay 20% more for fifth-generation services, and half of early adopters can pay as much as 32% more.
According to the study, one in five smartphone users’ data usage could reach over 200 GB per month on 5G device by 2025.
In February, Ericsson and Intel began a multi-year partnership to align ongoing development efforts in software-defined infrastructure (SDI), distributed cloud, and 5G. The platform will aim to deliver ‘a new level of cloudlike agility, transparency and efficiency required for Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), distributed cloud, and 5G’. As part of the partnership, both the companies will bring together the Ericsson SDI Manager software and Intel RSD reference software while maintaining full backward compatibility for current customers.
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