Cold war for 5G!
“War for 5G would been much better if it was between telecommunication companies, but it’s been more than that, it’s a war of political dominance.”
After century of first world war, a new war for supremacy has started between two countries again. China and America are on a cold war to gain financial as well as technological domination around the world. And the next big weapon for that is ‘5G’ technology.
According to 3GPP(The third generation partnership project), which is associated to maintain standard protocols to mobile technology and works for maintenance and development of GSM and related 2G, 2.5G etc, 5G technology is defined as any system using 5GNR(5G new radio). The speed of 5G will be 100 times to that 4G, which will lower the lag-time by 5 times, increases mobile data by 1000 times and enable new capabilities to unlock innovation. In simple language, it’s less the concern of download speed and more of a game changer.
The first fairly substantial deployments were in April 2019. SK Telecoms, KT corporations and LG U PLUS, Telecommunications operators based on South Korea were among the first to install base station. Verizon, also claimed to provide services in two of the major cities of USA. But that was initial testing, the final deployment hasn’t been made yet. China and America are on the track to be the first to provide 5G service around their respective nations. Whoever wins the race is likely to dominate both technological and financial market.
With 4G technology only, America increased their GDP by $100 billions in 2016 which created more jobs, lowered costs of consumer goods and helped US to roughly earned around $125 billions in revenue. And 5G will have even bigger impact to this sector around the globe. It is estimated that 5G promises to make benefit of around $12 trillion and America expect to make benefit of $3.5 trillion alone. So being first will eventually make change in economic sector.
The technology advancement from 4G to 5G is just not limited to number, it’s impact is way beyond that. There are many technological projects around the world whose effective functionality is not possible by the band-width and speed of 4G technology can finally be out of prototype. VIrtual Reality will finally be a reality, wireless technology will substantially replace the cable technology, AI based technologies will be empowered effectively, gaming experience will be even better, Health care will have improvement with better tracking of patience health condition and much more, Internet Of Things will be used with ease, “smart city, smart home, smart citizens and smart living” concepts will be propelled. More or Less, The world will be same as the movies based on future years to come.
China has invested $17.7 billion in capital so far and added more than 350,000 wireless facilities since 2015, giving the country about 1.9 million wireless sites. Not only this China has planed to invest roughly around $500 billion in 5G-related investment over coming five years. Similarly, America is about to invest $100 billion till 2020.
For months, Australia had warned the United States about the destructive capacity of 5G technology. Now, America is aggressively campaigning against Chinese telecom champion Huawei, fearful Beijing’s domination of 5G could be used for espionage and sabotage. Huawei, giant technological corporation based on China has been banned by US following allegation of theft of intellectual property, obstruction of justice and fraud related to its alleged evasion of US sanctions against Iran. That will surely slow the race for the China at least for few times. When US banned Huawei, Chinese rejected Apple product which divided the giants symmetrically. The gap of mutual understanding has made the race even beautiful for third nations.
“In this 5G war, we can tell that no matter for a country or a company, everyone is striving to develop 5G capacities internally while keeping an eye on the external competition.” An statement written in Official Huawei consumer page.
According to the report conducted by CTIA, the US leads with 92 commercial 5G deployments planned for 2019 but noted that China’s wireless operators are conducting “hundreds of large-scale 5G trials across the country.” But the China has has infrastructural advantage over the US as China has more than 14 cell sites per 10000 people compared to 4.7 of US.According to the survey, South Korea ranked third in 5G readiness, followed by Japan, Britain and Italy. But there is a saying in English “pioneers take the arrows, settlers take the land”, that means whoever is leading now, one that settles for the long will eventually win the race.
Refrences:
- Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com)
- Google (www.google.com)
- Forbes (www.forbes.com)
- Reuters (www.reuters.com) etc.
