When will 5G become mainstream, or is it already mainstream?

Is 5G still waiting for a "killer app"? When will 5G become mainstream, or has it already become mainstream? The new research report reveals global 5G technology trends and provides the latest views from nearly 200 stakeholders from North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific who are directly involved in the development, implementation or adoption of 5G technology by leading telecommunications companies.

The new 2022 5G Technology Trends Survey Report comes from Jabil and SIS Intl. The report shows that 5G adoption and deployment are on a steady upward trend. It also outlines the challenges facing 5G adoption and deployment in both the technical and business sectors. Key findings include that 65% of respondents expect 5G to significantly change the telecommunications industry, compared to 49% in Jabil's last 5G survey in 2018. Compared to 2018, fewer people believe that 5G's advancement over 4G is "incremental" (34% vs. 51%).

As for the question of how soon 5G will become mainstream, 14% of Jabil respondents believe it is already mainstream. However, more than half of respondents (64%) believe 5G will become mainstream in the next 1-3 years, while 19% expect it will take another 3-5 years and 4% expect 5G to take 5 years or more to become mainstream. The majority of stakeholders participating in the survey (59%) strongly agree that 5G will benefit telecom companies by creating new opportunities. Similarly, 53% of respondents said that the transition to 5G will open the door to new business models. Could killer apps be the ticket to creating these expected new business models?

Less than half of respondents strongly agreed with the view that killer applications will drive 5G to realize its true potential. However, the majority of respondents (58%) made it clear that they expect 5G's next killer application to be most beneficial to business. Only 20% of respondents said they expect the next killer application to be consumer-oriented. The vast majority of stakeholders (87%) said that business applications will adopt 5G solutions first, followed by enterprise applications, personal applications and healthcare applications. The top five industries that respondents said will benefit from 5G are financial services, transportation, healthcare, defense and aerospace, and energy and utilities.

According to the Jabil/SIS survey, business model challenges are the biggest pain points organizations are trying to address, followed by operational challenges, technical challenges, supply chain challenges, and user/customer challenges. Meanwhile, among those organizations that are developing or implementing 5G networks, the biggest business challenge is creating a subscription model for 5G—although this percentage (31%) is much lower than the percentage in the 2018 survey (50%). Other key business challenges include government regulations and qualifying top vendors to capture market share. Unsurprisingly, the most cited 5G technical challenge in the study was spectrum availability (32%), and it’s worth noting that a higher percentage of respondents (34%) said they had no technical challenges at all with 5G networks. Overall, the percentage of stakeholders facing 5G challenges has decreased since the last Jabil/SIS survey in 2018, suggesting that the path to 5G is becoming smoother. If most of these stakeholders are correct, mainstream 5G adoption is only a year, two, or three years away.