There are many "roadblocks" blocking the way for the full popularization of 5G. When will it be possible?

Now everyone is talking about 5G, just like when we talked about 4G. There is a saying that 4G changes life, and 5G changes society. I vaguely remember that when I upgraded from 3G to 4G, it was as if I woke up and entered the 4G era. The operators did not do much pre-promotion and promotion work. Everything seemed so natural and smooth, and it was a completely natural upgrade.

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But now, upgrading from 4G to 5G seems to have encountered some troubles. Not only is the entire communications industry vigorously promoting 5G, but various 5G summits have been held year after year. The country has also listed 5G as a key direction in the latest new infrastructure construction. At the same time, the operator's phone calls every week "remind" us how good it will be to upgrade to a 5G network, but even so, the current promotion and popularization of 5G is still much more difficult than the original 4G.

There are many factors that influence this. For example, when the 4G upgrade was first launched, the Internet was in the process of transitioning from audio and text formats to video formats. The massive explosion of mobile applications such as voice/video chat, mobile games, and short videos laid the demand foundation for the popularization of 4G networks. It can be said that users at the time were looking forward to the launch of faster mobile networks to solve their urgent needs. Therefore, the rapid popularization of 4G is not surprising.

Roadblock 1: The market is not yet mature and demand is low

5G is different from 4G. The theoretical uplink rate of 4G is 40Mbps and the downlink rate is 150Mbps. It takes about 5 or 6 seconds to download a 100MB video. The download rate of 5G can reach up to 10Gbit/s, which is 100 times faster than 4G network. It only takes 1 second to download a 1G video. But this is not the biggest advantage of 5G.

The biggest advantage of 5G is that it has three main characteristics: large bandwidth, low latency (less than 1 millisecond, 30-70 milliseconds for 4G), and large connections. The application scenarios of these characteristics are no longer limited to video applications, but will be more oriented to application markets with higher requirements for network quality, including AR, VR, unmanned driving, and industrial Internet. However, these application markets are still in their infancy and are not yet fully mature. This is also one of the most fundamental reasons for the slow popularization of 5G networks, and it can be said to be the first stumbling block.

Roadblock 2: High construction costs and long construction period

The second obstacle facing 5G is cost. The construction cost of 5G is very high, about 4-5 times that of 4G. This is mainly due to the high-frequency characteristics of 5G. As we all know, the higher the frequency, the shorter the signal transmission distance. Therefore, 5G base stations adopt the deployment method of small micro base stations. In actual deployment, a small base station is required within a range of about 500 meters. The large number of base stations has brought about a sharp increase in cost and deployment cycle. It is estimated that China's 5G investment cycle will be ten years, and the total investment amount will reach 1.6 trillion.

Therefore, the country has previously proposed to reduce investment costs by having tower companies build stations in a unified manner and having the three major operators share base stations. However, even so, the initial construction costs of 5G are still much higher than those of 4G. This has also made operators feel the pressure brought by the huge construction and operating costs. Ultimately, these costs will also be reflected in users. For example, the current 5G network package fees are significantly higher than 4G, which is also an important reason for keeping most users out of 5G.

Roadblock 3: Complex technical routes and difficult maintenance

Currently, operators mainly use two technical paths in 5G network construction: NSA (Non-Stand Alone) and SA (Stand Alone). NSA is based on the 4G core network and upgraded to 5G base stations. This method requires relatively less investment, but it also requires increasing the deployment density of small base stations. SA, on the other hand, uses a technical path to completely independently build 5G core networks, base stations, and backhaul links.

Although the NSA technology path can reduce initial investment, lower operating costs, and be more beneficial to terminal production and support, the core network has not been fundamentally changed, resulting in the inability to fully utilize the low latency and large connection characteristics of 5G. Therefore, in order to truly meet the high demands of certain specific scenarios on the network, such as driverless scenarios, the SA technology path is still needed.

Therefore, in the future, for operators, there will be at least two 5G technology evolution directions, NSA and SA, and these two methods will coexist for a long time. This has brought many challenges to the operators' subsequent network maintenance, which has also become a management problem for multi-frequency and multi-standard complex networks that operators must focus on solving in the next step.

Obstacle 4: Fierce global competition and uncertain market

At present, the main players in the competition of 5G market are China, the United States and Europe. Previously, the "China 5G Economic Report 2020" stated that China's total investment in 5G will reach 0.9 trillion yuan in 2020 and 1.5 trillion yuan in 2025. The US government also announced that it and private enterprises plan to invest 275 billion US dollars (about 1.84 trillion yuan) in 5G networks. US President Trump even declared that the United States must win the 5G competition.

It is not difficult to see from this information that all major competing countries are determined to seize the 5G market, which also makes the competition in 5G not only a competition in technology and business, but also a competition in national interests and security. There are several main meanings:

First, whoever occupies the 5G market will have the right to speak in the formulation of future 5G technology standards. This is related to a series of interests. Many technology companies, including communication network equipment manufacturers, operators, and terminal manufacturers, will benefit from it. If the related semiconductor chip industry is also included, the profit space will be even more immeasurable. This is one of the important reasons why major 5G application countries and regions such as the United States, Europe, China, South Korea, and Japan attach great importance to the development and construction of their own 5G technology.

Secondly, since the fifth generation of communication technology represented by 5G will be an important technical carrier for the future Internet of Things and smart city construction, a large amount of data will be interacted through the 5G network. In the future, data will become an important resource for national and social development like oil. Whoever controls the data controls the future. In order to keep the data firmly in their own hands and avoid being controlled by others, the world's major 5G players are vigorously building their own 5G technology systems.

In this competition, political factors are also an issue that cannot be ignored, and even dominate the trend of the global 5G market to a large extent. For example, two large Canadian telecommunications companies recently announced that they would cooperate with Sweden's Ericsson and Finland's Nokia to build 5G communication networks and refused China's Huawei to participate in their 5G projects. At the same time, after choosing to cooperate with Huawei on the 5G project, the UK announced that it would refuse Huawei's participation in the 5G project. The reason behind this is also due to pressure from the United States, making the future 5G market more and more unpredictable.

Most countries will actually face the same situation, just like the UK, which has been in a state of uncertainty. From their own interests, if they choose to cooperate with Huawei, they will upgrade the network based on the original 4G network, and their 5G investment costs will be greatly reduced. However, if they adopt 5G technology from other manufacturers, they will face the complete replacement of the entire network and the construction cost will double. Considering technology and products alone, Huawei is still a good choice. However, how the market will develop in the future is still unclear due to many factors.

Roadblock 5: High safety risks and difficult protection

The application of any new technology will bring new security challenges, and 5G is no exception. Since 5G can provide ultra-high bandwidth and ultra-high network speed, people can't help but worry that hackers will use this feature to launch more vicious attacks, such as DDos attacks, which may intensify the intensity of cyber warfare.

In addition, the massive connection feature of 5G also brings new security issues. For example, a large number of IoT devices connected to the 5G network will bring great risks and challenges to security. Security boundaries will become more blurred in the 5G era, the number of intrusion paths will increase greatly, and there will be more vulnerabilities exposed to hackers.

What is even more important is that 5G has become an important basic technology in the new infrastructure. In the future, important national infrastructure including cities, transportation, power grids, etc. will be based on the 5G network. Once the network is breached, the losses caused will be immeasurable. Therefore, as a new technology, security issues must be solved before large-scale application. This is one of the reasons why 5G is relatively slow in popularization in industry applications. The industry generally believes that solving 5G security issues requires both technology and management.

The above obstacles must be solved one by one to truly usher in the full arrival of the 5G era. In terms of cost, operators need to find a more reasonable business model, including cooperating with industry users to build networks or using existing networks to upgrade, which are both ways to expand the market in the early stage. However, in the long run, the operator market still needs to establish a unified core network architecture and invest in the research and development and deployment of 5G technology. After all, the full arrival of the 5G era is only a matter of time. When the demand market gradually matures, perhaps when we wake up, 5G will quietly arrive.