5G connection: Majority end-users willing to pay more for faster internet

The next step in internet revolution, 5G connection, has many expectant buyers, even at a higher cost. Over 75 per cent IT and business leaders at end-user organizations are willing to pay more for 5G, recent research from Gartner indicates.

According to the research, 31 per cent of organisations are willing to pay up to 10 per cent higher for 5G than 4G, 22 per cent are willing to pay 10-20 per cent more and 14% are willing to pay 20-30 per cent more. But just 8 per cent are willing to pay a premium of 30 per cent or above.

However, the end-users were not confident about technoloy's ability to deliver cost savings or increase revenues. Instead 5G is mainly seen as a network evolution (59 per cent) and only secondarily seen as an enabler of digital business (37 per cent).

Respondents from the telecoms sector are also less likely than those in other industries to believe that 5G will be a revenue enhancer. “They tend to see 5G migration as a matter of gradual and inevitable infrastructural change, rather than as an opportunity to generate new revenue," Gartner research director Sylvain Fabre said.

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Across industries, the majority of respondents (57 per cent) believe that their organization's main use for 5G will be for IoT communications.

"Even once fully implemented, 5G will suit only a narrow subset of IoT use cases that require a combination of very high data rates and very low latency. In addition, 5G won't be ready to support massive machine-type communications, or ultra-reliable and low-latency communications, until early 2020."

Fabre said this result may demonstrate that there is confusion about 5G's applicability given the lower-cost alternatives available for wireless IoT connectivity.

Another area of confusion involves the fact that 84% of respondents believe that 5G will be widely available soon after it is standardized - by 2020 - while operators' plans indicate that wide availability may not be achieved before 2022.

Gartner instead predicts that by 2020 only 3% of the world's mobile network operators will have launched 5G network commercially.

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