February 28, 2023
The economic crisis caused an increase in the sales of cheap phones from the low end, at the expense of expensive phones equipped with 5G technologies. “The operators are diverting budgets from the deployment of new networks to projects to remove old infrastructure”
In 2022, the number of subscribers worldwide to fifth generation (5G) services increased by approximately 446 million subscribers, while fourth generation (4G) networks increased by approximately 592 million subscribers – 14 years after the initial launch of the fourth generation. The figure surprised the research company Omdia, which discovered that currently only 31% of the cellular operators offer their customers the fifth generation services. Following the findings, the company updated its forecasts, and now it predicts that the scope of adoption of 4G systems will begin to decrease only in 2024, but will maintain its preeminence at least until 2027.
This unexpected phenomenon was probably caused by a combination of several factors that acted on the market at the same time: the global economic crisis caused an increase in the sales of cheap low-end phones at the expense of expensive phones equipped with 5G, the market still lacks new applications that are mainly adapted to the fifth generation, and there is a problem Another related to the expansion of the use of connected accessories: about 30% of them are accessories that are not phones, such as IoT accessories or connected tablets, whose replacement rate is much lower.
Omedia’s chief market forecaster, Grinder Shankarwalia: “Following these data, we lowered the 5G sales forecast in 2023 by about 7.2% to about 150 million new subscribers. We believe that the industry will begin to make up for this loss starting in 2025, if the conditions in the global market improve.” The director of the company’s research division, Ronan de Rinas, said that telecommunications providers should adopt a net-zero policy in which they remove old infrastructure from their networks while installing new infrastructure.
Rinas: “The operators began to divert budgets from the deployment of new networks to the removal projects of old 3G infrastructures. The companies should formulate a realistic policy in relation to 5G and carry out a strict business assessment before moving to the next stage”. At the same time, the company believes that the transition to the fifth generation is inevitable. Therefore, it maintains for the time being the general estimate according to which the number of subscribers to the fifth generation services will reach about 5.9 billion subscribers by the year 2027, a number that represents a penetration rate of about 70.9%.
Published in the categories: WIRELESS, news, tablet and smartphone, communication, wireless communication
Posted in tags: 5G, mobile
