‘Democratization’ of 5G Deployments Will Come At ‘Very High Costs,’ Says ABI

The “bright and lucrative future” for 5G could be “hampered” by early deployments that “were designed to fit the needs of the consumer market first,” said ABI Research Thursday. So “costly and time consuming” are the early consumer deployments that if mobile service providers (MSPs) were to “rely solely on consumers to justify their investments in 5G rollouts,” it could take them up to 15 years to see any returns, it said. MSPs “have every hope” 5G will help them reduce the cost per gigabyte of bandwidth but “network densification” will make 5G “much more expensive” than its “predecessors,” said ABI. “The implementation and democratization of 5G will come at very high costs.”