Moffett Asks How Carriers Will Justify Investments in 5G

Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson asked where the revenue is going to originate to justify carrier investments in 5G. Moffett told investors Thursday he isn’t hearing any real answers. “Most of the use cases we’ve heard don’t make sense, yet the capital requirements for densifying networks are very real,” he said: “Simply using more data at higher and higher speeds -- we’ve all heard about the dream of downloading a full season of Game of Thrones in seconds before boarding a plane -- has, up to now, been a dry well for wireless revenue generation.” There are problems with most use cases, he said. Driverless cars are commonly cited, “but would anyone really make steering, accelerating and braking, the most mission-critical functions of a driverless car, dependent on ubiquitous network connectivity?” Moffett asked. The factory of the future is likely to be broadly connected, but private networks could cut out carriers, he said: “Won’t low frequency mesh networks like Amazon Sidewalk siphon off lots of the simpler narrowband IoT network use cases?”