U.S. 5G Deployment 'Leapfrogged' Europe but Has Slowed This Year: Analyst

Worldwide 5G strategies have differed widely by region, Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading senior principal analyst, said during an Informa Tech webinar Tuesday. 5G deployments really started in 2020 with 1.9 billion subscriptions expected by the end of this year, Brown said. Mid-band deployments have been critical, allowing operators to “effectively double site capacity … very rapidly,” he said.

China and South Korea have aimed for “more or less a blanket coverage of massive [multiple-input and multiple-output] MIMO,” Brown said. “It looks now, in hindsight, that they overinvested in the early phases, but undeniably they built large, high-capacity networks,” he said.

Europe started strong, but its focus has “moderated a bit,” Brown said. Once operators cover the top 15% or 20% of sites, they don’t need as much capacity for other sites from mid-band spectrum, he said. Investment in Europe hasn’t surged like it has in other regions, he said. “It might turn out to be a very good strategy,” he said.

The U.S. buildout in 2021 and 2022 was “pretty incredible,” but moderated this year, Brown said. About half of U.S. sites now include massive-MIMO 5G, he said. “The U.S. has essentially leapfrogged places like Europe and is now on the way to having a very compelling 5G infrastructure,” he said. Indian operators are deploying rapidly, and their timing has been good, he said: They are building out “the most industrialized, high-volume version of 5G.”

Carrier priorities start with finding ways to monetize investments in consumer services, said Waris Sagheer, chief technology officer-routing architecture at Cisco. Fixed-wireless access has emerged as the big 5G use case, offered by 77% of operators globally, he said. Worldwide, FWA revenues were $27 billion in 2022, expected to climb to $67 billion this year, he said.

Private 5G networks are a “near-term priority” for carriers, including surveillance, campus security and manufacturing, Sagheer said. FWA and network slicing are both important for private networks, he said. Carriers are also focused on cutting operational costs and decreasing energy costs, he said. The radio access network is responsible for 60%-75% of energy consumption in a mobile wireless network, he said.

The operators Cisco works with are focused on moving from non-stand-alone to stand-alone 5G networks, Sagheer said. For network slicing you need a stand-alone core, he said. Operators are also planning for 5G advanced, and working on open and virtualized RANs, he said: “Why do they want to do this? Better utilization, scalability, flexibility and cost reduction.” ORAN has been slow to deploy, but should grow as 5G-advanced is deployed, he said.

For UScellular, the move to a more advanced network will take time, said Reggie Collette, a member of the technical staff. “We’re a brown field operator -- we’ve got legacy hardware that we need to support,” he said. “You don’t flip a switch and then overnight you centralize all your RAN compute into one location,” he said: “We’ll probably be on a journey where maybe new hardware gets centralized” and “as time goes on” legacy hardware is addressed. As fixed wireless becomes more popular UScellular needs to manage the demand, he said.