Deployment of 5G will take off in all regions of the world but with wide geographical variations over timing and rate. China will dominate the headline numbers, but the USA, UK, South Korea and Japan will also be among the fastest to make 5G services widely available to consumers and enterprises.
India will be notable for holding back and focusing on completing 4G roll-out in a country where 70% of the 1.05bn active users are still stuck on 2G, before proceeding to 5G, while 5G deployment will occur later still across most of sub-Saharan Africa. Yet it is developing nations where 5G will eventually make the greater difference to the quality and reach of high speed broadband, with fixed wireless access (FWA) playing an important role. Yet over time FWA will converge with mobile access to yield more universal 5G serving both fixed and moving devices (see separate item).
These are key findings of the latest RAN Research spectrum report and forecast, constructed from a combination of interviews with technology vendors and a survey of 57 leading operators spanning the three principal regions of North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. This gives detailed forecasts of spectrum, numbers of cells and data traffic volumes in each category by region, with separate breakdowns for India and China on account of their size and importance.
The 5G boom has begun for most areas in the midband sweet spots between 1 GHz and 6 GHz but will then pick up in the higher millimeter wave (mmWave) bands, where more spectrum is available but at shorter range. This will lead to rapid proliferation of micro infrastructure, often small cells, largely because existing towers are too big and unsightly for the urban settings where mmWave will mostly be deployed in the shorter term.
The amount of spectrum awarded in the mmWave will dwarf that in the lower bands. This is reflected in the allocations recommended by the GSMA, with a contiguous 80 to 100 MHz of spectrum considered adequate in the midband, but a full 1 GHz needed to exploit the potential of the mmWave zone in full. This disparity of spectrum is reflected in the RAN Research forecast, with China, for example, predicted to have allocated 540 MHz in the midband by 2027 but as much as 8.25 GHz in the mmWave.
The report notes that counts of cells deployed in the context of 5G can be confusing because different methods are used to allow for overlaps with previous generations, as well as between the different bands. RAN Research adopted a consistent way of counting cells which equates each of the three 5G bands separately as distinct virtual cells.
For instance, a single macro cell can house several virtual cells, potentially one each for low, mid and high band 5G and another for 4G. This approach avoids any confusion in tracking multi-RAT cells – for instance, in some, 4G and 5G run side by side via DSS (dynamic spectrum sharing) and in others they are implemented as distinct cells. This method can, however, lead to higher cell counts than some other methods, although the report is only addressing 5G and so there is no risk of double-counting cells that are also 4G.
By this methodology, the total number of 5G cells deployed in the world will rise from 1.18m in 2020 to 13.88m by 2027. By then the cell breakdown by band is predicted to be 6.23m in the mmWave, or almost half; 4.84m in midband spectrum and 753,000 in low bands, with 2.059m refarmed from either the mid or low bands. The mmWave cells will usually have smaller footprints to cater for higher signal degradation, so that more will needed for a given coverage area.
Growth in data traffic flowing in 5G networks will be dramatic, rising from 2.12m exabytes per month in 2020 to 249.7m EB in 2027. The breakdown will be 104.8m EB in the midband, 80.4m in mmWave, 20.8m in low band, and 43.8m in refarmed spectrum across low or midband zones.
Rapid expansion is also predicted in the burgeoning field of private mobile networks driven by vertical sectors such as automotive and manufacturing. Operators will have to battle to avoid being squeezed out by enterprises working directly with infrastructure providers, where Germany and Japan have led the way from their large manufacturing bases. Some operators have enjoyed more success than others getting their oar into private networks, Vodafone and Telefónica being among them.
But whether or not operators succeed in gaining a major stake, private networking will boom in the 5G era – we predict it will generate 77.5m EB data per month by 2027, up from just 51,000 EB in 2020, so almost from a standing start.
The report notes that FWA is becoming the primary driver of 5G deployments in some regions. This includes developing countries where fixed wired broadband alternatives offer patchy coverage, and also some parts of developed nations where it can provide more cost-effective reach in rural as well as low density suburban areas.
Several Latin America telcos, for example in Uruguay and Brazil, have already launched FWA 5G services ahead of mobile for this reason. Then among more developed countries, Germany, the UK, Australia and the USA, have been notable for promoting 5G as an FWA service offering affordable broadband at higher bit rates than are available over DSL in rural areas where there is also no coaxial cable TV option.
This activity in FWA will have a significant impact on 5G traffic numbers. Taking mobile only, 5G traffic is unlikely to overtake 4G until 2027, but more likely by 2025 when FWA is factored into the equation.
Another area of interest, overlapping with the private networking field, is indoor wireless communication. China is the only country of note so far to issue dedicated spectrum for indoor coverage – the 3.3-3.4 GHz band shared between China Telecom, China Unicom and China Broadcasting Network (CBN) for co-developing 5G indoor access networks for economy of scale.
Indoor 5G coverage will be limited in other countries at first, starting with low level spectrum and then expanding into the mmWave for specific use cases in some vertical sectors. RAN Research found from its operator survey that a number of operators will rely on WiFi or 4G, or both, for enterprise indoor coverage in the short to medium term. Around 14% of operators stated that they would rely on WiFi as their primary strategy for indoor coverage in the 2021 to 2024 period, with a similar number indicating they would continue to depend mostly on 4G.