In the second quarter of the year, between April and June, 5G subscriptions for the first time surpassed those in 4G: this news has been circulating for a few days with understandable excitement. The source is the reliable Ericsson Mobility Report which does not really talk about the total number of subscribers but only about new subscribers. In short, in the world there are eight billion and 100 million telephone subscriptions with data connection; of these 4.8 billion, 59 percent, are for 4G; and 380 million for 5G which, however, has 84 million new subscribers against 71 for 4G.
In short, overtaking is there but it is small. For every 5G subscriber there are still more than a thousand on 4G. This is the state of affairs. An abyss separates them. The fact is that 5G in my opinion remains a technology still in search of a convincing narrative. Let me explain: when 3G arrived, consumers had the obvious advantage of being able to download apps and attachments to emails in seconds; and with 4G we can finally watch TV events in streaming as it would have been impossible before (the data that DAZN has just released on spectators at the first two days of the football championship prove this).
But 5G? What exactly is it for? What benefits will it bring us? It is not clear: in the previous Ericsson Mobility Report it is stated that users who have activated 5G spend more time playing video games in the cloud or using augmented reality applications and instead make less use of home wifi. That’s all? Surely not. I cite again the Report where it says that 5G users are waiting, with anxiety and curiosity, for new services they can do with 5G. They wait and hope. Here, the point is that overall we have not exactly understood the practical advantage of this new technology. And the news of the (small) overtaking among new subscribers compared to 4G only serves to try to create a “hype” that does not seem to exist. Let’s clarify: I’m not saying that 5G is not needed. It would be too trivial a mistake: the history of technology is made up of steps forward that at first seemed to be useless and then instead … The Internet itself, and then also the web, at first seemed like things that could be done to less.
What 5G needs now is a compelling narrative: a story that tells us what will really improve our lives. Or, as usual, it will be enough to wait a bit, just long enough for someone to invent an application that no one had foreseen and that can only be done with 5G.
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