Ericsson and the Middle East are leading the 5G race

Network testing and measurement vendor Viavi has published a report on the state of global 5G trials to paint a picture of who and where is leading the charge.

72 operators are currently having a look at 5G, which is three times more than a year ago, and 28 of those have got as far as field trials. Of those only two have launched pre-commercial 5G services and they’re both from the Middle East: Etisalat and Ooredoo. Among the vendors Ericsson has a clear lead in terms of the proportion of those 5G trials it is involved in.

“Network service providers have been grappling with the evolution to 5G for some time, including how to address technology challenges such as fixed mobile convergence, hybrid cloud, network slicing and increasing virtualization,” said Sameh Yamany, Viavi CTO. “Virtual test, automation, self-optimization and analytics will be essential to dealing with the growing complexity and scale of 5G networks, while managing demand for high data rates, very low latency applications and large-scale IoT services.”

“Expectations for 5G are sky-high, offering mobile operators new opportunities for revenue,” said Stéphane Téral of IHS Markit, in the press release announcing the report. “Yet the path to full 5G adoption is complicated and still evolving. Operators and infrastructure vendors across the globe are moving at varying speeds when it comes to testing and deployment – they need to act now to address technology challenges.”

Of course some allowance has to be made for the vested interest companies like Viavi have in as many companies as possible testing 5G, as soon as possible. For all the talk of ‘sky-high expectations’, many operators are likely to take a cautious approach to 5G and are likely to hold off on significant capex until a pretty compelling business case is shown. Here are some charts illustrating the key datapoints from the report.