5G is still a few years away but several organisations worldwide have already showed willingness to embrace it, market research firm Gartner said on Wednesday.
Nearly 75 percent end-user organisations would be willing to pay more for 5G mobile capabilities, of which 31 percent are ready to pay up to 10 percent higher price than existing 4G, 22 percent willing to pay 10 to 20 percent more, 14 percent willing to pay 20 to 30 percent more, and 8 percent willing to pay 30 percent or higher.
“Those in the telecom industry are more likely to be prepared to pay more than those in other industries,” said Sylvain Fabre, research director at Gartner, in a statement.
According to the survey, most of the respondents think their organisations would be prepared to pay more for 5G but few (eight percent) expect 5G to deliver cost savings or increase revenues.
5G is seen principally as a network evolution (59 percent) and only secondarily as an enabler of digital business (37 percent).
“End-user organisations in manufacturing, service and government sectors are less likely to be willing to pay a premium for 5G than telecom companies, which are willing to pay it for their internal use,” Fabre added.
Majority respondents (57 percent) believe that their organisation’s main intention to use 5G is to drive Internet of Things (IoT) communication, making the technology the most popular use-case.
“This finding is surprising, as the number of deployed ‘things’ that need cellular connectivity won’t exceed the capacity of existing cellular IoT technologies before 2023 in most regions,” noted Fabre.
A large majority of the respondents (84 percent) believe that 5G will be widely available by 2020 but Gartner has predicted that only 3 per cent of the world’s network-owning mobile communication service providers (CSPs) will have launched it commercially by 2020.
