Between infrastructure and spectrum licenses, mobile operators worldwide will spend over $1 trillion on 5G by 2025, GSMA Intelligence predicts. What will they – and their customers – get for that money? Gigabit speeds, latency as low as 1 millisecond and the ability to support up to 1 million devices per square kilometer, to name just a few key advantages over 4G LTE.
But just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither will ‘true’ 5G: a fully standalone network with a cloud-native, service-based architecture. With the exception of greenfield operators, everyone will spend the next several years with a mix of 4G, 5G non-standalone (NSA) and 5G standalone infrastructure.
