BARCELONA, March 1 — Driverless cars, fridges that talk to toasters, breathtaking immersive reality, mind-blowing gaming experiences — 5G was going to enable it all, and telecom companies were going to make a packet.
The event’s organisers proclaimed that 5G was “unlocking untapped value for all players across the entire ecosystem” and “redefining how the world connects”.Network operators were in peril, she told the MWC, because “massive network investments of almost 600 billion euros in Europe in the last decade happened to be hard to monetise”.Networks are not the only ones who might be rueing their big bet.
But telecom firms were unlikely to be seduced into investing billions only to improve connectivity in factories and ports, or help develop hi-tech medical services. This summarises two of the main problems with 5G — 4G is good enough for most people, and 5G jargon is often impenetrable.