Analysis: What is 5G and why we need to be more objective about its ‘arrival’

When listening to announcements and reading news from the last few weeks, it seems that 5G is a living being capable of “arriving” and installing itself in a certain location with autonomous and viral reproductive properties.

But 5G is not a pandemic virus that “arrives” and reproduces autonomously and massively in a country. On the contrary, we are talking about a new technology that needs huge investments to “arrive”, that is, to be implemented, and to “go viral”, that is, to be adopted at scale.

5G is not a simple software update. There are considerable costs for this technology to become a reality and for its benefits to be taken advantage of. And there are even greater costs for such benefits to be accessible and redistributed to the population in its entirety, rather than leaving them restricted to a tiny minority.

So, to build a constructive debate, we need less marketing and bombastic announcements and more critical analysis of the costs and impacts of 5G. In addition, we also need to stop considering only potential benefits.

First: what is 5G?

Unlike previous generational evolutions (especially 3G, 4G), 5G is not simply aimed at improving mobile internet access, that is, for consumers with their smartphones.

The main objective of 5G is to facilitate automation: extremely fast and highly reliable connectivity and the management of millions of connected objects within the scope of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), allowing sensors and robots to dialogue quickly and safely, fueling intelligence. artificial and potentially generating huge gains in productivity.

This new technological world will enable the industrial internet (connected factories), connected agriculture, smart cities and smart highways with millions of sensors and autonomous vehicles, as well as enabling augmented reality and virtual reality applications for consumers.

However, 5G does not “arrive” by plane and does not propagate itself. Huge investments are needed and clearly such investments will be targeted and prioritized primarily where there is a return. That is, 5G will take many years to be adopted and adopted at scale for consumers.

5G has very high costs in addition to the benefits, and a true 5G connection — the so-called “pure 5G” as if there were a 5G that is not pure — will initially be available in geographic areas, in economic sectors and for very limited segments of the population. , not without generating negative externalities.

What are the high costs of 5G?

Firstly, infrastructural costs. To “arrive”, 5G needs a high density of 5G stations to be installed and such stations to be connected by a fiber network. These stations or cells basically act as routers that must be extremely close to the user in order to have access to the 5G network.

In other words, the spectrum auction is only a preliminary step. Once defined in which bands of radio spectrum the signals will travel, we still need the infrastructure to transmit such signals and the devices that receive them. In this sense, the official planning predicts that 5G will arrive in all Brazilian cities –or at least in the neighborhoods where the investment is more profitable– “by 2029”.

The second cost directly concerns the consumer. To use 5G, we need to have 5G-enabled devices, whether it’s a high-end smartphone or a virtual reality headset. The values ​​of such gadgets is not particularly popular.

Then there is another cost to the consumer that is totally absent from the debates: mobile internet plans to use 5G. Such costs have not yet been revealed to operators. However, it is clear that the plans practiced until today by the operators are not based on the type of technology, but on data consumption. That is, you do not pay for 3G, 4G or 5G plans, but pay based on how much data you consume.

So let’s take the famous example offered in the other discussions about the incredible qualities of 5G: the consumer will be able to download a 20 GB video in 20 seconds, while with 4G it would take half an hour. Perfect: currently, for any Brazilian operator, the cost of consuming 20 GB is more or less R$ 60. That is, you downloaded the video in 20 seconds, but you consumed and paid R$ 60, if the cost of the GB does not decrease radically.

It is good to remember that nowadays a 100 GB plan, which would be the minimum with this type of capacity, costs around R$ 400. Once again, it doesn’t seem to be affordable for any budget. Perhaps it is also interesting to note that in Brazil more than 30% of the population is still not connected and about 80% of the C, D and E classes use prepaid plans with very low data allowances.

Furthermore, for an informed debate it is also useful to consider the difference between the ideal of technological performance and the reality. 4G reaches speeds of 100 MBps in the laboratory, but the average speed in the Brazilian mobile connection is less than 20 MBps, or about 20% of the potential. Considering the wide range of challenges, it seems prudent to think that at least “until 2029.”

Is 5G being planned in a sustainable way?

A final social cost is entirely missing from the 5G debate. The great automation that 5G provides does not only have productive advantages. It also creates huge costs: remember the automation of industry, agriculture and transport? These are the sectors in which 5G will surely come first because it is an enabler of extremely profitable automation.

But is anyone explaining the situation to the automated factory worker who will be replaced by 5G-connected robots, the farm worker who will be replaced by autonomous tractors, and the truck driver who will be replaced by a self-driving electric truck?

In China and South Korea, which are world leaders in 5G and automation, this process is being studied and a systemic change, including to prepare and reconvert the workforce, has been planned for years. China introduced programming as a compulsory subject in elementary school three years ago.

In the current Brazilian context, unfortunately, there are many advertisements, but few strategies. The only thing that can be said about the arrival of 5G in Brazil at this time is that, considering the existing “plan”, the disruptive potential of this excellent technology will not generate universally distributed benefits, and may even exacerbate existing digital inequalities.