San Francisco: Global Switch to 5G A new report states that the next generation network is well underway with the number of connections reaching 1.34 billion in 2022.
According to an analysis by market researcher CCS Insight has seen 5G connections triple to 637 million this year, which suggests that the roll-out of the network continues to accelerate.
ZDNet reported that national lockdowns due to the global health crisis in 2020 slowed network rollouts, for example making it more difficult to send engineers to the ground to physically build infrastructure.
CCS Insight notes that geopolitical tensions are related to HuaweiThe role of the 5G rollout has caused delays, especially in Western Europe.
European countries are effectively hesitant to allow Huawei to provide critical infrastructure for their 5G networks after the Trump administration in the US raised concerns that the company could pose a security risk due to its ties with the Chinese government. Were.
“The US being a country, decisions were made relatively quickly, whereas in Europe each country had to make its own decision on what to do with Huawei,” Marina Koycheva, vice president of forecasting at CCS Insight, told the tech website.
“In some countries, operators had to wait a bit to see if they would be allowed to use Huawei equipment and what part of the network. This was perhaps an even more significant delay factor in 2020 than Covid-19 ”, Koyacheva added.
Although the pace of the rollout in Western Europe is improving, this relatively gradual launch means that 5G will not account for more than half the cellular device connections in the region until 2024, predicts Koycheva.
Different regions are switching to 5G at different speeds, but the trend is the same in Western Europe, North America, China, and other advanced markets in Asia – operators are now largely committed to upgrading from 4G, and Fast forward with the build. .
One of the key reasons for accelerating deployment is that consumers are now buying devices that are 5G-capable, with CCS Insight expected to sell 560 million 5G-capable smartphones in 2021.
In a turning point for the industry, Apple released its first 5G-equipped iPhone in late 2020, starting a “smartphone supercycle” with many users switching their devices.
After a sharp drop in sales, the smartphone has now resumed sales with the second quarter of 2021 seeing a 10.8 percent increase in year-on-year shipments.
A previous analysis by IDC predicted that 5G device shipments would increase by 123 percent in 2021 compared to 2020, and by 2022, they would make up more than half of all smartphone shipments.
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