- South Korea, Japan and China are all accelerating their own spectrum auctions.
- It’s really critical, as a country, to be early at rolling out the 5G networks, Ekholm says.
- Mid-band spectrum auction in US is expected to take place in December 2021, with private operation of services likely to begin in 2022.
Bengaluru: The US will struggle to be on the forefront of building nationwide 5G coverage as it lacks spectrum and mid-band spectrum, Ericsson chief said.
Speaking to McKinsey & Company, Borje Ekholm, President and CEO of telecom giant Ericsson, said that it’s interesting to see, globally, what has happened with the rollouts of 5G.
The US has been faster at moving ahead in millimetre (high frequency) spectrum for 5G but it lagged in mid-band spectrum allocation.
The mid-band spectrum in the US is heavily utilised by government services like the military and has prevented commercial operators from accessing that spectrum and moving forward with wider 5G deployments.
The White House has officially handed off the 3,450Mhz to 3,550Mhz spectrum to the FCC for an auction that will allow private operators to access midband spectrum.
The auction is expected to take place in December 2021, with private operation of services likely to begin in 2022.
“Europe has decided to slow down, with several countries delaying the spectrum auctions. And we see operators being, in general, very cautious. In northeast Asia, it’s completely the opposite. There, South Korea, Japan, and China are all accelerating their own spectrum auctions,” he said.
Platform for innovation
“If we look 12 months out, we will, for sure, see China have fairly good coverage of a 5G network, well ahead of pretty much everyone except South Korea and Switzerland,” he said.
“When we were rolling out 4G, everyone was asking us, what’s the killer app for 4G? Why do you need 4G? The interesting thing is that both the US and China were very early in rolling out 4G,” he said.
In a way, he said that created a platform for innovation in the app economy, e-commerce migrated very quickly away from laptops to mobile devices and streaming went to mobile devices too.
A lot of the social networks are today mostly done over “mobile”.
“So it’s not a surprise that you see almost all of the consumer-app economy being dominated by the US and by China. And I fear early leaders can do the same thing in 5G. So it’s really critical, as a country, to be early at rolling out the 5G networks as well,” Ekholm said.