Mobile communications
5G network: Western Europe is catching up internationally
The fifth generation of mobile communications (5G) offers significantly higher data transfer rates than the previous standards UMTS (3G) and LTE (4G) (symbol image). Photo
© Boris Roessler/dpa
The USA and Northeast Asia are way ahead when it comes to the use of 5G mobile communications. Western Europe’s race to catch up could pick up speed if the user experience in one frequency band were better.
The number of 5G mobile phone contracts is increasing in all regions worldwide and will reach 1.7 billion by the end of the first quarter of 2024.
However, the Ericsson Mobility Report, published in Stockholm on Wednesday, predicts a neck-and-neck race and a change in the top positions in the future. By 2029, the study expects Western Europe to catch up to second place in 5G usage, with 86 percent of all contracts, just behind North America (90 percent) and the Gulf Cooperation Council region (89 percent). Northeast Asia is in danger of falling behind with 80 percent.
What does 5G offer?
The fifth generation of mobile communications (5G) offers significantly higher data transfer rates than the previous standards UMTS (3G) and LTE (4G). In addition, the delay time (latency) is reduced, which makes 5G usable for real-time applications such as remotely controlling machines or telemedicine applications. 5G technology is also better suited than 3G or 4G for bringing large crowds of people online, such as visitors to a large football stadium.
According to Ericsson, the boom in 5G usage in Western Europe is being held back by a technical shortcoming. The frequencies below 1 gigahertz that have been widely used so far enable large-scale coverage, but cannot keep up with the mid-spectrum frequencies around 3.5 GHz in terms of capacity and speed. This reduces the user experience, as too much time passes between the user’s “click” and the time at which a video is played or a web page is loaded.
Ericsson is seeing technical advances in smartphones. The end devices increasingly support 5G Standalone, the full-fledged version of 5G. Smartphones from Android 13 and Apple iPhones from iOS 17 also support what is known as network slicing. This technology virtually divides a physical network into different parts (slices) in order to give priority to certain services such as the transmission of videos on the network.