5G: Show me the money! MWC-A showed that the industry is moving beyond hype and beginning to look at the complex trade-offs that are inherent in 5G deployment and economics. Brass tacks: who will pay? Will revenues cover costs? What deployment scenarios will drive and control costs? Can we capture incremental revenues? And do revenues for each niche accrue to the public network or is it an orthogonal, stand-alone opportunity as is much of the opportunity in industrial automation? Several vendors weighed in on this. Below we outline a few where we had in-depth discussions. We will address the Industrial opportunity in a following blog (and an upcoming Market Outlook report). 5G presents some technical and economic conundrums . . . NOKIA notes that the added technology cost of 5G in low and mid-bands is vastly smaller than the cost of new site acquisition – the only densification alternative for many LTE regions today. This means that 5G’s biggest near-term driver may be capacity growth and spectrum exhaust, in both new and existing radio bands. Nokia also showed early market data that indicates that 5G users consume roughly 3X more data than 4G users, while at the same time expecting […]