Europe Lagging Behind on 5G: GSMA
Europe is in danger of falling behind North America, East Asia and the Gulf Cooperation Council nations in deploying 5G, GSMA warned in a report Wednesday. 5G is poised to become the “dominant mobile technology on the continent by 2026…
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and already accounts for the majority of connections in Germany and Switzerland,” while adoption rates in Denmark, Finland, Norway and the U.K. are in excess of 40%, the report said. However, GSMA warned that European providers could struggle to deploy 5G standalone (SA) service, which doesn’t rely on an LTE backbone to operate. As of September, 18 European operators had launched 5G SA, and 5G-advanced is “set to deliver new solutions for enterprises, enabling uplink and multicast services at better latency, increasing accuracy for extended reality applications and improving the reliability of AI,” GSMA said. “Unless key regulatory challenges that restrict investment capacity in the European sector are resolved, the increased adoption of these technologies in Europe will progress more slowly” than in other regions. “Europe is at a crossroads in its development of the digital infrastructure that its businesses and citizens will need to succeed,” said GSMA Chief Regulatory Officer John Giusti: “It is concerning to see it falling further and further behind other large markets around the world.”