A new report by Bain finds that over the next five years, 5G will enter the mainstream, gaining popularity through accelerated deployment by telcos, affordable handsets, and other major uses for the technology. According to the analysis, which focuses on how AI can help telcos realize this opportunity, the adoption of 5G is expected to be faster in 2018 to 2025 than the adoption of 4G in the seven years following its market debut in 2009.

Amid these growth assessments is cautionary news. A new Oracle survey reveals that the vast majority of CSPs planning to launch 5G networks within the year still don’t have the technology needed to monetize these offerings. Industries are also examining how 5G wireless cellular connectivity impacts their businesses, with findings in a new whitepaper from 5G Americas on the benefits and challenges of enterprise 5G adoption.

5G advancements provide a link for us between trends research and reality. Verizon, Samsung and Qualcomm reached upload speeds of 711 Mbps in a lab trial using aggregated bands of mmWave spectrum, in an exploration to push the limits of 5G technology (and make uploading data much, much faster). Nokia announced a fixed wireless access breakthrough that could push wireless broadband capacity by increases of five to ten times. In other Nokia news, Nokia and MediaTek have successfully aggregated 5G standalone spectrum, a breakthrough that will enable communication service providers to deliver higher throughputs and better coverage to more customers.

Network Evolution News

Network evolution news bubbled with Wi-Fi 6 headlines this month. Eighty-three percent of service providers, equipment manufacturers, and enterprises worldwide will have deployed Wi-Fi 6/6E or plan to do so before the end of 2022, a key finding from the latest cross-industry survey by the Wireless Broadband Alliance. ABI Research expects that Wi-Fi 6 will lead the enterprise Wi-Fi market in 2023 as Wi-Fi 6 enterprise access point shipments increase from 4.3 million in 2021 to 13.4 million in 2026, at a CAGR of 25 percent.

New research commissioned by Quortus reveals that nearly two-thirds of US and European enterprises suffer reduced productivity and efficiency at the hands of weak and unreliable connectivity—highlighting the growing awareness, interest in, and appetite for private networks in enterprise IT.

Colt Technology Services has launched a new 400GE service across Europe and Asia Pacific, making it the first telco to offer access to the technology in this region.

Together, Vodafone, Cisco, Nokia, Benu Networks, and Casa Systems have successfully tested a system that will make it quicker and easier to deliver faster fixed broadband services to new and existing customers across Europe.

In another industry first, Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson have demonstrated a world-first implementation of 5G end-to-end enterprise network slicing combining network exposure capabilities for slice-specific service in video production. This will enable dynamic QoS updates adapted to the performance requirements of the application.

To enable smarter, data-driven networks that can learn and improve, Ericsson announced the launch of its Network Data Analytics Function solution, which enables service providers to use data generated by the network to flag and fix problems, thus improving service quality.

Transformation, Innovation and Leaderboard News

The Industrial Edge continues to be a hot topic for industrial and manufacturing firms when it comes to understanding the performance of their equipment and production