At Canto’s 36th Annual Conference last week, a panel of experts gathered to discuss “How 5G can be rolled out in the Caribbean.”
There weren’t many revelations coming from a panel composed of vendors, regulators and stakeholders for a discussion that will, ultimately, be decided by governments and regional telecommunications companies, neither of which were represented in the discussion.
What did emerge were some proven best practices and the results of some limited deployments in the Latin American region. According to Dr Mohamed Madkour, VP global wireless marketing and solutions Huawei Technologies, 5G has not started big in Latin America.
In the Caribbean, Liberty Puerto Rico can point to its successful deployment over the last year (
https://j.mp/2TSJwQn - https://technewstt.com/bd1311-5g-global-deployment/), but most regional telecommunications operations are still recouping the cost of their 4G LTE network upgrades.
China has embraced 5G; particularly for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The wireless technology is being actively used there in more than 20 industries in over 1,000 projects with a collective value of US$1.2 billion.
China is finding, according to Madkour, productivity enhancements in industry of 20 per cent and the country has reduced the number of workers labouring underground.
Huawei has built 170 5G networks globally.
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“Those who are adopting 5G want to raise their profile on the technology map,” Madkour said.
“Investing in 4G is the best way to lower investment barriers to adopting 5G, that way in two to three years you can just turn on the 5G switch.
“You cannot cultivate good 5G until you have good soil of 4G, you have to have the anchor of 5G and you have to be able to aggregate 4G and 5G [bandwidth].
“Every 4G dollar is a 5G dollar.”
Ericsson has built 93 live 5G networks, said Fabian Monge Muñoz, head of networks and managed services sales for the company.
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Ericsson has connected 580 million subscribers to 5G, and expects to have 3.5 billion by 2026.
“The Caribbean has a 40 per cent penetration of 4G, which makes for a potentially robust foundation,” said Muñoz.
“A year ago for the Caribbean and Latin America, Ericsson was estimating 13 percent growth in 5G traffic by 2025, but now we are seeing regulators setting out midband and highband frequencies and adoption should be faster.”
Ericsson estimates that there will be 7.7 per cent economic growth directly attributable to introducing 5G in the region.
“The faster we introduce the technology in the Caribbean, the faster we can bridge that technology gap,” he said.
Ericsson believes the new technologies that 5G will enable will act
