The Road To 5G Leads The Way To Diversification

There is a unique power in technology that encourages creativity and transforms people's lives, businesses and society. Cellular, fixed broadband, and wireless technologies are all essential for helping businesses of all sizes keep things running remotely.

Cellular networks that make this possible are underpinned by technology that emerged from a lengthy and collaborative development process driven to a great extent by inventive private companies.

This collaboration is key to developing the connectivity solutions that we are relying on more than ever today, and it will be key for enabling future innovation to bring us even closer together.

The importance of collaboration was also highlighted by His Highness King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud as the kingdom assumed the 2020 G20 presidency. The summit aims to harness the power of collaboration to forge mutually beneficial solutions, face challenges and create opportunities.

Saudi Arabia is driven by aspirations to leverage innovation and shared learning to build a better life for its people. Innovation is a key part of its Vision 2030—a futuristic vision that will be realized through nextgeneration technologies.

From a mobile data traffic point of view, the Middle East and Africa's growth forecast is the highest globally at a rate of nine times growth, with the average data consumed per smartphone expected to reach 23GB per month in 2025.

How will service providers manage a massive increase in mobile data traffic and address the growing complexity of the network? By deploying the best technology for the job—and that's 5G.

The region's ICT industry has never seen anything like the journey to 5G. MENA is expected to reach 80 million 5G subscriptions by 2025, 5G presents an incredible opportunity for service providers to reap the rewards of new use cases and offer services that generate revenue growth.

Commercial 5G deployments with leading service providers took place during 2019 and 5G subscriptions have already surpassed 500,000 subscribers, mainly in the Gulf countries. Now is the time for service providers to use their market-leading technologies to develop solutions that empower people and businesses.

The kingdom has commercially deployed 5G to enhance the digital lives of people, enterprises, and industries. Enhanced mobile broadband is the first large-scale global use case for 5G, which is a key factor to remember as it drives the next wave of productivity within the ICT sector.

The shift to 5G will bring enhanced mobile broadband to data-hungry subscribers across Saudi Arabia with huge speed and low-latency changes in on-the-go user experiences such as streaming, downloading, gaming, infotainment, and interactivity. Upgrading to 5G will also bring rapid relief to consumers suffering from capacity constraints in their networks.

5G will introduce new capabilities that will allow operators to develop new use cases, applications, services and revenue streams, towards consumer, enterprise and different industries and markets. However, for the full 5G potential, large-scale rollout and to achieve long-term success, two main areas need to be addressed: spectrum availability and use-case development.

Though 5G opportunities are substantial, they do not come without their challenges. Mobile service providers need considerable support from regulators to carve out enough spectrum in existing mid- and low bands. On the other hand, high band and mmWave spectrum is needed for addressing ultra-low latency cases like automation, Augmented Reality (AR) and remote monitoring.

An abundance of possibilities that were once only things of science fiction are now within reach for us.