Network World recently published their best guess at a timeline for 5G cellular deployment. As happens with all new technologies that make a big public splash, the actual deployment is likely to take a lot longer than what the public expects.

They show the timeline as follows:

• 2017 – Definition, specification, requirements, technology development and technology field tests
• 2019/20 – Formal specifications
• 2021 – Initial production service rollouts
• 2025 – Critical mass
• 2030+ – Phase-out of 4G infrastructure begins

There is nothing surprising about this timeline, and in the cellular world we saw something similar with the roll-out of both 3G and 4G and there is no reason to think that 5G will be introduced any faster. There are an incredible number of things that must come to bear before 5G can be widely available.

Just to be clear, this timeline is talking about the use of the 5G standard for cellular service, as opposed to the same 5G terminology that is being used to describe high-speed radio connections used to deliver broadband over short distances. The use of the term 5G is going to be confusing the public for years, until some point where we will need a different name for the two different technologies.

Like with any new technology, it will probably be fifteen years until there is equipment that incorporates the full 5G specification. We are just now finally seeing a full implementation of fully-compliant 4G electronics. This means that early 5G roll-outs will only implement a few of the new features of 5G. Just like with 4G we can then expect successive future 5G roll-outs as new features are introduced and the technology inches forward. We won’t go straight to 5G, but will work our way through 4.1G and 4.2G until we finally get to the full 5G specification.

Here are just a few of the things that have to happen before 5G cellular is widely deployed.

• Standards have to be completed. Some of the first generation standards will be completed by the end of this year, but that’s not the end of the standards process. There will be continued standards developed over the next few years that look at the practical issues of deploying the technology.
• Then equipment must be developed that meets the new standards. While many wireless companies are already working on this, it takes a while to go from lab prototype to mass production.
• True field trials are then needed. In the wireless world we have always seen that there is a big difference between the capabilities that can be tested in a lab versus the real performance that can be had in differing outdoor environments. Real field trials can’t proceed until there are finished deployments that are not prototypes that are then tested in many different environments.
• Then the cellular companies have to start deploying the equipment into the field. That means not only upgrading the many existing cell towers, but it’s going to mean deploying into smaller neighborhood cell sites. As I’ve written about recently, this means building a lot of new fiber and it means solving the problems of deploying small cell sites in neighborhoods. If we’ve learned anything from the recent attempt by the cell companies to deploy small 4G cell sites it’s that these two issues are going to be a major impediment to 5G deployment. Just paying for all of the needed fiber is a huge hurdle.
• One of the biggest challenges with a new cellular technology is introducing it into handsets. Handset makers will like the cachet of selling 5G, but the biggest issue with cellphones is battery power and it’s going to be costly and inefficient to deploy the more complicated 5G big-MIMO antennae in handsets. That’s going to make the first generation of 5G handsets expensive. This is always the catch-22 of a new cellular technology – cellphone makers don’t want to commit to making big volumes of more-expensive phones until customer can actually use the new technology, and the cellphone makers won’t deploy too much of the 5G technology until there are enough handsets in the world to use it. I’ve seen some speculation that this impasse could put a real hitch in 5G cellular deployment.

To a large degree the cellular industry it its own worst enemy. They have talked about 5G as the savior of all of our bandwidth problems, when we know that’s not true. Let’s not forget that when 4G was introduced fifteen years ago that the industry touted ubiquitous 100 Mbps cellphone connections – something that is still far above our capabilities today. One thing not shown on the timeline is the time when we finally get actual 5G capabilities on our cellphones. It’s likely to be 15 years from now, at about the time when we have shifted our attention to 6G.