5G still needs its ‘killer app’

At the start of 2022, most of the US still had yet to experience the promise of 5G.

That’s not necessarily because anything has gone wrong, though the rollout has faced its share of hiccups—it’s just that even three years after the first installations, the country remains in the early days of the next-gen network’s rollout.

5G coverage from the major carriers extends nearly nationwide, but not many can access the connection. As of January 2022, T-Mobile customers had an active 5G connection 35.4% of the time, per a report from OpenSignal, while AT&T and Verizon customers had one 16.5% and 9.5% of the time, respectively.

“We’ve been through the first step. What has just happened is we finally have a four-lane highway to drive on,” Tom Wheeler, a former FCC chairman, told Emerging Tech Brew.

But even beyond infrastructural issues, like limited availability, 5G faces another challenge: It still lacks a killer app, an essential and definitive application of the technology that could show consumers and businesses alike that 5G is worth embracing. A need-to-have app could further accelerate demand for 5G-enabled devices—in the US, 5G smartphone shipments grew to 91.1 million in 2021, per IDC estimates, up 173% from 33.4 million in 2020.

For example, the advent of 4G technology enabled live video streaming, refined the accuracy of geolocation-based apps like Google Maps and Uber, and allowed online mobile gaming, all from the comfort of a cell phone.

“We’re all trying to figure out, you know, that killer app,” Brian Danfield, vice president of commercial and 5G strategic planning at Verizon, told Emerging Tech Brew. “No one knew these other apps were going to exist when we were launching LTE.”

Danfield said that while there’s no definitive killer app yet, “it’s not all vapor and, ‘we’re gonna.’” He pointed to 5G-enabled smart-home tech and faster home broadband as examples of potentially game-changing tech that is available today.

“The important thing to recognize here is the 4G experience was smartphone applications looking for spectrum,” Wheeler said. “The 5G experience, thus far, has been spectrum looking for applications. I think that they’re coming. There is not the kind of demand-pull economics there was in the 4G environment.”

With low latency and high speeds that 5G boosters have promised, a number of use cases could, in theory, be vastly improved upon in the future:

• Augmented reality and virtual reality from gaming companies like Sony, which could use 5G to support immersive and persistent universes for players to meet, socialize, and play with each other. This could also apply to work-based metaverses, like those proposed by Meta and Microsoft.
• Smart city and mobility applications with low margins of error could be improved, like robotaxi fleets, while smart city tech like digital twins could be updated and referenced in real time.
• Remote operations, like robotic surgery, or tele-operation of heavy machinery, could allow doctors to perform operations remotely.

Zoom out: The success of 5G is something that may come with time, but could be closer than it seems. According to a report from Ericsson, 5G could be the dominant cellular connection by 2027, accelerating at a faster pace than 4G.

Monisha Ghosh, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, said that while 5G is rolling out rapidly—especially since we’ve been in a pandemic for nearly two years—the standard is “promising a lot.”

Ghosh added that while she doesn’t know what must-have apps may or may not emerge, she’s confident that eventually companies will create products that take advantage of the standard’s new capabilities.

“We will have to see whether it will deliver on all the promises. None of these technologies deliver everything they promise,”Ghosh said. “4G did not, and I’m pretty sure 5G will not, but it’ll definitely be a lot better than 4G was in terms of, not just throughput but also in latency."