Over the past six months, Loup Ventures has been tracking US carrier comments related to 5G deployment along with the number of 5G cities launched and coverage within those cities.
Gene Munster for Loup Ventures:
Based on the most recent updates, we continue to believe that widespread US adoption of 5G, defined as 75% of the US population having consistent access to 5G, is still two years away (2022). This is about a year behind the general time table advertised by the US carriers.
While 5G will take longer to roll-out, we believe its impact will, over time (5 years), exceed expectations by enabling real-time cloud processing on mobile, game streaming, and other compute-intensive mobile use cases like autonomous driving, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, augmented reality, and countless IoT and smart home applications, to name a few.
The wild card in determining the pace of the 5G rollout is whether the carriers continue to turn on 5G antennas when they are added rather than installing antennas but holding off of activation until larger coverage areas can be turned on. Our expectations that broad 5G coverage will be available in 2022 assumes the current incremental rollout approach.
MacDailyNews Take: Yet again, this time with 5G, Apple’s iPhone will be well ahead of the times.