Increase in 5G adoption could provide €42bn boost to State

Increased adoption of 5G technology could lead to a €42 billion economic boost for the State, according to a new forecast from Ericsson.

The company, one of the main 5G technology providers along with Huawei and Nokia, predicts a significant rise in the number of subscribers worldwide in the coming years with Ireland leading the way in promoting growth.

In a new forecast, Ericsson said it expects there to be over 190 million 5G subscriptions globally by the end of 2020 and some 2.8 billion by the end of 2025.

The company, which employs more than 1,000 employees who are working on next generation technology at its research and development centre in Athlone, said the State was primed to take a leading role in 5G growth in a move that would provide a sizeable boost to the national economy.

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Value

"This pandemic has highlighted the true value of connectivity and has shown just how important leading digital infrastructure is to the future of Ireland. As a platform for innovation, 5G presents a great opportunity to not only improve critical national infrastructure but also transform new industries with increases in productivity and efficiency," said John Griffin, head of Ericsson Ireland.

“The potential for 5G is very exciting and it could add as much as €42 billion to Ireland’s GDP by 2030, an important consideration in the country’s economic recovery post Covid-19,” he added.

Ericsson’s calculation is based on an increment to growth from expansive mobile of 0.25 per cent per annum.

Vodafone was the first Irish mobile provider to roll-out 5G here albeit on a limited scale so far. It launched the State's first 5G network last August. Eir quickly followed suit while Three has said it will introduce its services sometime in 2020.

Reliability

The technology is the next generation of mobile connectivity which succeeds the current 4G and older 3G systems. It brings faster speeds of over 1,000 megabits per second, as well as increased security, reliability and lower latency.

According to Ericsson’s report, fixed wireless access (FWA) connections, which provide internet access to homes using mobile technology rather than fixed lines, are forecast to reach 160 million by the end of 2025. This is equivalent to a quarter of all global mobile network data traffic.

At the end of 2019, global FWA data traffic was estimated to have been around 15 percent of the global total. It is now projected to grow nearly eightfold to reach 53 exabytes in 2025.