2019 will see islands of 5G coverage starting to be  rolled out, Telenor SVP says

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Hakon Bruaset Kjol, Senior VP – Partner and External Relations Asia of Telenor Group, speaks during Fireside Chat on Day 2 of CNBC East Tech West at LN Garden Hotel Nansha Guangzhou on November 28, 2018 in Nansha, Guangzhou, China

“What is going to be much more interesting when it comes to 5G is the use cases that 5G will support … It will be more of a business-to-business type of network, rather than a consumer network to begin with,” he explained.

“In 2019, we expect that you will see islands of 5G coverage, which is going to be much more for piloting and testing. Bringing the network to a larger group of users so we can start to see what kind of services will actually go on top of this network,” he said.

The advantage of 5G is that it will provide greater bandwidth and speed compared to previous generations — and it has lower latency, which means it is suitable for heavy data transfers.

Bruaset Kjol thinks the first cases we will see of 5G will predominantly be in smart cities and autonomous vehicles, “because autonomous vehicles need low latency to be safe,” he explained.

He also expects use cases of 5G to be rolled out within health care, “there is a lot of health care that requires remote access and it would be possible to do real transfers using this network in remote areas,” he said.

“5G will also be very important within industrial manufacturing, which requires robotics where you need productivity,” he added.