Airtel's Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Gopal Vittal, has commented on his opinion on the 5G hype. Vittal says that 5G has not been able to live up to the buzz, and has not been as transformative as it was marketed out to be. The Airtel executive says that neither has 5G disrupted business models or increased revenue, something that telcos hoped would happen, after adoption of 5G.
In Airtel's latest earnings call, Vittal said, " One of the pain points in the telecom world across the globe is that 5G has not lived its promise of what it was meant to. The primary use case of 5G is only speed and now it is just a more efficient way of producing the same gigabyte, it is a more efficient way of doing it, but it has not led to any monetisation, anywhere in the world."
Even after billions of dollars of investment, telcos haven't really found game-changing ways to monetise 5G. The hype around 5G-promised new services, like augmented reality, remote surgery, and reliable low-latency communications, did not scale or gain mass-market adoption.
The only way that telcos have been able to monetise is by increasing rates of recharge and postpaid plans int he garb of 5G. "There have been some experiments and some moves on standalone through slicing in some markets like the US and so on, but it is too small and to few and far between to make a meaningful difference to the overall monetisation that was promised," added Vittal.
While 5G does offer much faster speeds and more efficient data delivery compared to 4G, the primary consumer-visible benefit has just been speed. The technical efficiency allows telcos to deliver more data at a lower cost, but this has not led to new, widely adopted services or significant incremental revenue.
