75% of end-user organizations willing to pay more for 5G mobile capabilities: Gartner

Market research firm Gartner said that 5G is still a few years away but several organizations worldwide have already shown willingness to embrace it.

Gartner said that 75 percent of end-user organizations would be willing to pay more for 5G mobile capabilities and only 24 percent of the survey's respondents would be unwilling to pay more for 5G than for 4G.

"Those in the telecom industry are more likely to be prepared to pay more than those in other industries," said Sylvain Fabre, research director at Gartner. Fabre added, "End-user organizations in the manufacturing, services and government sectors, for example, are less likely to be willing to pay a premium for 5G than telecom companies, which are willing to pay a 5G premium for their internal use."

According to the survey, most of the respondents think their organizations would be prepared to pay more for 5G, few (8 percent) expect 5G to deliver cost savings or increase revenues. 5G is seen principally as a network evolution (59 percent), and only secondarily as an enabler of digital business (37 percent). The survey also found that respondents from the telecom sector are less persuaded than those in other industries that 5G will be a revenue enhancer.

"They tend to see 5G migration as a matter of gradual and inevitable infrastructural change, rather than as an opportunity to generate new revenue," Fabre added.

A majority of respondents (57 percent) believe that their organization's main intention to use 5G is to drive Internet of Things (IoT) communication, making the technology the most popular use-case.

"This finding is surprising, as the number of deployed 'things' that need cellular connectivity won't exceed the capacity of existing cellular IoT technologies before 2023 in most regions," noted Fabre.

A large majority of the respondents (84 per cent) believe that 5G will be widely available by 2020 but Gartner has predicted that only 3 percent of the world's network-owning mobile communication service providers (CSPs) will have launched it commercially by 2020.