First to 5G? For mobile phone users, the race is sort of useless

Pop the champagne and polish the medals, for the competitors to be very first to 5G has actually stated its victors.

UK provider EE switched on the very first 5G network in its house nation on Thursday, beating its competitors to the punch. EE signs up with Verizon and Swisscom as “winners” of the race to being the very first in a provided nation to provide clients the next generation of network speeds.

5G is the follower to 4G, and its greater speeds will allow brand-new experiences, from self-governing vehicles to perfectly incorporated wise houses. For a handful of early adopters out there, EE’s 5G switch-on will bring the very first taste of whizzier, much-hyped mobile web.

But it’s vital to acknowledge that it will simply be a handful. Initially, 5G will just be offered in the busiest and most main parts of the little number of launch cities. The remainder of the time, you’ll be linked to the great old-fashioned 4G network.

So it might deserve holding back on updating to a 5G phone agreement for now.

Here lies the uncomfortable duration when 5G changes from unrelenting buzz to truth. It’s a point of pride for a network to turn on 5G initially, and you’ll hear a provider trumpet the claim in numerous commercials. But it does not always show when you’ll get 5G or the supreme strength of your network’s 5G offering. Keep in mind, the market commemorates lots of 5G turning points, even if the majority of typical phone users could not care less.

Kester Mann, expert at CCS Insight, does not believe EE being very first to pull the 5G trigger spells doom for other networks. In the UK, Vodafone is due to release its own 5G network at the start of July, with O2 and Three set to follow by the end of the year — a reasonably little distinction. “If anything, it gives a bit of an opportunity to see how it’s been positioned to market and use that early learning to inform their own propositions,” he stated in an interview.

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But that’s not to say there aren’t also good reasons to be in the pole position.

“Being first is really important to maintain leadership when you have a technology transition,” said Cristiano Amon, president of Qualcomm in an interview with CNET at EE’s launch event in London last week.

“You’re always going to have first-mover advantage, not only because you’re going to get the learnings and the technology, but you actually can be faster to bring it to maturity, understand the new use cases and actually provide the value proposition to your customers.”

And it’s not just the networks that could be affected by being early to 5G — the hierarchy of device manufacturers could also be switched up. 5G is unusual in that it’s the first generation of new network technology in which the ecosystem of devices is mature ahead of the carriers, said Amon.

Several prominent Chinese manufacturers, including Xiaomi, Oppo and OnePlus, have timed their arrival or expansion in Europe to coincide with the advent of 5G. Of the current top manufacturers in the UK (Apple, Samsung and Huawei), only Samsung is in a position to compete with the newbies, with the Galaxy S10 5G variant available on Vodafone and EE.

Apple is conspicuous by its absence from the range of devices offered at launch and may not have a 5G phone of its own until 2020. Meanwhile Huawei’s devices were pulled — or put on “pause” — by EE and Vodafone at the last moment due to uncertainty over its future relationship with Google’s Android.

So while you might be trying to decide between a Huawei and Samsung phone for your next upgrade, in a year or so you could be weighing up an Oppo or Xiaomi device instead. “You could certainly argue that it’s an opportunity for some of these new device makers to make a bit of an impact on the market,” said Mann.

Don’t worry, there will be plenty of time to make up your mind. Mann estimates networks won’t be providing widespread 5G coverage to hundreds of thousands of people until the end of 2020. “It’s definitely going to be a long process,” he said.