However, other countries have been less enthusiastic about ousting China from their 5G markets, given the price and quality of China’s offerings. Germany has refused to ban Huawei, despite U.S. threats to cut off intelligence-sharing, and the United Kingdom appears likely to take the same approach. Both Germany and the United Kingdom have pushed back on U.S. claims that Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications companies represent an unacceptable risk to national security, claiming that their security organizations could take measures to limit vulnerabilities in their networks. India and Italy have also expressed their hesitancy to exclude Huawei products from their 5G roll-outs, and in recent months New Zealand has eased its initial hard stance against China. In the coming months, Europe will continue to be a battleground for the future of 5G, as it represents one of Huawei’s largest markets as well as a major source of U.S. allies. This fight also suggests a more concerning trajectory for the rest of the world’s approach to 5G - in particular, developing countries that are more sensitive to cost will find the Chinese 5G price-point difficult to turn down, especially when the offer is sweetened with infrastructure and project-financing incentives like the Belt and Road Initiative.
United States
Private Sector
The telecommunications industry is organizing the effort to develop and deploy 5G in the United States, with increasing support from the U.S. government. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile are all developing their own 5G networks and 5G devices, each with their own strategy and method. Verizon and AT&T are focused on developing high-band mmWave networks and are in the process of deploying small cells in various test cities for mobile and fixed applications, Sprint is taking a joint approach of mmWave and mid-band spectrum to build out its network, and T-Mobile is focused on mmWave and low-band spectrum. While all carriers are looking into sub-6 spectrum options to some extent, they are inherently restricted by smaller amount of bandwidth available in sub-6 relative to the hundreds of GHz available in mmWave, and this constraint is exacerbated by the fact that the U.S. government owns large portions of the sub-6 spectrum. Carriers are piggy-backing off of existing 4G infrastructure, but those focused on mmWave will have to build out additional infrastructure to ensure uninterrupted connectivity through a dense network of base stations. There is debate over whether some of the networks deployed have qualified as true 5G, and there is intense competition between these providers to roll out 5G networks within the next few years. 5G development is being overseen by 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), the standards body that also oversaw the development of 3G UMTS (including HSPA) and 4G LTE standards.
Despite messaging from various marketing initiatives in the United States, very little U.S. territory has seen deployment of 5G infrastructure that can deliver 1 Gbps or even 100 Mbps service at the edges of coverage. Whereas LTE deployment resulted in 10x end user speed improvement across large parts of the United States, carriers to date have not demonstrated deployment capability that would deliver high speeds to large parts of the U.S. population.
