Cell Phone Carriers Spending Billions To Drive Excitement Around 5G. Learn How This Will Affect Your Business.
Cell phone carriers are spending billions of dollars to make sure you and everybody you know are all excited about 5G. The benefits will be terrific – faster download times, more throughput, and much more reliable and pervasive connectivity. All to support an astonishing array of connected devices and services. No more “connection lost because of poor connectivity” just when you are expected to speak on the Zoom call. We already have, and will have much, much more of, smart cities, smart cars, smart offices, smart factories, smart roads, smart everything. More, smarter, better.
What Does The Advent Of 5G Mean For The Broader World Of Real Estate?
One of the curious features of the radio frequency spectrum that 5G utilizes is that it is different from what we have been using up until now. The wireless industry has effectively run out of the standard spectrum and the carriers have bought – for tens of billions of dollars– what is called millimeter-wave spectrum.
This spectrum behaves differently than the frequencies we currently use for cellular service. It can carry much more data at much faster speeds. Very good things. But the hops – the distance it can carry this data – are much shorter. So, what does this mean? Many more sites! How many? In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, points out that China is trouncing the US in 5G development, with almost 10 times (1 million versus 100,000) as many 5G base stations. This implies that to catch up to China, allowing for differences in population size, the US will need over 1 million new sites, roughly 3 times what we have today. For real estate owners that have properties that fit the basic requirements for cell sites – elevation, permitability, power, fiber and the like – this can only be a good thing. For carriers, this means a whole lot of new installations at a significant cost.
