DECEMBER 12 2019
A penny for your thought- 5G arriving in Luxembourg
In the late 90ies, beginning of the new century every European Telco conference featured at least one panel with experts discussing the digital gap or digital divide: the uneven distribution in the access to, use of, or impact of ICT across the globe. Europe was putting cabling into the ground to provide households with ADSL where phone cables where still travelling across streets and providing access to digital television where forests of terrestrial antennas where brand marking cities, … mostly in Southern Europe.20 years later with the arrival of 5G technology we could have done without the digging and the numerous workplaces. But that’s what ICT is about: the tireless seeking for ultra-high bandwidth and low latency “connectivity”. But 5G is much more than that. At the Luxembourg 5G conference, experts showed implemented examples of a game changing technology. Peak download speeds as high as 20 gigabits-per-second will enable specialized tasks like remote precision medicine, connected cars, virtual and augmented reality, and a wide array of internet of things (IoT).
What looks already like a success in Asia (mainly South Korea), Australia and the US,- where Internet is provided at affordable costs to households with minimal retention for cable operators,- 5G is still up in the air for most of Europe.
In Luxembourg, 5G licenses will be provided to operators no later than mid-2020, according to stakeholders from the Luxembourg Government. How the granting of the licenses will occur, which spectrum will be used and what applications operators will offer to whom, is not yet clear. Two things are certain though: Luxembourg is determined to be a pioneer for the introduction of 5G and it will introduce the game changing technology in 2020.
But here comes the downside or… divide … I will have to spend long hours again to negotiate with my teenage kids requesting to trade their only-one-year-old irrationally expensive 800+.- EUR smart phones for 5G-enabled devices. A penny for your thought! contact@apollo.lu …
… and a happy 2020!
