Rewheel/research

2018 capacity utilization and 5G capacity potential of mobile operator existing macro cell site grids

October 2019

When will EU28 & OECD operators run out of 4G capacity and how many more gigabytes per subscriber per month can they carry with 5G? A Rewheel research PRO-study of 143 European, US, Canadian, Japanese, Korean and Australian operators

Elisa Finland is currently the operator with the highest 5G capacity potential in the world ~342 GB/subscriber/month.
3 UK (part of Hutchison) is the operator with the highest 5G capacity potential in the United Kingdom. 3 UK has very substantial 5G capacity potential of ~240 GB/subscriber/month. In August 2019 3 UK declared that ’5G is in the house’ and announched the launch of a 5G home broadband plan with truly unlimited data and fibre-like ultrafast speeds for £35 per month.
Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Swiss and Hutchison 3 European operators have, currently, the highest 5G capacity potential.
US operators had the highest 4G capacity utilization levels in 2018 (i.e. most congested macro site mobile networks).
Play Poland was the European operator with the highest 4G capacity utilization in 2018, 63% up from 55% in 2017.
Canadian and US operators (e.g. Telus, Verizon, T-Mobile) were among the operators with the least dense macro site grids.
Finland was once again the country with the highest mobile data usage per capita. 30.2 gigabytes/person/month in 2018.
Spectrum usage in 2018 in Canada, a de-facto network duopoly , was among the lowest in EU28 & OECD markets (14x lower than in Finland).
Canadian mobile data prices are among the highest in EU28 & OECD and mobile data usage among the lowest - is mobile spectrum being efficiently used in Canada?

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