The lack of full-fledged 5G threatens to stall European innovation, keeping the bloc’s industry stuck in the slow lane while other parts of the world speed ahead. Industry officials warn the lag is aggravating Europe’s competitive decline and the bloc’s ability to attract investment.
“At the start of the 5G cycle, vendors and operators put up huge promises about how it is going to enable robotic surgeries, autonomous cars, all this different stuff,” but none of that can be delivered until standalone architecture is in place, said Luke Kehoe, an industry analyst at connectivity intelligence firm Ookla.
European companies are missing out on faster speeds and game-changing capabilities that were supposed to take the industry to the next level — making factories smarter and more automated. Ultra-connected, robot-packed plants are still a work in progress, partly because operators haven’t fully upgraded networks, especially right down to the core parts, to the full 5G standard.
Trade association Connect Europe estimated that only 40 percent of the European population was covered by 5G standalone by the end of last year, behind North America (91 percent) and Asia-Pacific (45 percent).
But Ookla, which is behind the online tool Speedtest, crunched the data and found that fewer than 2 percent of Europeans are actually connecting to it today.
“We did see very, very clearly that Europe is markedly behind,” Kehoe said.
