Report: Consumer understanding of 5G benefits needed
May 15, 2019
A report from the User Experience Strategies (UXS) group at Strategy Analytics investigating why consumers should shift to 5G, has found that while 5G will produce upgraded speeds with improvements focused on spectrum/channel optimisation and high frequency usage, consumers need more understanding of the benefits of 5G to overcome consumer scepticism to adoption.
Key report findings:
- Consumers express strong interest in 5G overall once the benefits and use cases are explained to them.
- Consumers are particularly interested in 5G to replace their fixed home broadband as long as it can deliver the anticipated improvement in speed over 4G, but only if it is reliable and cheaper.
- Other use cases of highest interest are those that improve safety or address current pain-points such as the ability to get connection in congested areas or in fast-moving vehicles.
“Consumer satisfaction with the current 4G mobile data experience is high,” advised Kevin Nolan, VP User Experience Practice and report author. “Therefore, operators must create compelling, differentiated 5G experiences if they want to motivate customers to adopt 5G plans.”
“Moreover, while understanding of the benefits of 5G is currently extremely limited, consumers already have concerns about 5G: largely centred around when 5G will be available where they live, how much more it will cost and what its impact will be on battery life. These questions must all be addressed to ensure mass adoption.”
“Specific effort must be made to address consumer scepticism around the need for 5G,” added Chris Schreiner, Director, Syndicated Research UXIP. “Since the technology evolution is about more than simply ‘faster upload and download speeds’, consumers need more convincing that 5G is not simply just a marketing ploy to raise prices. Operators must educate consumers on the most compelling aspects of 5G and promote features such as the ability to solve existing pain points, especially connectivity improvements in high network demand situations.”