The implementation of 5G technology is not behind in Romania, but at the moment the main applicability is that of improving the capacity of the networks, said Valentin Popoviciu, vice-president of DIGI, at a specialized event on Friday.
"Don't worry, that's the answer, because actually 5G is a development of the 4G, actually. Why is that, when we did talk about frequencies available for the 5G at the European level, at the US level? Well, I think the operators actually needed the additional spectrum to support the data traffic growth that we're all seeing right now. The year-on-year data traffic growth is over 25%. If the traffic per SIM was around 3-5 GB a few years ago, we are now at 15 GB per month in Romania and the same is the case in Spain, for example. Basically, the traffic is growing exponentially faster and faster and then the adoption of technologies that also use the new spectrum, such as 5G, with 700 and 3500 MHz spectrum is important to support future evolution," said Valentin Popoviciu, at the International Day of Telecommunications and the Information Society, an event organized by the Digital Transformation Council.
He stated that 5G has also brought a technological change that enables future applications such as zero delay communication, IoT, connecting millions of devices on a large scale, but their adoption is still not taking place significantly at the business level.
"The implementation of 5G is not behind. Perhaps in other countries, greater coverage of 5G has been implemented than in Romania or in Europe, but the only applicability in the whole world is enhance broadband, i.e. more capacity for network operators and for customers. As long as we have a very good quality for the 4G network in Romania and serve the existing traffic, 5G comes as an addition to the traffic capacity and for which we only now see a need. Moreover, we as an operator will probably do 5G this year in the entire urban environment in Romania. We have implemented more than 2000 out of 3000 base stations in the urban environment. So we are basically there. And the other operators also have similar projects. And why the urban environment? Because there is a higher demand for traffic and because the density of customers is higher. On the other hand, from the perspective of business applications, we still don't see an evolution, at least not in Romania, and also in the other European countries, but it will come," said Valentin Popoviciu.
He mentioned that 5G will cover all bands available to operators in the future.
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