Total Telecom – WiFi is 5G’s biggest competitor
WiFi represents the biggest single competing technology to what will eventually become 5G, argued telecoms consultant Bengt Nordström on Wednesday.
Nordström, CEO of Swedish telecoms consultancy Northstream, noted that previous generations of mobile technology have had competing standards, such GSM versus CDMA, and LTE versus WiMAX, for example.
“With 5G, for the first time, we don’t have a competing technology standard,” he told Total Telecom during Mobile World Congress.
Except that 5G does have competition to a certain extent in the form of WiFi, he said.
“WiFi is capturing 70% of the data traffic coming from smartphones, and there are some markets where you can get by using WiFi quite well,” Nordström said.