The US/EU policy divide over 5G

Next month, a 5G Action Plan – informed in no small part by the European telecommunications industry’s 5G Manifesto – will be unveiled by Brussels

A leaked draft communication from the Commission to the Parliament, Council and other EU institutions suggests the Commission will be following it to the letter, although the head of the Digital Single Market initiative, Gunther Oettinger has said he doesn’t necessarily agree with every sentence of it – although PolicyTracker is still not clear on the sentences he doesn’t like.

What we have learned, however, is that co-investment is expected to play a big role in the roll-out of infrastructure. We don’t know if this means co-investment between telcos, or public private partnerships, although the latter is definitely on the table.

So, while a unifying theory of 5G eludes the best minds in the industry, politicians in both the US and Europe are busy making policy to support its eventual launch, the only way they know how. 

In the US, the FCC wants to see a thousand flowers bloom in the acres of spectrum freed up for the purpose of experimentation. In Europe, a more corporatist approach seems to be winning the day. So it’s much the same way as it was with 4G. 

This time, however, the Commission has said it won’t have a march stolen on it by the US, although you could be forgiven for thinking this has already happened, with all that newly-freed spectrum and Verizon’s recent announcement that it has come up with the first working set of 5G specifications.

But perhaps the Commission should not worry too much that Verizon has released a very general set of standards that could arguably be more about fixed 5G networks than mobile. Even if it does end up as part of the eventual 3GPP standard, previous generations of mobile, too, are a hotchpotch of proprietary and open standards – can we expect it to be any different this time around?

And hopefully FCC chief Tom Wheeler is right when he says 5G is not a zero-sum game. There’s far too much at stake to let this laudable project be taken over by inter-regional squabbling and the quest for profit.