CIOs and IT professionals have varying levels of interest in the perceived, but still largely unproven, benefits of 5G. Some are more excited and anxious than others. However, before 5G enables an ascension of enterprise use cases and applications in a wireless context, the onus is on vendors and operators to deliver viable and more effective services.

If 5G merely provides higher bandwidth and capacity, it will be looked back on as a failed opportunity. Network operators, equipment and software vendors, and enterprises are taking a very different and more aspirational view of 5G than previous leaps in wireless network technology.

Features like mobile edge computing, network slicing, and low latency are central to this effort but not yet widely available. Enterprises are being increasingly targeted and before MWC Barcelona was cancelled due to concerns over exposure to the coronavirus, it would have undoubtedly been a recurring theme on stage and in discussions around the halls of the mobile industry’s largest and most important annual gathering.

“5G holds promise for the enterprise, but only in specific use cases in the near term,” said Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at AVOA. “While it is getting a lot of buzz right now, the practicality is that it needs time to deploy and normalize before the enterprise is able to leverage it. In the meantime, specific use cases may drive early adoption in places where alternatives are either not practical or possible.”

There are instances of early adopters in enterprise, but those are the exception more than the rule.

“I’m still very much on the fence with 5G. There is a lot of promise and hopefulness for those who need better bandwidth where there isn’t underlying infrastructure,” said Aaron Gette, CTO and partner at West Agile Labs. “It’s taking too long to materialize both in the device availability and network. Where 5G or pseudo 5G networks exist, it’s not the step up we’ve hoped for or needed.”

The potential features that get Gette most excited about 5G include peak data rates of 10 Gb/s, latency under a millisecond, a thousand-fold increase in bandwidth per radio unit, a hundred-fold jump in device connectivity per radio, 99.999% availability, truly ubiquitous coverage, a drastic reduction in network energy usage, and a significant leap in battery life for low power IoT devices.

Greg Meyers, CIO and chief digital officer at Syngenta, doesn’t expect 5G and its mission-critical features to be prevalent enough to architect things differently for another three to five years. “Longer term we would view 5G as a replacement to traditional WiFi, but in the short term we aren’t expecting any major changes to how we operate,” he said.

“In most enterprise contexts, 5G is probably less of a use case for internal uses in an enterprise than they are in a consumer context,” Meyers explained. “Most enterprise connectivity employee use is somewhat low in bandwidth intensity … The more exciting angle of 5G is in building customer applications that allow them to better use our products,” including mixed reality applications.

Crawford takes a somewhat more hopeful view on internal enterprise use of 5G, contending that it will open up new employee experiences that are not currently available with 4G LTE and WiFi. “Higher bandwidth for mobile applications that have access to more localized resources are key here. But all of this is just starting to roll out,” he said.

Rob High, VP and CTO at IBM Watson, told SDxCentral there’s still a lot of expectation around capabilities that can be provided by 5G and mobile edge computing in particular. “The higher up the C-suite you go, the more focus there is on the potential to unlock innovations in their business and to accelerate the transformation of their business,” he said.

For Gette, the more interesting 5G use cases center around the ability for the software and design agency’s products to deliver rich and more engaging customer experiences on mobile devices that would not be possible without 5G. This includes integrations with open data, IoT devices, and underlying data availability, he explained.

“I think the IT community will absolutely embrace a viable 5G solution. There is so much upside if or when it can be delivered,” Gette said. “5G should be the tipping point to a more mobile and highly connected workforce in or outside your four walls. Layering on VPNs, cloud security, [and] ID management to the connected devices on your mobile workforce becomes more cumbersome and inefficient without the bandwidth provided in 5G.”

West Agile Labs is currently working on multiple 5G projects and is developing digital experiences that 5G into account, he said. Other IT leaders are still working through how 5G might impact operations and pose new opportunities.

“Enterprise CIOs are largely looking at 5G, but have limited work happening around it currently,” Crawford said. “Much of that is due to a lack of access to the network providers. As the 5G networks broaden their deployments, I expect to see an increase of 5G experimentation.”