The march toward 5G continues what has been a natural progression of cellular technology innovation dating back to the early 1980s. But the economic impact stuffed into the promise of 5G is making this evolution the most significant.

We are just over a year into actual 5G deployments and so far these networks have made substantial progress. Industry trade group GSMA recently proclaimed that 5G networks were live in 24 countries. Some operators even claim “nationwide” 5G coverage, which is impressive unless you look at just what “nationwide” means and how wide a country really is.

Industry trade group 5G Americas cited an Omdia report that counted more than 17.7 million 5G connections at the end of last year, including a 329% surge during the final three months of 2019. Omdia is also predicting 91 million 5G connections by the end of 2020.

Despite its nascent status, the 5G ecosystem is already swimming in financial might. That same GSMA report predicts 5G technology will add $2.2 trillion to the global economy over the next 15 years. And operators are expected to spend more than $1 trillion on mobile capex between 2020 and 2025, with 80% of that spend directed at their 5G networks.

While past technology evolutions primarily targeted the consumer market, the spend and return on 5G has a larger focus on the broader enterprise space. This includes connecting not just traditional enterprise workers and their respective mobile devices but connecting all electronic devices. This will involve a broader push toward edge deployments that can serve what are expected to be billions of connected and IoT devices.

“With greater reliability and data speeds that will surpass those of 4G networks, a combination of 5G and local edge compute will pave the way for new business value,” ABI Research noted in a recent report, citing benefits gained from agility and process optimization; better and more efficient quality assurance and productivity improvement. That report predicts the market for 5G cellular connections in manufacturing could reach nearly $11 billion by 2030.

Juniper Research predicts that 5G IoT connections will surge from $525 million in operator-billed revenues this year to $8 billion in 2024. It cited the automotive and smart cities sectors as key growth drivers for 5G adoption over the next 5 years.

“We believe that only 5% of 5G connections will be attributable to the IoT, but as these are newly enabled connections, operators must view them as essential to securing a return on their 5G investment,” explained research author Andrew Knighton.

This opportunity will also be a boon for vendors that will be supplying most of the hardware for these deployments, though the real benefit will be for those that can also adapt those platforms to take advantage of true 5G capabilities.

“The implications for solution providers such as Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, and ZTE are that they must enhance their ‘value add’ by complementing their deep technical expertise with business expertise including vertical industry knowledge, new functional expertise (sales, marketing, and accounting), and solution design and consulting expertise tailored at niche use cases,” said Don Alusha, senior analyst at ABI Research.

These vendors are also going to benefit from the need for a significantly larger number of cell sites to serve 5G networks. This will include the need to bolster both traditional outdoor networks and the growing push by enterprises to deploy 5G services within their campus environments.

Research firm Omdia predicts the global 5G radio access network (RAN) will more than quintuple from $4 billion last year, to $21 billion in 2024. And that enterprise-based 5G connections are forecast to surge from 500,000 last year to 175 million in 2024.

This need is being forced by the new spectrum bands being used to serve 5G. Unlike past generational cellular deployments, 5G is going to rely heavily on millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum bands. These are spectrum resources typically above 6 GHz that have traditionally been considered too high on the spectrum chart to economically support commercial services. This is due to their poor propagation characteristics that limit the reach of those signals from a cell site and that signals ability to penetrate obstacles.

However, these characteristics have also left a lot of spectrum in these bands sitting fallow. Even though 5G technologies can produce a slight increase in network speeds compared with 4G LTE with everything else being equal, 5G’s real boon is its ability to support large swaths of wireless spectrum. And those larger swaths equal higher speeds. But to get those higher speeds, carriers and enterprises will need to deploy more cell sites and antennas to provide coverage.

Of course, the ongoing COVID-19 virus outbreak could throw a wrench into many of the 5G economic predictions and plans. Global supply chains will be interrupted because of the social impact the virus is having on the workforce and this in turn will delay the availability of equipment.

A recent survey conducted by 451 Research found that 79% of organizations said that the virus outbreak is having a negative impact on overall operations. “Major business disruptions in organizational supply chains, IT resources, human capital, and strategic planning are contributing causes of the reported negative impact,” the firm noted.

And Juniper Research predicts the COVID-19 virus could cause a $42 billion revenue gap for smart device vendors over the next nine months.

Vendors and operators have so far provided limited commentary on the expected impact from the virus. Most are still “monitoring” the situation, though starting to hedge that they will see something as the situation continues to develop.

“The outbreak of COVID-19 has created a crippling effect, not only on service industries but also on manufacturing enterprises, including 5G infrastructure vendors,” Stuart Carlaw, chief research officer at ABI Research, wrote in a new report about the technological toll of COVID-19. “The 5G New Radio part of the supply chain has been particularly affected by this, especially because most 5G radio units and active antennas are being manufactured in China.”

Industry standards group 3GPP is delaying the adoption of a pair of critical releases for 5G specifications because of changes in how its membership will be able to conduct meetings. The releases are tied to more advanced 5G features that should not impact the ongoing initial roll outs but could impact plans for enterprises.

“Those interested in the [ultra-reliable, low-latency] capabilities, which can support things like automated robotic-based manufacturing, are likely to be delayed commercially,” Patrick Filkins, senior research analyst in IDC’s network infrastructure group, recently told SDxCentral.

However, Filkins doesn’t think the delay on at least the next 5G technology update (Release 16) will significantly impact enterprise adoption. “5G coverage is just picking up in many regions. As such, even if Release 16 was not delayed, many enterprises who wish to work with carriers to begin 5G trials and pre-commercial deployments would still need to wait for coverage to start,” he said.