U.S. mobile operators have collectively covered 75% of the country’s population with 5G service and successfully convinced 8% of smartphone users to purchase compatible devices, according to PwC.

During the next six months, the firm expects 5G coverage to reach 80% of the U.S. population and 12% of wireless customers to own 5G-compatible devices.

“We look at availability as the minimum gating item to get 5G adoption going," Dan Hays, partner at Strategy&, PwC’s consultancy, told SDxCentral. "Despite that, of course, the availability of 5G is still a little uneven and the performance of 5G networks continues to also be uneven, though we’re expecting that to improve as you see more mid-band spectrum deployed over the next couple of years."

“It will probably be a slow march toward adoption of 5G smartphones over the next three years or so, but the thing that will accelerate that is really going to be some greater clarity on the benefits and the use cases that will make 5G devices compelling,” he said. 

Early reviews of the 5G experience “reflect some significant cloudiness in the value proposition and the customer experience. We’re hearing a lot of reports of people even turning off the 5G capability of their new smartphones,” Hays added. 

5G deployments in the U.S. have occurred at a faster pace than previous generations of cellular technology, and that acceleration has been fueled by consolidation in the market and the fact that 5G technology introduces a more broad set of levers or advances that can be activated via software, according to Hays. 

Nonetheless, the unequal performance of 5G is a nagging problem for U.S. operators and a challenge that isn’t likely to be overcome by all three of the country’s largest carriers for a few years. 

“It’s actually unfair to blame the differences in speed on 5G as a technology. The differences in speed that users are experiencing are really driven more by spectrum availability and the spectrum portfolio that each carrier has in each location than it is by 5G as a technology,” Hays explained.

“This is, in our eyes, a huge challenge for the wireless industry to educate the end user on what their experience can and should be,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that the marketing continues to be still a bit ahead of the user experience.” 

Consumers are typically less forgiving when it comes to negative experiences with new technology, and operators are going to face an uphill battle particularly among those that have disabled 5G on their device due to poor performance or battery drain, Hays said.

However, IT professionals in mid- to large-sized enterprises tend to bring more sophistication to technology advancements and there continues to be strong interest in 5G for corporate campuses or other facilities that could benefit from more control, he added. 

One area of minimal concern for 5G is the underlying technology, radio access network (RAN) equipment, and software that powers it, according to Hays. “We have not heard any meaningful reports of any challenges from an infrastructure standpoint when it comes to 5G readiness,” he said. “In general, the availability of equipment and the robustness of the equipment doesn’t seem to be the constraint right now.”

As such, most of the burden is on operators to execute on their vision and acquire the necessary spectrum to fulfill the promise of 5G. 

“Mid-band spectrum is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in the capacity that it offers for mobile operators and for end users, but the challenge of deploying mid-band spectrum is the significantly larger site count that’s required to get meaningful coverage,” Hays said.

There’s also dramatic variance in site count requirements between different spectrum bands that fall under that mid-band category, including 2.5 GHz, 3.5 GHz, and the recently auctioned 3.7-3.9 GHz spectrum, according to Hays. “The challenge for the industry is going to be funding and locating and constructing those extremely large numbers of sites that will use the mid-band. As a result of that, our expectation is that we’ll see that spectrum deployed most quickly in the urban and suburban areas.”

5G momentum is trucking along, build outs are occurring at pace, and consumer adoption of 5G devices is trailing, but more gains will be achieved across all those areas during the next six months and beyond, Hays concluded.