5G small cells and local vs. state and national government: go local go!
The evidence is piling up that a key expense for 5G, possibly the key expense, is going to be involve densification and small cells. It follows that whichever place has the most effective incentives for deploying small cells will win the 'race' to deploy 5G. I'm backing local government to be better at this. Go team go!
I want to start this piece by giving context to my comment about the race to deploy 5G. I think it's a mistake to construe 5G as a battle between nations - the only winners of it are going to be consumers and they're only win if 5G is deployed efficiently. However, lots of politicians are already treating the technology as a race to deploy the fastest. Since the power of local vs. national government is a political issue, I'm going to borrow this concept to underline my point.
If 5G is going to rely on lots of small cells to be deployed in population centres, the cost of deploying each cell is going to be a big issue. RCRWireless carried this article by Peter Rysavy, Analyst Angle: Small Cells — suddenly essential. He mentions for example, that 62% of Verizon's wireless deployments in 2017 were small cells (62% by number?) and that this will continue to rise with 5G.
A major cost of mobile deployments is associated with planning and consents. The lower these costs are, the more deployments there will be. Planning and consent costs are never ever going away - NIMBYs and the like won't let that happen. However, they'll be reduced when those who provide them have an incentive to see whatever it is they're being used for.
I've long marvelled at how local government has a great incentive to see telecommunications deployed to its area. Chorus, the builder of an FTTH network that I worked for in New Zealand, ran a competition in 2013-14 called Gigatown. As described here, the competition picked a town where people would get gigabit FTTH connections for the price of entry level connections. Of course, councils loved it and piled into the social media contest to try and ensure it was their constituents who got the cheap internet.
Local government would seem better placed to placate the NIMBYs and choose where infrastructure gets put. However, it's national and state governments who feel the greater pressure to win the 'race' to 5G. The tension between these two groups already seems evident. It's described in this article by Sean Kinney at RCR Wireless, Streamlining small cell process a state and federal priority.
I'm a bit surprised these two groups should be at odds. On one side, you have state/national governments and Kinney quotes one representative as saying, "We don’t want cities to prohibit the deployment of these small cells." On the other, you have representatives Kinney quotes as saying they want support for local government as "we seek to expedite the expansion of 5G infrastructure in our communities."
From my perspective, I don't think much of the ability of state and national governments to manage NIMBYs and the like. If they're left to their own devices, they'll legislate for the lowest common denominator and small cell deployment won't be cheap, 5G deployment will suffer. The country that wins the 'race' to 5G might be the one that's best at taking their hands off and leaving local government to it.
This issue is yet another than will continue to develop. If you're keen to hear more about it, please come and join us at the LinkedIn Group, Commercializing 5G.
UPDATE: I've just posted this story on the group that contains evidence on why state/federal government isn't as good at local issues as local government. If you're further interested, please join the group to have a read.