5G market in APAC to reach $125 bn by 2025: Frost & Sullivan

The 5G market is estimated to be worth $124.8 billion by 2025 in the Asia Pacific region, according to global research firm, Frost & Sullivan. 

The technology could provide operators the opportunity to offer new services to enterprises and consumers, the report titled 5G in Asia-Pacific forecast to 2025.

"Mobile operators are aggressively entering the 5G space to grasp opportunities presented by expanding their portfolio, in order to increase revenues and improve customer experience," said Sofea Zukarnain, Research Associate, Information and Communications Technology at Frost & Sullivan.

The 5G market in APAC is expected to grow from the second half of 2019. This growth will be preceded by commercial deployment of 5G in South Korea and the soft launch of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) in the Philippines.

While many developed countries are expected to deploy 5G commercially in 2020, emerging economies such as India will only be able to commercially launch 5G after 2020 owing to the lack of available spectrum.

However, the Philippines and Thailand could be comparatively quicker in adoption of 5G due to the push by local governments towards spectrum allocation. In this regard, local government support would be crucial towards the success of 5G.

“Regulations need to cover new 5G use cases and should also be flexible enough to help drive the local economy in line with their respective digital nation initiatives," said Zukarnain.

The report suggested a few opportunities that the telecom participants could explore in order to make the most out of the upcoming 5G wave.  Some of these include developing a strong 5G infrastructure to deliver artificial intelligence services, establishing and developing edge computing services to support latency-sensitive applications, build scalable identity management and distributed authentication services.

Frost & Sullivan also urged telecom operators to collaborate with industries such as automotive, healthcare and utilities to bolster cross-industry connectivity.