Qualcomm claims $trillions of 5G benefits from applications that don't need 5G
Steve Mollenkopf's creative engineers produce many of the world's best chips. It's time for him to stop promoting a bogus claim "5G Expected to Create 22 Million Jobs, Produce Up to $12.3 Trillion of Goods and Services by 2035." They offer no evidence or logic that leads to that conclusion. They hired IHS Markit to do a "study" and Berkeley Professor David Teece to sign off on it. The substance of the study is a laundry list of future services, from drones to telemedicine to IoT to VR to Smart Grid. (They provide no source for their estimates of the values of each, but added together they do come to enormous figures.)
Problem: Nearly none of this requires 5G and the report gives no reason to believe their value-add should be attributed to 5G. Nearly all of them work just fine on LTE or Wi-Fi and do not require 5G. Nowhere in the report do they provide a breakdown of how much of the total value of the drones, remote medical consults, or meter reading need 5G. Without that, the conclusions are hogwash. In addition, anyone who has worked with economic forecasts knows how hard it is to look five years ahead, let alone 20.
I've researched the requirements of AR, VR, telemedicine, and IoT. Experts in each field tell me 5G isn't needed for what they are doing. Even most of the connected car stuff doesn't need lower latency than LTE can deliver. Thousands of Qualcomm engineers every day tell customers, accurately, that Qualcomm products today meet these needs and will be even better in the future.
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