A national strategy for 5G?

Good morning.

Cristiano Amon becomes the CEO of Qualcomm on June 30, and in that role will be a key global leader in the roll out of 5G technology over the next decade. I spoke with him recently about the opportunity and the challenges ahead.

“The problem to be solved with 5G,” he told me, “is to connect everyone and everything to the cloud 100% of the time with reliability.” The emphasis on “reliability” is mine, but everyone who has ever suffered a dropped phone call knows why. “For mission critical applications—production lines, remote surgery, autonomous cars—you need a reliability that never existed in wireless.” Amon says the pandemic also has created “an accelerated timeline” for the 5G roll out. “All the numbers are bigger now.”

The economic opportunity is enormous. A study by Accenture, commissioned by Qualcomm and being released this morning, finds that in the U.S. Alone, 5G will generate “up to $1.5 trillion in additional GDP between 2021 and 2025” and “has the potential to create or transform up to 16 million American jobs.” (You can find the Accenture study here.)

Jobs also will be lost, of course, due to 5G-enabled automation in factories, transportation, and elsewhere. Amon says the key is to move fast—hence to talk of a global 5G race. “If you are late to 5G, there are consequences that are far bigger than what happened in the telephone sector…If you are early in the process, you have an opportunity for people to learn new skills, and for new opportunities and business models to be created. If you are late, you could be in situation where jobs are lost to technology and you also have lost the ability to create the jobs of the future.”

Bottom line: Amon says we need a national push, with collaboration between business and government. “All the carriers have aggressive roll out plans, but I would argue we need to go faster, especially when we think about what’s happening in China.” Like many others in the business community, he is hoping for the Biden administration to move quickly beyond COVID relief efforts and focus on infrastructure. “We need to accelerate the build out of nationwide 5G infrastructure, including accelerating the ability to build out infrastructure that otherwise would not be economic.”

More news below.

Alan Murray
@alansmurray
[email protected]

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This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.