UPGRADING telecommunication networks to support 5G is an unavoidable investment for telecom operators but may not necessarily need users to get new handsets unless they’re using very old ones.
“A lot of phones today will support 5G,” Amalgamated Telecom Holdings chief executive officer Ivan Fong said, in an interview with The Fiji Times after the company’s annual general meeting on Wednesday this week.
“For us as operators what you mean by 5G is you are basically providing more speed to serve the customers at the end of the day.
“It’s a large investment but you can’t avoid it because that’s the way the world is moving, especially in tourism, we have tourists that are coming in and they will want a 5G network, so, for us, it’s ensuring that the level of service we provide is up to that global standard that everyone is used to,” Mr Fong said.
While for consumers a 5G network means faster speed and for telecom operators, keeping up with the world, 5G will also spawn new types of technological advances that are not in the Fiji market right now.
“5G enables a lot of new applications as well, they have these things like the driverless cars, remote surgeries, etc, so it’s a whole ecosystem that’s enabled for real-time remote operations but then, we need the rest of the private sector to come in to start exploring these things,” Mr Fong said.
ATH’s fully-owned subsidiary Vodafone Fiji, which became a quad player in January this year – combining the triple play services of broadband Internet access, television or content, and telephone with wireless service provisions – had rolled out the first phase of its 5G network in mid-September this year.
