According to the association, now is the right moment for governments to reassess the business and regulatory environment for mobile services to accelerate investment and innovation.
GSMA said initially, regulators should aim to make available 80–100MHz of contiguous spectrum per operator in prime 5G mid-bands and around 800 MHz per operator in high bands . It stressed that lower bands are also required to provide wide-area capacity and ensure that 5G reaches everyone. GSMA also noted that this figure will grow by $480 billion by 2025 to nearly $5 trillion as countries increasingly benefit from the improvements in productivity and efficiency brought about by the increased take-up of mobile services.
It added that the shift to online activities caused an increase in the growth in data traffic at the peak of the pandemic, adding that mobile network traffic grew 50 per cent on average in the 12 months to September 2020.