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The 5G World: What People Care About - POLITICO

Around the world, 5G is a buzzword, a sales pitch—and, increasingly, a policy challenge.

It’ll be years before most people have 5G phones and a super-fast network to connect them, but the future of mobile technology is shaping up right now. Behind the promises lie some big government decisions about what to prioritize, how to compete, and how fast to move.

In Europe, governments are already facing the difficult question of whether to build out cheaper networks using Chinese technology they might not fully trust, defying their allies in Washington along the way. As citizens and consumers, whether they know it or not, people are being asked to weigh convenience against privacy, national competitiveness against national security, and speed against price.

How they feel about those tradeoffs could shape national policies, and the competitive landscape of what is effectively a whole new internet.

To gauge their views, a new worldwide POLITICO/Qualcomm global survey on 5G asked nearly 8,000 people in the U.S. and 10 countries across Europe, Asia and South America what they were expecting, and what they worried about. Read on for the results, and why they could matter to decisionmakers.

(The full survey results are available here.)

Privacy

Consumers worldwide appear to have one big fear about the coming technological revolution in super-fast wireless: 5G could be a harbinger of hacking and greater loss of privacy.

More than half the surveyed population, averaged globally, expressed fears that 5G could make more personal data vulnerable to hacking. Sixty percent in the U.S. reported that worry.

On privacy, there was a much bigger split. A global divide exists on how willing people are to trade privacy for a new era of super-fast networks and interconnected devices. And they differ sharply in whether they place greater trust in business or government to address the problem.

In the U.S., only 21 percent of consumers surveyed would accept lower privacy standards in exchange for super-fast speeds. But consumers in China, Japan and Brazil expressed much greater willingness to make such a tradeoff—a sentiment expressed by 64 percent in the first two countries and 61 percent in Brazil.

That split could portend serious differences internationally about what privacy guardrails to erect in the era of 5G, and a possible splintering across national lines regarding advertising policies and the ways in which these networks are monetized.

Who gets your trust?

The results show widespread expectation among worldwide consumers that 5G will change their lives in ways both good and bad. Respondents imagined a future where a surgeon could operate remotely via a remote, and where it's easier than ever to contact a doctor. And people from every country said they expect 5G to narrow the urban-rural digital divide.

But the data also suggested a global rift over how much consumers trust corporations to safeguard their personal data.

Only 7 percent of U.S. consumers said they have a great deal of trust that companies will be good stewards of their prized personal information – a finding that comes after years of revelations about Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data scandal and massive breaches of financial titans like Equifax.

In China, by contrast, 35 percent expressed that kind of faith in corporations–as did 65 percent in India.

On the other hand, U.S., Japanese and Brazilian consumers said they trust corporations more than the government to safeguard their privacy, the poll found. Seventy percent of Chinese respondents would rather trust the government.

These preferences may help animate what 5G looks like as it begins to roll out in earnest in the coming years, and the fears are already manifesting themselves in fights about policy. Those include the White House’s international campaign to get other nations to exclude Chinese telecom giants like Huawei from their 5G networks, amid warnings that the companies’ involvement could enable spying by China’s communist government.

Who’s in charge—and who benefits?

Many hope 5G will bring a wide mix of economic benefits from the widespread adoption of driverless cars, new forms of telehealth, more powerful artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, and an ecosystem of internet-connected devices, from fridges to toasters.

The survey also explored broader 5G anxieties such as the potential for job loss and how these advances are rolled out.

In a survey of more than 1,000 IT-savvy specialists, U.S. respondents strongly favored the private sector taking the lead in 5G rollout. In the consumer survey, however, Americans had more mixed views, with a plurality of 41 percent agreeing that “the national government should work with industry to develop and define 5G strategy and implementation.”

The questioning also revealed reservations within the U.S. and European Union on whether China can be trusted to build the world's 5G infrastructure. While most respondents said they'd prefer their own country to take the lead in building out 5G domestically, Sweden and Finnish companies also ranked high internationally.

The American public also still isn’t sold on the idea that rural communities will enjoy advanced 5G wireless service even remotely as soon as bigger cities like Chicago, New York and San Francisco: Thirty-nine percent of U.S. consumers polled said 5G is expected to increase the rift between urban and rural America, a long-running, bipartisan concern known among policymakers as the “digital divide“. So did 51 percent of tech decision-makers in the U.S.

Greater optimism on the urban-rural divide reigned in China, 54 percent of consumers said they believe that 5G will cause the divide to decrease. That number rises to 57 percent among Chinese IT specialists.


The POLITICO/Qualcomm 5G Global Poll surveyed 7,711 people around the globe on the evolving attitudes, hopes, expectations and fears associated with 5G as well. It also surveyed a separate mix of 1,375 IT-savvy individuals who are plugged into tech-related decision-making. The firm PSB Research conducted the inquiry from Dec. 17 to Jan. 14, speaking to individuals from the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam and Brazil. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus 1.1 percentage points for the global population, and 3.7 percentage points for any individual country.

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