Study, Telecom News, ET Telecom

NEW DELHI: The number of global roaming subscribers using 5G services will reach increase from 4.5 million in 2021 to 210 million in 2026, growing by over 4,500%, as operators accelerate fifth-generation network rollouts and the international travel industry recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a study by Juniper Research.

The findings recommend that operators must now focus on increasing 5G roaming support in order to support the future rise in demand for data when roaming over 5G networks.

“As demand for international travel returns, operators must adjust to the significant uptake of 5G subscriptions during the pandemic. A failure to provide 5G roaming capabilities in key travel destinations will diminish brand reputation amongst subscribers and lead to churn to competitors,” Research author Scarlett Woodford noted.

Additionally, operators should also develop features such as roaming analytics, sponsored roaming, and steering of roaming.

With the proliferation of 5G roaming, vendor competition around the abovementioned 5G-enabled services will also intensify.

The findings underlined that vendors must also address subscribers’ demand for bandwidth and latency when roaming over 5G to home network connectivity, by offering value-added services.

It also projects the global roaming data traffic from 5G subscribers to reach 770 petabytes (PB) by 2026, from 2.6PB in 2021, representing enough data to stream 115 million hours of 4K video from platforms like Netflix.

The findings observed that the projected rise in data will necessitate 5G roaming data contracts between operators to provide roaming subscribers with comparable user experiences whilst roaming.