There is a race between top countries, who will implement 5G first nationwide. Recently, according to WSJ a group of the US senators is asking Mr. Trump to appoint a single person to coordinator 5G implementation in the United States. EU parlament two years ago said that 5G is one of the top priorities. There is an ongoing dispute whether the China based 5G technologies provided by ZTE or Huawei are safe. Main rationale behind T-Mobile and Sprint merger seems to be the 5G adoption speed-up.

5G networks are gaining traction all over the word. New technology offers, offering among other things, unmatched speed of data transfer and it promises to be even environmental friendly 😉

What could possibly go wrong?

Let me name just a few possibilities:

1. 5G is fragile towards fake mobile BTS’s, still …
2. Security holes in protocol of communication between IoT devices
3. Lack of interoperability and a lot of custom solutions (ca. 2000 operators worldwide)
4. Growth of mobile network was largely business driven, security was not necessary main concern. All generations starting from 2G are using one standard for interconnectivity – PSTN – which is based on trust. Again what could possibly go wrong when we are talking about growing number of virtual network operators with access to it.
5. By end of 2021 we could face up to 30bn interconnected devices that will use default password and credentials
   

Uncontrolled access to PSTN + literally billions of interconnected devices = problems.

So maybe it would be wise to slow down the race toward “5G superiority” and spend an extra amount of time re-thinking design and security. In my opinion it does not matter which nation will implement it first, but which one will implement it in a safer and more reliable way.