It has been known for some time that Italy was the country where there are the largest number of cell phones and smartphones per inhabitant, but today we have to celebrate another primacy of the Bel Paese and fortunately anything but negative! Indeed Italy ranks first in Europe for coverage of the 5G network.
This was revealed directly by the European Union 5G Observatory in its latest quarterly report which you can read in full at this address.
And it is Italy that pulls the locomotive of Europewith a huge leap made between the end of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022. At the end of last year, the national coverage detected by the Observatory was only 40%, but the network operators worked hard and managed to achieve 99.7% coverage of the national territory in just three months (data updated to March 2022).
A figure well above the European average which stops at 65% of the homes covered by the new mobile network, which overall has about 31 million subscribers. Overall, however, it is possible to keep up with Japan which has a ratio between population and number of repeaters similar to that of Europe. South Korea, on the other hand, is very far away, where a higher number of repeaters are installed than in the entire European Union, with an average of one repeater for every 320 inhabitants. China, which has one of the main 5G producers in Huawei, is also in a decidedly advanced situation with about 410 million subscribers and a density of repeaters higher than in Europe.
The USA, on the other hand, is badwhere 5G coverage is very poor with a third of European repeaters nationwide.
In fact, the Italian operators have decided to opt for an accelerated network renewal process in recent months, thus favoring high-speed connections even where it is difficult to reach with optical fiber. TIM had already announced at the beginning of the year the abandonment and conversion of the 3G network in favor of 5G. In fact, mobile phone repeaters are much simpler and more practical to install than fiber optic networks which also require specific and expensive road works.
Although some skepticism and initial protests, with some sensational demonstrations around Europe, there were no particular incidents. Plus 5G could be the key to bring the quality of gaming that we see on next-gen consoles also on mobile devices. Naoki Yoshida, head of the team working on Final Fantasy 14, is sure of it.
How many of you already own a 5G smartphone? Let us know your experience in the comments!
Source: European Union – Courier Communications