5G, a major topic for Telco Investors

30TH December 2019

After Germany and Italy in the Summer, France has now launched its auction of the frequency bands required for 5G rollout. The German and Italian auctions generated around 6 billion euros for the two governments, so the financial stakes are high for all operators wishing to operate 5G in France.

This concludes 2019, a year rich in events across the Telco world and marked by the arrival of 5G. The 5G rollout combined with the ongoing deployment of fibre optic networks requires a very high investment capacity from operators, leading some of them to sell all or part of their network infrastructure (fibre optic networks and towers). Infrastructure operators have also sought new partners to finance these investments as we saw in the recent 1bn euro Altice acquisition of Covage.

At Xperts Council, thanks to our vast experience in this sector, we saw a 50% increase in Telco-related projects in 2019, providing qualified industry leaders and expertise to help our clients with game-changing decisions.

We expect future years to continue to be very active with new services and rollouts in both the B2B (e.g. Smart manufacturing) and B2C (AR/VR) markets. These will be particularly boosted by 5G and the IoT which will require new ways of accessing, storing and computing data like FWA and “Edge Computing”. We believe all these changes will have a significant impact on various players of the telecom ecosystem including equipment manufacturers, infrastructure providers, and service providers.

We are eager to support you in all your projects in 2020.