INTERVIEW: Nokia’s Markus Borchert (pictured) urged Europe’s major players and regulators to learn from 4G mistakes, insisting this “cannot be repeated in the 5G era”.
Speaking to Mobile World Live at the GSMA’s recent Mobile 360 Europe event, the vendor’s SVP for Europe said the continent “cannot be proud” at looking at its track record on 4G, particularly when it comes to speed of deployment.
Specifically, he said Europe had come up short in comparison to other leading markets, both in the west and the east, given it had taken those markets between 8 quarters and 12 quarters to achieve close to 100 per cent population coverage: “In Europe, we have reached quarter 30 and we are still counting,” he said.
Borchert put Europe’s struggles down to two major themes: a lack of investment; and fragmentation.
“There is too little investment in our digital infrastructure, and this has to do with both regulation and the fragmentation we have across Europe,” he said: “We have different regulation across countries, where we don’t see consolidation and we have a regulatory environment that does not incentivise operators and web companies to invest fast enough in the digital infrastructure that we need to make the fourth industrial revolution a reality and to lead this from Europe.”
In the interview, Borchert also revealed his opinions on the major use cases of 5G and spoke of increased competition with vendor rivals.Click here to watch the full interview.
