“There are some countries delaying the 5G rollout deployment, causing an increasing expense to the providers.”
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EqualOcean held an exclusive interview with William Genovese, Vice President of Corporate Strategy Planning for Banking and Financial Markets at Huawei. We discussed the status quo of the fintech industry, the promise of the new generation of wireless technology and how the Chinese electronics juggernaut is leveraging the latter to disrupt the former. Below are the key insights from our conversation.
In this chapter, we touch upon COVID-19 and 5G. Check out the rest of the interview:
5G, Its Value and Potential
The User’s Perspective, Fintech and 5G
5G and Fintech
Huawei and 5G
The impact
“The impact of COVID-19 on 5G is a very complex question, and it gets more complex based on the country or the world level.
China is a unique case in the sense that the government culture and the people have already adopted emerging technology in the mobile device to expand and have a better life for themselves. As the COVID-19 crisis continued in China, so the usage of mobile devices and the dependency on mobile devices to have food delivery from major e-commerce players increased. As one innovative example, an interesting story about local farmers getting awareness available to their products to consumers via video streaming, which contributes a great help in COVID-19.
From the perspective of payments, deposit and lending, the impact from COVID-19 will be continued too. From the perspective of financial assets protection, 5G contributes to that as well, because people are still able to deposit money, transfer money and add it to their mobile wallet and then move it to their bank account online. So there's actually probably been an up-to-date activity.”
COVID-19 categorizes 5G rollout
“There are some countries delaying the 5G rollout deployment, causing an increasing expense to the providers – so many of the major telcos in the world that did have budget plans to upgrade their networks from 4G to 5G may have to defer now.
Whereas in other countries, for example in China, money was already allocated and provided for the work, so those plans will continue.
In some emerging markets, another dimension to that example is that there is no 1G, 2G, 3G or 4G that is operating. And they need this kind of network more than ever now. It is essential. So, they are going to continue the construction. It is very much a mixed bag. I would not say that COVID-19 is postponing the 5G deployment throughout the world, but for certain areas there are certainly delays.”