Feasibility and Challenges of 5G Network Deployment in Least Developed Countries (LDC)

Abstract

Growing client population, ever-increasing service demand, and complexity of services are the driving factors for the mobile operators for a paradigm shift in their core technology and radio access networks. 5G mobile network is the result of this paradigm shift and currently under deployment in many developed countries such as United States, United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, and China—to name a few. However, most of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) have very recently been implemented 4G mobile networks for which the overall role out phase is still not complete. In this paper, we investigate how feasible it is for LDCs to emphasize on a possible deployment of 5G networks at the moment. At first, we take a holistic approach to show the major technical challenges LDCs are likely to face while deploying the 5G mobile networks. Then we argue that various security aspects of 5G networks are an ongoing issue and LDCs are not technologically competent to handle many security glitches of 5G networks. At the same time, we show that most of the use cases of 5G networks are not applicable in the context of many LDCs (at least at the present time). Finally, this paper concludes that the start of the 5G network deployment in LDCs would take much longer time than expected.