Huawei Australia has criticized the Federal Government’s 5G roll-out, mentioning it will leave rural and regional areas without any coverage. The company says – “there is currently no plan to provide truly national 5G” unless network operators receive federal funding.
According to Huawei’s submission to a committee inquiry into the deployment, adoption, and application of 5G in Australia, rural communities will miss out on 5G without “decisive action” from the government.
“The reality is that 5G represents a chicken-and-egg situation for our farming communities until they know for sure that they are going to be able to access 5G technology then there is no way that they can start planning to invest in new technologically advanced equipment that can boost their productivity,” the submission said.
Huawei also specified that the government had staked $50 billion on building the National Broadband Network that “may deliver better internet than was previously available in the bush” but claimed that data-caps and speed limits of 25Mbps are “not sufficient” for agricultural technology innovation.
Further, the network builder referred to an earlier parliamentary submission whereby it claimed the cost of 5G deployment would rise by 30 percent to between $700 million and $2.1 billion by reducing “critical vendor competition”.
“These additional deployment costs for 5G are going to make it even more difficult to deliver 5G coverage in rural and regional Australia and it is critical that the Federal Government finds ways to lower the cost of deployment for operators,” Huawei added.
