Jun 1, 2023

June 1, 2023 Last week, Magyar Telekom evaluated the fact that it made its 5G network available to all residential pre-paid and postpaid customers as of June 1 as a significant technological milestone, although the marketing value of the announcement is certainly significantly stronger than the actual technological advantage given to subscribers as a “gift”. In accordance with the laws of physics, 5G – like all mobile broadband technologies – provides mobile data access on a fairly wide spectrum (literally) for clients equipped with the appropriate modems, which fundamentally determines the “experience” experienced by the user. In last Wednesday’s announcement, Magyar Telekom also lists that it provides 60% coverage in proportion to the population in the 700, 2100 and 3600 MHz bands, and with the current development, the service provider typically operated the network on the 700 MHz frequency. Although this is not clear from the announcement, the 5G and 4G networks share certain spectrums – as the name suggests, dynamically – along the lines of the dynamic spectrum sharing models included in the standard and regularized by the network device manufacturers, this solution (which Telekom’s supplier , and Ericsson calls it ESS) is also used in Magyar Telekom’s network. As a result of the above, situations may arise – which were confirmed by our previous tests – that even though the device is connected to a 5G network in certain locations, it still cannot reach the maximum bandwidth available on the 4G infrastructure, while the C-band (3.6 GHz) in using cells, it is ideally impossible to even reach the much-talked-about gigabit download speed. The cells of Magyar Telekom have been updated coverage map according to his testimony, in addition to the capital and a significant number of settlements around Balaton, there are Szombathely, Zalaegerszeg, Kecskemét, Szeged, Debrecen, Miskolc and Soltvadkert, that is, everyone who uses their 5G mobile phone outside of these settlements can only experience a marginal increase in speed compared to 4G – if at all. Based on the service provider’s coverage map, it is also striking that the Eastern Hungarian region seems to be better equipped with regard to 5G infrastructure. This may presumably have something to do with the fact that Telekom is traditionally the “provincial service provider” in the Eastern Hungarian region, i.e. its base stations on the 800 MHz LTE band serve customers of Yettel Hungary in addition to its own customers through a mutual frequency agreement concluded more than eight years ago – through a lease agreement. According to Telekom, the “opening” of the 5G network was done as a promotion, but it is questionable whether, in light of the above, such a promotion has any upselling effect, i.e. whether the service provider is able to persuade new customers to pay for the existing tariff structure for 5G access. Vodafone Hungary – which was the first to launch a 5G service in our country – is struggling with a similar dilemma, while Yettel does not distinguish between 4G and 5G access at the tariff level, which clearly shows that the monetization of 5G networks, which cost astronomical sums, within the industry there are still far from uniform, established methods.