How Do You Sell Really Fast Wireless When It’s Really Fast Already?

In a gold mine hundreds of feet below the boreal forests of northern Sweden, Ericsson AB is seeking the answer to an existential question: Does anyone really want 5G wireless service? The troubled telecommunications equipment maker, suffering as sales of 4G technology falter, has bet its future on the fifth generation of mobile, which is expected to link billions of devices to the internet with connections fast enough to transfer a feature film in less than a second. But even with initial 5G standards poised to be determined next year, no one is sure what applications and services will make customers hand over the billions of dollars the systems will cost to construct. “We need to explore this to understand what we’ll use it for,” says Peter de Bruin, an Ericsson engineer who designed the prototype 5G network the company built in the Kankberg mine, 500 miles north of Stockholm. “The benefits of such fast download speeds aren’t really obvious.”

The 50-year-old mine is one of dozens of locations worldwide where Ericsson and its primary rivals, Nokia Oyj and Huawei Technologies Co., are testing equipment for 5G, which will likely see its first large-scale commercial deployments in 2020. Nokia has worked with China Mobile Ltd. to show how ambulances can use 5G to stream patient X-rays to emergency rooms as they race toward hospitals. Huawei has showcased a remotely driven car. Ericsson, which has devoted the bulk of its 24,000 engineers to 5G, is involved in about 20 projects, including the highest-profile test, in February at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. There, the company is working with KT Corp. and Intel Corp. on a network that will guide self-driving buses through the athletes village and allow fans to experience the action live from tiny cameras embedded in the helmets of bobsledders. “We have talked for a long time about 50 billion connected devices, but we need to understand what they are,” De Bruin says.