WE are now in 2026 and despite mmwave 5G bands have been allocated, commercial mmWave deployment has been slow. So far, not many countries in the world has deployed mmWave for it’s 5G. While mmWave can deliver extremely high speeds and massive capacity, building and maintaining such a network is expensive and complicated. For most telecom operators, the costs often outweigh the benefits, especially when compared to other 5G spectrum options.
One major issue is infrastructure cost. mmWave signals do not travel far, so, in order to have a wider coverage, the density of cells is far more than conventional mid bands. More cells means more power usage, more maintenace work.
All of this increases spending significantly. If the coverage only extends to a few streets, a stadium, or a business district, operators may struggle to justify the investment. Many operators still goes for the n78 band 3.5GHz spectrum as the better high capacity band for deploying 5G.
Coverage is another challenge as mmWave are easily blocked by walls, tree, glass, it can’t penetrate into buildings that easily. Yes, it provides fast speeds of up to 3 Gbps downlink, it is still short distance coverage compared to the mid range bands. In fact a line of sight with good Signal to Noise Ratio should be able to transmit as far as around 100m to 300m. So if it is mounted on a building, the street coverage will be greatly enhance as it is usually paired with a mid band like B3 in a NSA setup. For example KDDI Japan uses a 5G NSA setup with an anchor band B3 with multiple n257 bands.
Device support is another factor slowing adoption. Even if operators build mmWave networks, customers still need compatible phones. In many markets, only a limited number of devices support mmWave. On top of that, the handsets need to be provisioned to support mmWave. Some manufacturers will want a fee to enable it’s firmware while such handsets also require the mmWave radio. Thus the costs also increase.
In Asia, commercial mmWave deployment has been especially limited. Japan is one of the few countries where operators pushed mmWave more aggressively, particularly through KDDI, along with deployments by NTT Docomo and SoftBank. These deployments focused mainly on dense urban areas, transport hubs, stadiums, and business districts where high capacity was needed.
Other Asian markets such as South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China have mostly remained at the trial stage or limited hotspot deployments. The costs invovled isn’t justified to deploy mmWave in a larger scale than it’s trial some years back.
mmWave is there but it is probably best to deploy in crowded areas such as stadiums, airports, train stations, concerts. Another opportunity is for launching a fixed wireless access, which can replace areas with no fibre access.
Overall, mmWave remains untapped. The bands are allocated but commercial deployment takes a back seat as there is no reason to deploy it due to costs. Furthermore, to most end users, your video streaming experience will have no difference since you can display in HD or even 4K with current 4G/5G technology.
So, will you want to feel the shiokness of mmwave with nice speedtest result?