Bahrain announced that it has completed preparations to launch 5G mobile networks, putting it on track to be one of the first countries in providing commercial 5G services to consumers by the end of 2019 once devices are made available.
Transportation and Telecommunications Minister Kamal bin Ahmed Mohammed has announced that the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) is scheduled to allocate licensing and spectrum by the first week of April.
Mobile operators in Bahrain have started rolling out the necessary network infrastructure, said the minister, adding that commercial services will become available by June.
The Minister admitted the project faced a lot of challenges, namely the method of ensuring spectrum's availability, but overcoming these obstacles was possible due to the efforts of “Team Bahrain” that includes elite representatives from both the public and private sectors.
This “demonstrates how Bahrain can make a swift progress … in partnership with technology pioneers in the world.”
With the new 5G technology, users will be able to transfer bigger volume of data at higher speeds, which in turn, enables the development and implementation of technologies required for autonomous driving vehicles that need up to 100Gb of data per second to operate, explained the Minister.
This places Bahrain among the world’s leading countries in adopting the 5G technology and makes the Kingdom more appealing for companies that use the next-generation technologies such as autonomous vehicles and VR.
In June 2018, Bahrain held several successful commercial trials for 5G technology and all licensed operators are preparing to provide commercial 5G services.
The products and services will allow Bahraini companies to tap into the global 5G services market, which is anticipated to grow from an estimated $60 billion in 2020 to an estimated $125 billion in 2025.
The Kingdom’s ranking is high in global ICT indices, being the first in the Arab region on the ICT Development Index (IDI) of UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and ranking 4th globally in the UN’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Index (TII) of the E-Government Development Index (EGDI) in 2018.
