5G debuts today in Brazil
The fifth-generation mobile internet (5G) will be made available this Wednesday (July 6th), in Brasilia.
The Federal capital was the first city where infrastructure could be installed due to its geography that facilitates the deployment. The expectation is that operators Claro, Tim and Vivo will make the signal available in the 3,5 GHz band to customers in approximately 80% of the federal capital immediately. The deployment plan should continue in sequence for the cities of Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre and São Paulo, but there are still no defined dates for this, according to the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel). The delay in the deployment of the 5G frequency bands licensed in the auction that took place in November last year is due to the lack of the necessary equipments and the global shortage of chips in addition to the difficulty of importing them.
The arrival of 5G is highly anticipated by Brazilians, who since 2019 have followed the slow auction process and its various postponements and now follow the delay in the deployment of the technology on a large scale that was initially supposed to be finalized in all state capitals by July 31. Notably, to have access to the 5G signal it is necessary to have a device capable of using this signal and there is already a wide variety of devices that have this functionality in the national market, with the market leaders being Samsung (with 25 models), followed by Motorola (14), Apple (9) and Xiaomi (6), among others. In this sense, it is also important to note that, today, Brazil occupies the 5th position in the ranking of countries with the most cell phones in the world, having approximately 120 million cell phones and being a very attractive market in this matter.
Being this gigantic market, Brazil has naturally become an important field of dispute in relation to patents related to the 5G standard and the movement of consultations, questioning and litigation involving patents in this area have grown substantially. With the start of its deployment, an even greater growth in patent disputes is expected, especially in relation to patents involving the technologies essential to the 5G standard. "These patents, because they are essential to the functioning of this standard, need to be licensed under FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms in order to guarantee fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory conditions to different market players, being certain, therefore, that issues related to these technologies will be at the center of the most important discussions involving patents in Brazil".
