The big barrier to Trump’s 5G America – By John Hendel (Politico) / Dec 29 2019
As Trump tries to edge out Beijing in the race to 5G, the U.S. is facing a shortage of workers.
President Donald Trump envisions a not-too-distant future in which super-fast 5G networks span the country, powering everything from smart cities to remote surgeries — and getting there before China does.
There’s just one thing: He doesn’t have the workforce to build it. And he’s not even close.
For starters, the U.S. needs to train another 20,000 tower climbers to install equipment, according to industry figures cited by Brendan Carr, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission.
The 27,000 tower hands working nationwide right now won’t be able to handle the workload, he told POLITICO. “We’re talking about the ability to double the existing workforce.”
These next-generation wireless networks, made up of thousands of tightly clustered suitcase-sized cell sites, are already coming online in a smattering of U.S. cities such as Minneapolis and Sacramento, Calif., and parts of China. They’re roughly 100 times faster than current networks and predicted to radically reshape the global economy, ushering in a new era of connected devices, driverless cars and enhanced telemedicine.
As Trump tries to edge out Beijing in the race to 5G, the U.S. is facing a shortage of not just tower climbers, but many other workers skilled enough to roll out the infrastructure on behalf of wireless giants like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, upping pressure on the administration given the economic promise of this new technology.
But the low unemployment rate that Trump loves to tout could actually slow the rollout of 5G. The broader network-building process, which includes laying fiber, climbing cell towers and placing hundreds of thousands of smaller pieces of infrastructure known as small cells, could call for as many as 100,000 new jobs to fill, Carr estimates.
Continue to article: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/29/big-barrier-trump-5g-america-089883
