Technical standards for the next generation of wireless services aren’t even finalized, yet the US and China are already locked in a crucial race to be the first country to deploy a so-called 5G network.

Or at least that's what both the US government and the wireless industry say. "The United States will not get a second chance to win the global 5G race," Meredith Attwell Baker, president and CEO of the wireless industry group CTIA, warned in April, when the group released a report concluding that the US trails China and South Korea in preparing for 5G (fifth generation) networks. If that doesn’t change, the report warns, the US economy will suffer.

The report echoed a leaked National Security Council document that suggested the US government consider building a 5G network. If China dominates the telecommunications network industry, the document said, it "will win politically, economically, and militarily."

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Democrats are worried too. The Federal Communications Commission's lone Democrat, Jessica Rosenworcel, penned an op-ed for TechCrunch earlier this year calling for a renewed 5G strategy to head off China.

The first specifications for the 5G standard were released last year, but the rest of the standard isn’t expected until later this month. Carriers don’t expect national availability in the US until 2020. The wireless industry promises that 5G will bring enormous boosts in speed and reliability to mobile devices, bridge the gap between wireline and wireless broadband speeds, and enable a new wave of technologies and applications that we can't even imagine yet.

But why exactly is it so important for the US to build 5G networks before China? The benefits of 5G are obvious, but today the US doesn't have the fastest home broadband speeds, nor the fastest or most widely available 4G networks, and often lags countries such as Finland, Japan, and South Korea in such metrics. Why would the US's economic strength erode if it's a bit late to the 5G party?

A widely cited 2016 report by consulting firm Accenture estimates that the construction and maintenance of 5G networks in the US could result in 3 million jobs and a $500 billion boost to GDP. But would all those jobs end up overseas if China is the first country with a nationwide 5G network?

Not necessarily says Sanjay Dhar, a managing director at Accenture who worked on the report. "Even if China wins the race to build various 5G technologies, it won’t be a zero-sum game,” he says.

Telecommunications industry analyst Jeff Kagan says the competition between the US and China keeps the US motivated to push 5G forward, but he doesn't believe that it will make a big difference to the US economy in the long term if the US is second or third. "I don't think it's ever been more than a battle over the ego over which country is first," he says.

For one thing, the two countries’ economies remain dependent on one another. Chinese telecommunications company ZTE nearly collapsed after the US barred American companies from selling components to it. Even if China “wins,” US companies will benefit by selling technology to China.

Roger Entner, a founder of Recon Analytics and coauthor of the CTIA report, concedes that it might not matter much if the US introduces 5G a few months later than China. Europe was quicker to roll out 2G, and Japan was the first with 3G, but that hardly deterred Apple and Google from dominating the smartphone market. But Entner argues that if China beats the US by a year or two, it could damage the US's ability to compete in the global technology market.