What is All The Fuss About
5G will change everything. 5G will change how people use and communicate with technology. It will change how different technologies communicate with each other. All this will take place faster and more reliably than ever before. Mobile internet will be faster than ever. High bandwidth and low latency will transform whole industries through new ways of connecting production processes and products. 5G specs are straightforward:
- Mobile-broadband: Lightning fast, 20Gbps(4G: 500Mbps). Users can play multi-player VR games and 8K video on mobile in the move.
- Low latency: 1ms (4G: 50ms) latency and ultra reliability. 1ms latency enables the remote precise steering of robots (car, boat, plane, construction robot, emergency robot, war robot)
- Massive IoT: 1M (4G: 100k devices) device connections per square km, high energy efficiency. A large industrial plant can base IoT on top of 5G. Stadium events can offer enhanced experiences for spectators.
5G Brings a Paradigm Shift
5G will recode the whole concept of mobile connectivity. 5G brings a new-market disruption, which opens a completely new blue ocean of opportunities. 5G pushes industries to seek entirely new use cases for connectivity. 5G offers a completely different performance. Throughput, efficiency, latency, reliability and device density are way beyond what earlier technologies have been able to offer; High speed, low latency, power efficient and cheap.
5G also pushes a shift from hardware business to software business. With 5G, IoT, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, the differentiating factor will be software capabilities. New capabilities are all about thinking outside the box. Ingenuity regarding what can be done with technologies, and how they can be applied to solve tomorrow’s challenges. This is a crucial mindset, not just within the telecommunications industry, but across every technology-related industry.
Software has a potential to grow the Telecoms business with double digits.
– Bhaskar Gorti, President of Nokia Software
5G Changes also the Operator Business
Currently, operators charge customers a fee for using their pipeline. 5G will enable new ecosystem structures and monetization strategies. From a technology standpoint, 5G impacts virtually every component of the mobile network in some way. Currently, it is hard to define precisely what a 5G network really is, as each network will be different from the next, both in form and function. While one network is used as a low-latency coverage for autonomous transportation, another may be used for an affordable gigabit internet of citizens.
5G goes beyond the regular operator business; it’s a business revolution.
– Borje Ekholm, Ericsson CEO
5G enables operators or network service providers to shape their offering. This will create a completely new ecosystem, while operators are able to offer additional value in the form of innovative use cases. Operators will shift from the current man-in-the-middle to true innovative ecosystem partners. This creates the opportunity and challenge: Operators must be able to develop the underlying payment, partnership, and interoperability systems that will allow a 5G ecosystem to be monetized and to flourish.
Industry 4.0 vs 5G
5G goes beyond the path that 4G/LTE and any generation of cellular technologies went through; It’s more about enabling services. Industry 4.0 refers to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is now upon us. It is a fusion of fast technological breakthroughs in physical, digital, and biological spheres. Technology breakthroughs in fields such as 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Analytics, Artifical Intelligence and Robotics are significant in their own right, but when combined, we are talking about the enormous benefits of Industry 4.0. The key to achieving the potential of Industry 4.0 is a collaboration between stakeholders from (traditional) industries and technology partners. This requires a new agile mindset and cultural shift.
IoT could also mean seamless critical and elderly care.
– Rajeev Suri, Nokia CEO
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is where devices such as industrial sensors connect to the internet and to each other. This is already happening on existing 4G networks and the technology is being used everything from hospitals to industry. 5G helps the evolution of IoT by improving the interaction between different platforms as well as enabling more devices to become connected. Possible future applications include real-time health monitoring of patients, optimization of street lighting to suit the weather or traffic; environmental monitoring, smart agriculture and industrial automation, autonomous traffic, etc. 5G enables remote-anything. Industry plants, construction robots, mining systems, oil platforms, traffic management all can be run remotely. No need to have high-performance computing power at the target device. A connection is the only thing needed.
5G Critique
Because of the high frequency, 5G does not penetrate building walls well and can also only travel short distances in the air. Therefore, it will most probably only be utilized in really dense population areas. For the same reason, much of the industrial IoT still runs on top of the 2G network because of good penetration, low price and low power consumption. If talking about simple monitoring, you cannot look past LoRa and other similar long-range technologies.
6G is Coming
While we are still wondering what 5G will change, the technology manufacturers are already preparing for 6G.
I want 5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible.
– Donald J. Trump, The President of the United States
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