5G Creates New Opportunities – What Will Be The Uber Of Tomorrow?
In a recent interview, Liam Quinn, Senior Vice President and Senior Fellow in the CTO team with Dell Client Solutions, shares his thoughts on 5G, its exciting applications, how organizations should be considering it and the worldwide impact it’s going to have on businesses and industries.
For context, let’s reflect on 5G relative to the other Gs, which stands for generation. In the early 80s we had 1G that used analog for voice traffic. In the early 1990s the Telecommunications (Telco) companies introduced 2G digital for voice and added support for SMS and texting capabilities. In the early 2000s, 3G was introduced and in addition to voice and texting it added support for higher data rates and mobile data. 4G was introduced in 2010 and that was really where data rates increased and moved to mobile data and cloud streaming capabilities.
5G will start deployment this year initially on mobile handsets with a lot of announcements coming out of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. But it’s really more than just a transitional change from 4 to 5. It is a complete infrastructure change and will realize the convergence of computing, cloud and IoT. Think of it as the era of hyperconnectivity.
LTE is synonymous with 4G and it’s got significant bandwidth and capability improvements over 3G. The transition to 5G adds additional frequency bands, both in and around existing LTE (4G), as well as new millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum that is pivotal to support low latency and mission critical applications – such as smart cars, smart cities etc….
The use cases for 5G can be distilled down into three main areas – massive mobile bandwidth, very low latency and network capacity. At the abstract level, providing more bandwidth enables end (user) devices to upload/download very large amounts of data (think of downloading an HD movie in a matter of 7 – 8 secs vs 7 – 8 minutes with 4G or a full day with 2G). With very low latency (1 millisecond) support for mission critical applications and end devices (smart cars for example), as well as the tactile Internet (Telemedicine), it will enable new markets and usage models. With the explosive growth of IoT and intelligent sensors (all of which have some form of network connectivity), 5G networks will have the capacity to service and support these new workloads.
The transition to 5G will drive disruptive changes within the Telco’s and the service provider network architecture and infrastructure. It will also drive a more distributed architecture with a migration to edge computing, placing more compute/storage and analytical features closer to the source of data. 5G really opens opportunities for artificial intelligence and machine learning to take advantage of these huge data lakes of data and content. The ability to process more data, means more analytics to drive better business decisions, which has a stronger impact on business models and capabilities that haven’t been available before.
The primary benefits of 5G is the transition of the core telco network infrastructure from a centralized architecture model to that of a distributed edge computing model. With the increased workloads and diversity of data traffic patterns required to support endpoint connectivity, this drives the need for Edge Computing frameworks to process, analyze and move data based on usage and profile models.
The benefit for customers are yet to be defined but certainly, where you have more bandwidth, more features and lower latency, there is an excitement about what can be done. There are businesses that haven’t been developed yet, but will develop, in this new capable 5G environment.
Think of a professional on the go who wants to download massive amounts of content, or a consumer who wants to download content. Instead of it taking minutes to download a movie, it would take seconds. Think about how many movies you could download. This means a few things.
