There has been a lot of talks around 5G network for a long time now. The trend has picked up when Samsung and Apple came up with their latest smartphones supporting 5G technology. This article is an effort to briefly explain what is 5G and why is it so important from a digital transformation perspective for the immediate future.
Share of 5G enabled smartphone will be around 51% by 2023
What is “5G”
5G is the next version of mobile broadband technology that will replace the existing 4G LTE technology which today’s mobile carriers have adopted. 5G will be exponentially faster and the communication time between mobile devices will be reduced significantly and which as most experts predict will lead to better and innovative digital transformation in many verticals in the coming days.
Having said that, the technology is fully not there yet from an infrastructure point of view and an adaptability point of view. The devices are out there and some cities have some sort of infrastructure in place to call it a 5G but it will take a while to see the reality
As per the current findings, 5G network performance will be based on how close users are to the cell tower or transmitter
Coming to how 5G works,
- High Band 5G — This will be 10X faster than the current 4G LTE with very low latency observed during the communication. Even though all major carriers are working on this, it will take a few years to becoming reality and users need to be very close to the transmitter to really experience the speed. It delivers superfast data for short distance communication.
- Mid Band 5G — With a smaller footprint than the low band and speed range between 3.5GHz to 6GHz, this can be a reality much faster than the High Band 5G
- Low Band 5G — The speed and performance will be incrementally better than the 4G LTE but this speed can be provided for a larger spectrum of users. This seems to be in operation with a couple of major mobile carriers. The range is between 500 MHz to 700 MHz when it comes to speed.
Under optimal condition, 5G latency will range between 1–4 milliseconds
Also, the bands are not available yet in all countries for the carriers to start using these bands and build infrastructure around it.
“In UK, If the development of a national 5G network proceeds at this orderly pace, by 2025, an extra £13bn will be added to annual business revenues. By 2030, the figure will reach £64bn”
Why “5G”
So here I am planning to cover why we need 5G and what would be the digital transformation innovation the technology can drive. Let’s discuss some use cases around 5G.
Healthcare
- Seamless remote monitoring and telehealth — The faster 5G will help the doctors monitor patients through connected devices and wearables to increase patient engagement and getting support at the right time. Eventually, this would reduce hospital expenses over the years. The AR- based devices can be used in real time to train doctors and to provide better healthcare options to patients. Post pandemic, Telehealth is going to be a significant median to treat patients without the patient being present which helps to treat less critical health issues and aged patients without much hassle.
- Personal fitness application can see a real change to provide dedicated training through 3D video calls/ AR applications or even holograms based solutions.
Automobile
- It is predicted that 5G implementation will be a big boost to autonomous vehicles to become near perfect. It can also help improve the performance and improve the efficiency of the vehicles by enabling real time vehicle to vehicle to communication. This can input information such as real-time traffic and road conditions and other details to make things better for autonomous vehicles
- Overall the real-time data collected can be transformed into various actionable insights to reduce traffic, improve the efficiency of the vehicle and to make transportation-related services smarter and accurate (ex: Amazon package delivery schedule and postal services, etc.)
IoT
- Smart devices have already entered into almost all the houses and 5G with faster bandwidth and the ability to connect more devices at the same time will lead to more efficient and innovative solutions to make our homes smarter and connected real-time data make cities more safer(public safety measures) and smarter.
- The IoT devices and sensors are still struggling to adopt because of connectivity, reliability and speed. The 5G can bring differences in the way IoT devices are used in various verticals, as explained earlier, it can bring a real change in healthcare devices to track realtime data to track and treat patients, which can lead to more data-driven innovations to improve patient lives. The IoT devices and can be clubbed with connected vehicles to get better realtime data.
It is imperative that businesses and IT to see what is coming and be ready for the next big change. 5G was a concept a few years back and now it’s almost a reality and businesses should find their uses cases to leverage the technology to stay ahead of the game. IT should get ready to support the business and start working on the readiness to move to a new environment where infrastructure needs a real refresh to handle the amount of data and speed of data inflow. More to come …
