5G is finally here
5G has been in development for years, but only recently has 5G standards-compliant equipment begun to pour into the marketplace. We’re still at the early stages of 5G’s hockey-stick growth, but by 2023, there will be an estimated 1 billion 5G mobile subscriptions, with more than 20 percent of the world’s population covered by 5G. It’s not just consumers who will profit, either: A recent Gartner survey found that some two-thirds of organizations plan to deploy 5G by 2020.
5G brings three fundamental benefits are predicted to drive adoption:
- High bandwidth: 5G has 10 Gbps uplink speeds, which is not only far faster than existing 4G standards, but also opens up a world of possibilities for business users, from high-definition augmented reality to real-time video analytics.
- Support for massive device density. Thanks to network slicing, QoS routing, and other features, 5G can rapidly scale to accommodate new devices, sensors, and services.
- Ultra-low latency. Latency throughout for a typical network is 16ms or greater. With 5G, the target is 1ms on the radio interface, with some telcos aiming for sub-millisecond latency between nearby nodes.
These benefits have huge implications for business users. This is especially true in remote environments, located far from the traditional data center. For enterprises like a manufacturer, the edge is the factory floor or warehouse and for an oil producer, the edge is in the middle of a desert or the sea where oil is being extracted. -Shifting applications and workloads out to the edge, closer to where the data is generated is not a new trend. By 2025, 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud, up from 10% today.
For a CSP, the edge will include everything between their core/cloud and the last hop in their network, before it reaches the end user: existing and new 5G cell towers, regional data centers and everything in between. Likewise, they will be in the need to shift their workloads, applications and extending network functions from the core out to the edge, in order to achieve the levels of service in each of the three critical features above and to fulfill the 5G promise.
Furthermore, 5G in seamless integration with existing WiFi infrastructure running on the latest IEEE standard (WiFi6) will serve as a force multiplier for IoT, enabling an exponential number of people and device connections, andextending the reach and capabilities of existing IT infrastructure and applications. 5G and WiFi will make it possible to take IoT and device data, pre-process at the edge (through AI and business applications) and send it to cloud services to perform analysis in real time, enabling near real-time response instructions back to the system and more importantly, unlock possibilities for innovation never seen before, reducing costs and developing new sources of revenue.
Now, the million-dollar question is: how will 5G benefit end users and enterprises, in practical terms? The answer is: it depends. 5G is an extremely powerful tool for existing digital transformation initiatives like IoT, and it joins a greater set of tools at the disposal of businesses, who will be able to decide how to best use 5G and how it fits best in achieving their goals.
However, here are a few examples of practical use cases that can be implemented today with existing Wi-Fi and edge compute infrastructure – and how 5G will come to enhance and amplify the results.
Consumer: AR/VR-enabled digital shopping and experiences
- A home improvement store may have a remodel kiosk that pulls up your floorplan and lets you walk through each room in your house in VR, changing the color of each room, switching out furniture or appliances, or even adding a new wing on the house to see how it looks.
- In gaming, 5G in collaboration with Wi-Fi and compute at the edge will enable players to have more realistic video (including AR and VR) faster response from button to action, and will allow cloud-based gaming companies to deliver greater digital experiences
Industrial:
- Visual remote guidance and maintenance with AR/VR is possible today with the use of Wi-Fi, compute at the edge and also in combination with 4G LTE connectivity. However, with 5G, the quality of the video, the speed of reaction and level of interaction with the remote guidance will be greater, faster and will provide the ability to superpose real-time richer data that will result in greater efficiency and faster responses.
- Tracking workforce safety, security, and productivity is becoming a more critical ability for enterprises, especially those with a large venue where workers need to walk around buildings or moving objects, like machinery, containers, etc. The complementarity of 5G and Wi-Fi will allow enterprises to locate employees within their premises at all times, regardless of the type of connection, keeping them safe and providing alerts when something is not right.
Smart Cities and Public Spaces:
- Real-time public safety using video analytics can be done running algorithms as the video is captured, identifying objects, potential threats or behaviors that should be monitored. Edge compute and Wi-Fi can do the work today, but 5G will come to enhance the quality of the video data, and extend the reach of places being monitored where Wi-Fi can’t reach.
- Autonomous vehicles and drones are the most futuristic use cases, where fast connectivity to a cloud, the bandwidth to transmit Petabytes of data in hours and the ability to react in milliseconds is crucial. 5G in combination with compute at the edge will make autonomous vehicles possible.
5G is a disruptive factor that has the power to change the way you do business. How are you going to leverage it to your benefit?