Do you feel the need for speed? Imagine the ability to move from 100s of megabits per second today to 10,000+ in the future on your smartphone or tablet. 5G will turn all of that into a reality. To badly misquote one of my favorite superheroes, “With great speed comes great performance.” Thus 5G has the potential to create an entirely new class of devices and services that will change our lives forever.
041204-N-5345W-277 An F-14B Tomcat is catapulted from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS... [+] Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) during evening flight operations in the Persian Gulf on Dec. 4, 2004. Truman and its embarked Carrier Air Wing 3 are providing close air support and conducting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions over Iraq. The Tomcat is assigned to Fighter Squadron 32. DoD photo by Airman Kristopher Wilson, U.S. Navy. (Released)
US Navy
Carriers all over the world are betting big. In April of this year,
T-Mobile
spent billions of dollars at FCC auction on spectrum that is targeted for 5G service deployment in the US and claims that it will be first to market with ubiquitous coverage.
Sprint
's commercial 5G availability is slated for late 2019 with its galactic far far away flavored announcement of C3PO, a scheme aimed at virtualizing its networks to make them more efficient (as a Star Wars nerd I applaud the naming convention). Across the globe,
China Mobile
and
China Telecom
have announced that 5G trials will begin in Xiongan in 2018 with a goal to commercialize networks by 2020.
Is the road to 5G paved in gold?
Lots of wireless infrastructure companies are investing in hardware, software and solutions that provide the “plumbing” to make 5G a reality. Despite current financial woes,
Ericsson
recently launched its “dynamic orchestration” solution promising to help carriers migrate to 5G by virtualizing their networks. Its 5G platform tools combine core, radio and transport solutions and will support trials in Australia with
Vodafone
and Spark in New Zealand among others.
And even the PC companies are getting into the game. Dell EMC and
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
(HPE) both offer services around Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to enable a faster transition from 4G to 5G. NFV is an initiative to virtualize network services that have traditionally run on dedicated, proprietary hardware. It facilitates moving services like load balancing, firewalls and intrusion prevention systems away from dedicated hardware. On the other hand, SDN is a series of network objects: switches, routers, firewalls, all deployed in a highly-automated manner. The result of deploying both NFV and SDN can help service providers and carriers minimize service delivery cost and improve time-to-market based on using open standards and cloud-based technologies. 5G is expected to be costly and complicated to rollout, thus these solutions can add significant value and accelerate the transition from 4G to 5G.
Future services will seem like something out of a sci-fi movie
In addition to the aforementioned superhero, I’m a huge science fiction movie fan and 5G promises to bring technology and services only once imagined. Remember those self-driving cars in Minority Report and I Robot? Augmented reality heads-up displays in the movie Aliens? 5G will make all of that a reality and more.
Nokia
, a major player among wireless infrastructure providers cited many more use cases in a 2016 technical paper. Among them, smart city sensors that can trigger needed road repair, smart energy grids that flex to meet spiking power demands, logistics and freight tracking and telemedicine enhancements that include remote measurement of heart rate, blood pressure and other vital statistics.
Apple
recently announced a planned enhancement to the Apple Watch to monitor glucose levels for people suffering from diabetes. Think about the power of a 5G network to carry that data back and forth via a telemedicine application to improve the quality of their lives.
5G is around the corner and one thing is for certain: our lives will be touched in one way or another by it. Game over man, game over!
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Disclosure: My firm, Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided research, analysis, advising, and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise cited or related to this article. I do not hold any equity positions with any companies cited in this column.
