What will 5G do for me?

[snoop1130]

What will 5G do for me?

By Special to The Nation

 

 

In a society where speed is always of the essence, 4G has delivered huge gains in performance: from 150Mbit/s to over 1GBit.

 

Now it’s about to be usurped by 5G, which brings not just an evolutionary growth in bandwidth, but also better use of the wireless spectrum, and improved connection reliability that will not only improve existing use-cases, but also provide essential flexibility and innovation space for new applications.

 

This flexibility is essential, and has became a core part of the 5G specification, which covers extreme bandwidth (eMBB), ultra-low latency and wired-(URLLC) and space for billions of connections (mMTC) thus seeding the potential for new apps and services to grow without worrying about limitations.

 

This isn’t vacant enthusiasm either: we have so many mobile-first services available today didn't exist prior to 4G smartphones, and with smartphone ubiquity and utility so obvious and global its a safe bet that 5G will again yield a flurry of new and innovative services, experiences and investments.

 

How will 5G improve our lives and what kinds of new opportunities can we expect?

 

Smart Cities

 

Building smarter cities can provide a wealth of benefits, but this is built on “operational intelligence”, which is to say services that react to the real-world, rather than just being fixed. Sensors and cameras will make up the bulk of the data gathering, and then cellular connectivity such as NB-IoT [Narrowband-Internet of Things] will relay it to a Cloud service for collection and digestion.

 

This forms just part of the billions of devices that are expected to join the IoT ecosystem in the next decade; some of which will do some edge-processing but most of which will require some form of remote connection capacity that’s likely to rely on cellular rather than unlicensed bands.

 

NB-IoT is already due to become the most popular LPWA (low-power wide area) network within the next two years; this reuses 2G cellular spectrum for those countries that have retired 2G services, or it can use the inter-band space of 4G LTE.

 

Replacing your home broadband with Fixed Wireless Access (FWA)

 

A big market opportunity for 5G is not actually mobile devices, but instead in replacing your home broadband.

 

Termed Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), this essentially is a device you plug in anywhere at home that converts a fast 5G connection into home Wi-Fi/Ethernet, letting all your Wi-Fi only devices – laptops, tablets, smart TV, smart appliances, doorbell, security cameras, games console have the benefits of multi-Gigabit bandwidth 5G offers.

 

This replaces the need to replace copper wiring with fibre to every house, saving significant infrastructure cost, and also frees the home user to put their 5G-enabled router just about anywhere, instead of within reach of the landline.

 

As most broadband users are on sub-Gigabit speeds today, it could provide a truly significant boost in internet performance at home. While for remote villages or developing countries where internet services are sparse or difficult to wire, it could be the gateway to internet availability for the very first time.

 

Internet of Vehicles (IoV), In-vehicle Infotainment and Autonomy

 

IoV covers a lot of aspects of vehicular connectivity, whether personal or commercial. Some vehicles today include cellular connections, but the usage is often limited to basic apps like maps, music or emergency calling. In future it’s expected that new services will be introduced into vehicles – whether for in-vehicle entertainment; 4K movies, TV, music, internet, ticket sales and advertising (buses, coaches, trains), or increasing levels of autonomy. Public Wi-Fi is typically slow and spotty, yet it can be an essential asset for tourists or Wi-Fi-only device users (laptops) so this service certainly has growth potential. With vehicles now competing for cellular space alongside smartphones, 5G’s better spectral efficiency will certainly provide capacity to meet this growth.

 

Autonomous vehicles, meanwhile, will require ultra-reliable, low latency connectivity (that won’t be available until a few years into 5G) and V2X (vehicle to everything) standards that are only now in discussion.

 

Suddenly areas that were previously of low cellular demand, like highways, have hundreds of calls for high bandwidth streams, information services and in future, mission-critical low-latency requests.

 

Game Streaming (Gaming as a Service)

 

5G is designed to be application variable between extreme bandwidth, ultra-low latency and massive connectivity. Gaming on smartphones has recently exploded in popularity with games like Fortnite becoming an international hit. However, instead of rendering the game on the smartphone itself, game streaming services instead do the heavy lifting remotely and stream the display output to devices instead. This reduces the pressure on the smartphone, while simultaneously opening up many lower-performance smartphones, or even other devices like smart TVs, to be able to play games with high-end graphics. It will also offer other advantages such as being able to pause a game on one device and seamlessly continue playing it on another.

 

As games are extremely latency sensitive – the user button press has to be acted upon within a few milliseconds – having the ability to tune the wireless connection in favor of being ultra-responsive is literally a game changer. Big investments being already made by companies such as Google, EA, Microsoft and Sony, who are a testament to this technology becoming an expected inflection point.

 

Better connection reliability

 

Deeper into the spec of 5G, we find it enables much better spectral efficiency. This means, the available wireless space is better used. If you're out anywhere where there's a lot of people (and inevitably their smartphones) like shopping malls, airports, train stations, sports stadiums - this is a real advantage.

 

For example: as a match hits half-time or the period ends, triggering 80,000 people in the stadium to pull out their smartphone to check the scores elsewhere, it puts an immense and sudden pressure on a single point of cellular infrastructure. 5G is designed to provide this kind of capacity through better use of wireless air-space, so all these people should see no noticeable difference in user experience.

 

5G mobile devices and base-stations work together to provide a still ‘good enough’ performance the closer you get to the edge of cellular reception, meaning you’ll still get a useful 100s Mbps performance rather than kbps.

 

Growth of remote interactions and XR

 

The remote-service model yields a real potential for services such a as tele-education, -office, -industrial robotics or -health services. Tele-education could provide more real-time opportunities between students and teachers. Office and industry can bring remote workers together to foster closer working relationships, operational efficiency and working assurances to satisfy HR. Tele-health provides several applications such as remotely providing medical services to at-home patients, reducing the burden on hospitals, or providing the mission-critical connection backbone for remote surgeries, where a field-specialist is using precision robotic arms whilst in another city or country.

 

XR describes the evolution of VR, MR and AR; a reality model that is not limited to the device but will continue to be an opportunity for future industries listed above. Where going beyond the flat screen into an immersive experience that’s closer-to-real will require personal freedom; that infers an ultra-low latency, ultra-efficient cellular connection of sufficient bandwidth for the application. 5G’s flexible design should meet this type of highly application-specific criteria.

 

The AI wildcard

 

All this is even before we come to the potential of Artificial Intelligence. While developing rapidly, AI is still in its application infancy and we don't know how it will change the landscape of products - user, commercial, industrial or civic. The balance between AI processing on-device or in the Cloud is likely to swing back and forth as new software is created, new opportunities are discovered and new services are launched and improved upon. Whether they become part of consumer smartphones, commercial IoT, or used in smart cities, who knows, but it's likely, though, that all will require some amount of data-offloading or discussion to a central service, which ultimately means many more devices or data-throughput requests to meet in future.

 

Source: https://www.nationthailand.com/edandtech/30378299

 

-- © Copyright The Nation Thailand 2019-11-13

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[OneMoreFarang]

11 minutes ago, snoop1130 said:

What will 5G do for me?

Little to nothing for most users.

[PatOngo]

21 minutes ago, snoop1130 said:

What will 5G do for me?

Make you 5 grand richer?

[Inn Between]

And a lot of people are asking the question, "What will 5G do TO me?". 

[sfokevin]

15 minutes ago, PatOngo said:

Make you 5 grand richer?

More likely 5 grand poorer... 

 

[Chazar]

The  ability to spend 25 hrs  a day gawking at a useless piece of Thai <deleted> soap etc etc

[ukrules]

I rarely use the internet on my phone and when I do I usually connect to wi-fi, if there is no wi-fi then whatever came before 3G was good enough for loading normal webpages.

 

 

[Beggar]

Is this article from Huawei? 

[Number 6]

Faster FB, IG and YouTube. Instant win for zombie populus.

[taichiplanet]

sounds all great, until someone hacks the system. Imagine driverless cars being hacked and all the traffic lights in the smart city are turned to green. While i am not a Luddite, maybe i am just a sceptical old man!

[KhunBENQ]

7 minutes ago, Beggar said:

Is this article from Huawei? 

No, Ericsson

This MediaThek company is Taiwan based and seems to work with Ericsson.

 

[KhunBENQ]

1 hour ago, OneMoreFarang said:

Little to nothing for most users.

Particularly for the typical foreigner using internet in Thailand to view/load data from servers located overseas.

The bottlenecks are and will be the undersea cables for total bandwidth.

And even 5G can't shrink the earth and break speed of light.

200 ms, 300 ms or more latency time can't be beaten.

[canuckamuck]

Now even your toaster will be an agent of the state, while it fills you with tumors, as you watch all the birds die. 

 

[legend49]

11 hours ago, sfokevin said:

More likely 5 grand poorer... 

 

Yes Thai wifey will want a new smart phone for 5G for sure her friend told her so LOL.

[spidermike007]

We are years if not decades away from a fully implemented 5G network. None exists in the US. AT&T has a fake 5G E network. Barely faster than 4G. And Thailand? How long did it take to get 4G up and running?

[Cereal]

5G will give China the keys to all the locks. 

[rwill]

The biggest impediment to 5G here is the buildings.  The higher frequency 5G signals are not good at penetrating solid objects with cement and brick structures being among the worst.  

[nervona81732]

If you operate on 5G , transmitters are too close and it will fry you from the inside out like a micro wave oven.

[Srikcir]

1 hour ago, spidermike007 said:

We are years if not decades away from a fully implemented 5G network. None exists in the US. AT&T has a fake 5G E network. Barely faster than 4G. And Thailand? How long did it take to get 4G up and running?

Big four US carriers face off over 5G

https://www.cnet.com/news/verizon-vs-at-t-vs-t-mobile-vs-sprint-5g-we-compare-their-peak-speeds/

[Diddl]

3 hours ago, canuckamuck said:

Now even your toaster will be an agent of the state, while it fills you with tumors, as you watch all the birds die. 

 

At least someone knows what is going on - good on ya Canuckamuck.  For those who don't know, see what is happening in the UK - no birds left, no bees left, people having nose bleeds, people dying, cancer, etc.  Good luck to you all who want it.  There were 2 tests in Bangkok some months ago and the result was nose bleeds and hospitalisations but media seemed to be hush hush about it so who knows what else happened.

[OneMoreFarang]

14 hours ago, Chazar said:

The  ability to spend 25 hrs  a day gawking at a useless piece of Thai <deleted> soap etc etc

NO! Now they can download 25 hours of soap opera probably in 25 minutes or even less time. So they can run it in fast forward 10x speed - I doubt that will make it more difficult to understand. Then they can use all that extra time for real important staff like facebook or candy crunch or something like that.

[Isaan sailor]

It will allow Huawei to control your life and finances better—if you don’t succumb to cancer first...

[kingstonkid]

The challenges are that it will be easier for people to track you and hackers to hack you.  As to the health risks I have seen too many articles on both sides of the argument to know for sure but I am sure a year after it is out we will find out.

 

The only issue I have is that as with anything else it will be a new cost shoved onto me as providers will phase out 4 G and make 5 g mandatory.

 

 

[Harveyg]

3 hours ago, spidermike007 said:

We are years if not decades away from a fully implemented 5G network. None exists in the US. AT&T has a fake 5G E network. Barely faster than 4G. And Thailand? How long did it take to get 4G up and running?

Hopefully long enough for people in general, and on this site, to become routinely aware of the incredibly magnified health risks associated with 5G.  And don’t expect it to come from the author at the Nation of the above article. 

[Pilotman]

5G means that you will pay more for the same level of service and speed.   It also means that your kids ( and you) will fry their brains as they walk past the new, high power 5G masts. It also means that you can look forward to hearing in 5 years time that it causes brain cancer in a great many of us. But the good thing is that the telecoms people will make tons more cash, so that's alright then. 

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

16 hours ago, Beggar said:

Is this article from Huawei? 

 

Reads like a telcom industry news release, or should I say, PR release.

 

I've got supposed 4G / LTE from DTAC in the center of BKK, and I don't get 150 Mbps down now on mobile data. And when I ran a mobile data speedtest on my phone this morning, it came it at about 39 Mbps for multi threads and 5 Mbps for single thread.

 

[Curt1591]

3 hours ago, Cereal said:

5G will give China the keys to all the locks. 

Yes; 5G is much bigger than telephones and internet. It will connect everything, with everything. 

At this point, even if China and Huawei where completely trustworthy,  according to many IT security experts, the OS is pretty sloppy, with plenty of vulnerabilities. 

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

4 hours ago, spidermike007 said:

We are years if not decades away from a fully implemented 5G network. None exists in the US. AT&T has a fake 5G E network. Barely faster than 4G. And Thailand? How long did it take to get 4G up and running?

 

I believe the terms of bidding docs released the other day by NBTC said the carriers would have to cover 50% of the country's population with 5G service within four to eight years of bid award... depending on the spectrum.

 

The article, at least, didn't specify what if any standards exist for going beyond the 50% of population coverage criteria.

 

 

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

1 hour ago, kingstonkid said:

 

The only issue I have is that as with anything else it will be a new cost shoved onto me as providers will phase out 4 G and make 5 g mandatory.

 

Not to mention, you'll get to (have to) buy new mobile phones if you want to take advantage of the future 5G service, because it won't function on most of the phones used today, much less even on most of the phones only being sold today.

 

[Krataiboy]

17 hours ago, taichiplanet said:

sounds all great, until someone hacks the system. Imagine driverless cars being hacked and all the traffic lights in the smart city are turned to green. While i am not a Luddite, maybe i am just a sceptical old man!

Join the club!