Impact of 5G on our lives: How it will impact our lives and other fields?

5G — Impact of 5G on our lives: Advantages and Disadvantages

How 5G technology will impact our lives and other fields?

In an earlier post, I have discussed the fundamental concepts about 5G (5th generation of mobile networks), how mobile technology works, and how has this technology evolved from 1st generation to 5th generation, over the years. How much speed enhancements will be achieved by 5G.

In this post, I will shed some light on the impact of 5G on our lives and other fields. At the end, I will also discuss advantages of 5G and some limiting factors / disadvantages of 5G (as of now).

“Speed, reduced time to connect and get a response, Instantaneous reaction, Remote patient treatments, enhanced user experience, real time monitoring of devices, drones, etc. , Live gaming would result in an evolving gaming industry ultimately leading to new / enhanced business models”.

5G will bring great and highly influential changes to our businesses and lives. It is impossible to cover all of them in a short blog like this, but I will just list some of them in the following paragraphs.

1. Medical: Other than speed, it shortens the time of connection and period of getting a response from a network device. 4G had this issue, but 5G would solve it. Now the surgeons would need not to be physically in the same room as of patient. Through Virtual Reality (VR) headset, and 5G service he would be able to operate a patient who is far away. This would greatly address the shortage of medical practitioners on one hand and would likely to save many lives on the other hand, which are otherwise lost due to unavailability and shortage of doctors.

2. Haptic Feedback: A team of researchers from Kings College London, are working on haptic feedback. Through which, users would be able to share their experiences of experiments with other people and places without having the need to relocate or move physically. Video and sound could also be shared and transmitted over longer distances.

3. Self Driving Cars: This will only become true through 5G, since there is a limitation to send a signal / message from main centre to self driving car, which results in not having the possibility to stop cars from accidents. A network which has the capability to show instantaneous reaction and take over the control if there is a chance of accident or some danger.

4. Drones: 5G can bring their true power to the next level. Through 5G, HD videos can be obtained and 4k resolution can be used which is 4 times better than HD. These videos can be used to see and monitor the drones.

5. Live Gaming through VR Mask Glass: Engaging experience, will look like real life. Players from far away can engage in competitions potentially resembling the near real life experience.

6. New services and businesses (models) will emerge: Data download speed will increase, data resolution, data storage will increase due to which hard disk and system quality level will increase. The potential to leverage the power of Data & AI will exponentially grow. All the limitations which come in the way of downloading, exchanging data and processing data will become story of the past.

7. Enhanced Data Analytics: AI and Data Science will go to the next level with the help of 5G and the speed that it will bring. Edge analytics will be realized and AI and Data Science will become omnipresent.

As I mentioned before, these are just some of the changes which will happen. There are countless opportunities that we can think of and realise them within less time and budget, thanks to the power of 5G. However, other considerations that still have to be taken into account are legal, regulatory aspects and of course, it is needless to say regarding security and privacy. How those landscapes will change, and corresponding models, implementations and compliance requirements would definitely be required to be adapted.

“It will enhance the speed at which data and AI potential can be utilized by pushing data and AI to the next level”.

In the next section, I will briefly touch base on the advantages and disadvantages of 5G.

Advantages and (Limitations) Disadvantages of 5G:

Advantages of 5G:

1. Increased Bandwidth for all users
2. Faster Speed: Smart devices will become truly smart as they will not have limitations in terms of bandwidth and speed, which means they will more likely to have real time access to data. This will take the Analytics and AI applications to next level.
3. Uninterrupted connectivity across the world.
4. It will offer 10 times decrease in latency, 100 times traffic capacity, 100 times network efficiency and other benefits like these.

Limitations and Disadvantages of 5G:

Razvan and Giuseppe outlined the limitations of 5G in their paper[3] and highlighted that the AI will be the driving force for 6G. 5G equipments and devices will be costly. It will take some time before all the required infrastructure will be in place, as to take the full advantage of 5G strengths and power, a connection to be established a 5G device would be required at both ends; (a) client side: a 5 G mobile device, (b) On the server / provider side 5G antennas and other infra requirements have to be met.

Millimeter wavelengths have smaller coverage profile, despite the fact that they can carry more data, they can’t travel much far. To combat this problem, the carriers would need to provide a huge range of network antennas for stronger coverage.

In addition, skilled workforce and engineers are required to install and maintain 5G networks, which might limit its quick adoption. High costs would yet be another factor for initial deployments.

Although a few countries are front runners, many are late adapters, so it will take some time to become mainstream. Rural areas and remote locations, which are ideal candidates in terms of empowering the humanity and getting them connected, probably won’t have it anytime soon. For remote site, applications in agriculture, mining, remote site management etc are best candidate for leveraging 5G, carriers might be reluctant to deploy 5G in some of those remote areas.

Other considerations with reference to operationalisation and truly leveraging the potential of any technology such as privacy, and security are yet to be evaluated. Businesses would have to understand new security models enabled by 5G. As 5G would enable a whole lot of new capabilities, new legal restrictions and regulatory requirements will surface which organisations, individuals and operators have to comply with.

Conclusions and Future of Mobile Technology

While world has barely started to deploy 5G (in US it is expected to be launched between 2019 and 2024, China has planned to activate 130000 base stations of 5G networks by end of 2019 [4], South Korea claimed that they were the first to launch a 5G network in April 2019) and 4 million Koreans have 5G enabled phones since Oct 2019 with 5 million more expected to be by year end, many researchers have already started to work on 6G. The Academy of Finland announced the funding of “ 6Genesis,” an eight-year research program to conceptualize 6G under the auspices of the University of Oulu’s Centre for Wireless Communications [18 Apr 2018]. As we can see by looking back and refelcting at the history, a new mobile generation emerges after every 10 years, 6G will emerge around 2030 (hopefully even before) to overcome all the limitations of (or expectations not met by) 5G as well as the ones which are yet to be defined. 6G will offer TeraHertz frequencies and AI infused applications.

Qualcomm and other companies are also thinking about 6G. China has officially started investigating about 6G with a team consisting of Government departments and 37 other researchers from universities, research institutes, and corporates, as announced on Nov 6, 2019. Who knows it would be empowering or impacted a lot by technologies such as Quantum Computing, Lifi or Light-Fidelity [5] (using infrared and visible light spectrum to transmit data and position between devises), Wormhole [6]: which has the power to link disparate datapoint in spacetime, and their likes which have not been invented yet. This technology 5G and its sequels will greatly enhance the capabilities of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality(AR), IoT, Edge Computing etc. as they need a great deal of increase in wireless capacity. Some of the other areas, where it will have great influence include but not limited to Industrial Automation, Mission Critical Applications, Self-Driving Cars, Autonomous Systems.

Whatever you do and whatever role you play, it is evident that 5G will have not only an incredible value proposition to our lives, but will also greatly influence, change and enhance the way we do our business, we live our lives. Familiarising yourself and your dear ones with this and other technologies is not only critical but also would help in great deal for our time to come.

References:

1. 6G: the Wireless Communications Network for Collaborative and AI Applications
2. http://en.people.cn/n3/2019/1105/c90000-9629661.html
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405428317300151
4. Wormhole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.

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