As 100,000 people came together in Barcelona this week for the annual Mobile World Congress, 5G, the mobile network of tomorrow stole the show.
As such, there’s much more significant importance to 5G than merely being a candidate of superfast speeds or low latency – everyone is talking about 5G in Barcelona because the next generation of mobile networks is destined to emerge as a catalyst of technical advancements that will transform almost everything in our daily lives; the way we think, the way we work, the way we behave.
Laila Worrell, CEO of high-tech engineering enterprise Altran North America, says that 5G will have a great influence on our lives. She believes that 5G is going to drive us to a major advancement in our quality of life.
5G and driverless cars
For beginners, there’s a major role 5G can play in the way we commute. Self-driving vehicles have been the center stage of debates for a while now, and 5G mobile networks can breathe a new life into this concept.
As numerous 5G evangelists claim 5G networks to be 100 times faster as compared to the current 4G networks, and that a large number of devices will be able to connect to a 5G network at the same time, the cars of tomorrow will be easily able to interact with each other in real time.
This means the vehicles of the 5G era will be able to understand when another vehicle is switching lanes, taking a turn, or applying brakes; thence managing traffic accordingly.
Electric SUV BMW iNEXT, which is scheduled for launch in 2021, will be equipped with sensors that are able to gather and manage data from the car’s surrounding environment.
Christoph Grote, senior vice-president of electronics at BMW, recently revealed that the BMW iNEXT will be able to survey the road around it in real-time and send collected data to the cloud, thence creating a real-time map which, in turn, is collected and processed by all other cars nearby.
5G and bees
5G will have a tremendous impact on our daily lives. When used for the deployment of smart agriculture, 5G can have a decent influence on the environment.
David Houghton, general manager at NimbeLink, recently revealed how the Internet of Things and 5G can come in handy for protecting honeybees, and the food chain in general.
He said that beehives are extremely valuable to us and are already in high demand around the world as such, therefore there’s a need for hive keepers need to safeguard them. With 5G, hive keepers will be able to use asset trackers for practically monitoring the beehives and the health of the bees.
The Bee Corp has joined hands with assets tracking solutions provider NimbeLink to develop a beehive tracking and management system that collects and processes essential data such as location, movement, temperature, and humidity through IoT sensors. The collected data can then be analyzed to figure out the conditions of the hive.
The future
While most of us are still working on to figure out the endless capabilities 5G will offer, scientists have already come up with the next big thing on the block.
“5G is good but 6G is better,” said Ari Pouttu, a science professor at the University of Oulu, Finland.
He said that projected to become a reality by 2030, 6G will be a thing beyond the smartphones and the way we will be able to interact with our surroundings. “You can have smart surfaces with electronics in them, smart glasses so you can have devices everywhere,” he said.
But then, it’s a long long way to go before we start thinking practically about the scope of 6G. 5G is just around the corner for the moment and we must look to make the most of it during the next few years.
So, stay tuned