5G is cool. It’s all the buzz these days in the tech business world and for consumers. You’ve seen it on every single telecom commercial as they race to 5G, and you’ve heard about how ‘fast your cell phone will be.’ I can assure you 5G promises much more than a faster cell phone. But what exactly is 5G and what will it mean for you?
Here are the top 5 ways I believe 5G will impact your life:
- Telehealth: There are many use cases that could save lives via faster diagnosis. For example during the Golden Hour a connected ambulance could rapidly diagnose a patient who has had a stroke, acute CHF or MI within the first hour of the incident. and let’s not forget the potential of remote surgery — it sounds crazy, but it’s coming. When you need an operation by a specialized surgeon but cannot physically be in the same location, 5G has the potential to bridge the gap remotely.
- Connected vehicles: Connected and eventually autonomous vehicles are in our future. Already, you can sit at an outdoor cafe in Palo Alto enjoying an ice cream and watch many of the big tech companies operating their autonomous vehicles, with a person behind the wheel for safety. Not that I did that.
- Cutting the Cord: Everyone wants to cut the cord and save money with their cable company. You will be happy to know 5G will bring about speeds that are just as fast (or faster) than current wireless (and new wireless is coming but that is another topic for another day). It’s possible that many people could run their connected devices solely from 5G. Keep in mind, there are still a lot of wires running 5G itself, just not in your home.
- Connected Cities: 5G will allow us to enable our cities to be smarter and therefore safer. Cities can monitor traffic and pedestrian patterns and be alerted to anomalies to keep our streets and cities safer. We have already created a smarter city solution for the City of Las Vegas in collaboration with VMware.
- Things Not Yet Found on the Internet: There are many ways that 5G will change your life that we aren’t ready to share. Did you know that delivery of services such as Uber and Instagram needed 4G, because their apps didn’t function well on a 3G network? In a sense, 4G made Uber and Instagram “happen.” I would guess many people don’t remember what is was like before you could Instagram story your entire day or have a car pick you up in 2 mins flat by pressing 2 buttons. 5G isn’t just ‘faster internet,’ rather, it’s a complete rebuild of the network — so the possibilities are endless.
I know that we are #5GReadyNow as we help the biggest Telcos build the 5G network from the core to the edge. Still, many of these applications will be an evolution over time and are #5GFuture. 5G also holds many possibilities beyond those listed here. I can assure you that we are working on things at Dell Technologies that you may not yet know that you need by building the infrastructure to run the network and manufacturing the hardware to run on it. If you are interested in reading more be sure to check out our entire 5G blog series.
