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As the promise of 5G creeps slowly into the present day, the ways certain technologies and industries will be affected or transformed once the technology is in place are coming into focus. While many businesses cannot say they are using 5G today, many are experiencing its initial impact as the fiber roll-out to prepare for 5G takes place. Over the next year or two, we will see the use of 5G as an alternative to fiber for buildings, introducing a more robust network and reduced latency to networks that will evolve with implementation.
While most 5G conversations are around the grand promise of 5G wireless services, deployments to the cell phone aren’t what’s most disruptive today. What is how 5G is lighting up buildings at multi-gig speed, replacing what would traditionally have been fiber access. While we may not see the benefits of 5G directly within the data center for a few years, as we likely will not use 5G to connect servers together there, we are already seeing the benefits of a more robust network and added redundancy as networks evolve to prepare for the 5G rollout.
Another benefit of the 5G rollout is the density of devices. A typical 4G network, which is what LTE is built off of, can have about 1,000 devices/km2. 5G will enable hundreds of thousands of devices/km2. It will open up the number of devices on the network, which then opens up the amount of data sources on the network and increases the bandwidth. Being able to stream video in real time and upload over 5G is a realistic use case – you wouldn’t be able to do high-definition video uploading through a 4G connection.
Government and city municipalities also will be reaping the benefits of 5G in 2020, and some counties already are. Stemming from the 5G fiber rollout is the increase in cell towers in the U.S from around 300,000 to a million. There will be 5G towers in office parks and shopping plazas in cities and suburbs, which will allow cell towers to have much closer proximity to large data centers. This increase in cell towers will decrease the amount of time it takes to get data from an application to a nearby data center, heavily reducing latency in metro areas, which will be critical as more applications are deployed in cities and more data is being generated.
For example, autonomous vehicles will generate around 4 terabytes of data a day once they are deployed on roadways. Another smart city use case enabled by 5G will be controlling traffic. For instance, consider three jurisdictions within a 10-square mile radius of each other in a city working together to control traffic through synchronizing traffic lights to move vehicles more efficiently. This will be done through video surveillance, and for it to work data will need to be pulled from data centers in real-time over a robust network. We can only expect this type of collaboration and innovation to grow with the rollout of 5G over the course of the next decade.
As for the industries that will see the most benefit from 5G in 2020, the media and entertainment sectors are seeing immediate effects with the use of 5G extensively in video streaming. With consumer demand for diversified viewing experiences, networks are leaning into 5G to support the speed of video. For example, sports franchises like the MLB are working to differentiate their fan experience by giving their fans access to live-stream games. This requires a robust network and modernized framework to deploy. A few key enablers for 5G are 5G radio technology itself and 5G towers. 5G radio technology is extremely robust and has the ability to shape different frequencies to be used in various ways. For example, if you are standing close to a tower you may have 10 Gbps of upload capacity, but if you were farther away you might have 1 Gbps. Applications close to the 5G radio have much more throughput, enabled by the fiber rollout to support 5G.
The challenge of all this is that with more devices on the network and more throughput on the network as 5G comes into play, upgrading your network data infrastructure technology to make sure it can support all this is key. It will be imperative in 2020 to make sure businesses have the latest and greatest optical technology and to ensure you can secure networks and data on the networks as bandwidth increases.