5G: Evolution or Revolution?

Cellular technology has reshaped how we interact with each other and the world, no other technology has had a greater impact on civilization in the 21st century and this is just the beginning. As companies begin to roll out 5G to select cities the technology will bring all new changes to industry and society. Blink and you might miss them.

5G technology is poised to bring improvements that are orders of magnitude greater than current 4G LTE technology. Right now, networks can deliver speeds around 20 MB/s, 5G can deliver up to 600 MB/s. Latency, the time it takes for your information to travel to its destination, is reduced from an average of ~70 milliseconds to less than 1 millisecond. Then there is connectivity, the number of unique connections that can be made within a square kilometer. 5G offers 10 times greater connectivity of 100,000 over 4G’s 10,000 as well as upping the reliability of these connections to 99.999%. Finally, the energy efficiency of 5G technology will allow 10 times longer battery life than current devices.

All these enhancements herald the creation of entirely new industries that will take advantage of these capabilities. When you think that Uber barely existed when 4G first rolled out, and now with the on demand economy there is an “Uber” for practically everything you begin to get a sense of how radical this transformation will be. How many startups of today will blossom into the titans of tomorrow on the backs of these networks?

The most obvious and immediate winner of this rollout will be the mobile broadband consumer. Faster download speeds mean you can download your movie in seconds and upload your selfies in milliseconds. You could probably livestream your entire life and barely make a dent in your available bandwidth. The full connectivity to the internet goes anywhere you go, no more asking for the café’s wifi password or worrying if your home broadband will reach all the way to your bedroom, the internet is now ubiquitous and faster than ever before. Thinking beyond that you could imagine that phone manufacturers will think of clever ways to improve their products and take advantage this new paradigm. Moore’s law begins to break down as we approach the 10nm processor size, we can only cram so much power into a handheld device, but networks continue to improve 10x by every generation. Maybe phones don’t need to be $1200 processing behemoths with 256 GB of storage but are rather connectivity tools that leverage the power of cloud-based supercomputers and near limitless cloud storage. A whole server rack in your pocket able to stream to your TV and talk to your smart home and plug in to your driverless car. Plenty of software already does this, Alexa sends your soundbites off to the cloud for the complex voice recognition processing. Google translate can process images in real time because it off loads that data to its powerful data centers. But that’s just sending pictures and soundbites, imagine what a bigger data pipe could handle? Real-time facial recognition technology, augmented reality that overlays data onto your smart glasses, high fidelity gaming running through phone sized devices. You thought Pokémon Go was fun? Wait until some enterprising gaming company turns all real space into a game world. Does that get your attention yet?

Mobile broadband is just the tip of the iceberg, as much fun as we will have on our new toys the real revolution is going to be the non-human agents interacting with the network. In addition to the faster speeds we also have the higher connectivity which will allow billions rather than millions of connections. An army of discrete agents running intelligent autonomous tasks all around us. There have been huge developments in machine learning and AI over that past few years. We have computers that can defeat the worlds greatest players in incredibly complex games like GO or DOTA 2. This intelligence is about to reach out and touch our lives on every street corner. Self-driving cars alone present a dauntingly complex problem; a vehicle needs to know its location, speed, surroundings, route, and traffic rules. It needs to be able to process that data in real-time as well as interact and relay necessary information to other smart vehicles around it. This simply would not be possible without the high capacity, low latency, and high reliability of a 5G connection. That’s not to even mention all the Netflix we are going to be binging in our new mobile entertainment pods. So yea, vehicles are about to get pretty smart, but we are about to start putting sensors in everything, trash cans, street lights, refrigerators, dog collars, luggage, everything! The IoT revolution is here and the data it creates is going to create an entirely new level of human and civilizational self-awareness. Our data sphere is going to start to know more about us than we know about ourselves. Health trackers are going to flag vitamin deficiencies and be able to detect early onset of diseases. Your fridge is going to know that your favorite food is in fact waffles, not pancakes, because you ate waffles 212 times this year. If this data is public or shared it could also enable greater cognition of our society, we could track viral outbreaks in real time, understand and avoid inefficient traffic patterns on a granular level, or predict energy usage to empower a smart energy grid. Again, these are things that we do in some capacity already, but we are sipping data through a straw right now and we are about to be blasted by a fire hose’s worth of information.

The most interesting and nebulous aspect is how this technology is going to affect society on a fundamental level. The Wall Street Journal and other publications have called the printing press the greatest invention of the last millennium, not because the invention was a technical achievement or spawned massive industries in its wake, but because it enabled the era of mass communication that altered the course of history. The printing press is synonymous with Luther’s 93 theses, the enlightenment, the scientific revolution, the democratic and communist revolutions that rocked the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The printing press democratized information and gave the power of knowledge to the people. I believe we are living through a similarly revolutionary time and that the communication networks that we create will enable seismic shifts in all aspects of our life. From the way we work to the shape and layout of our cities to the nature of our political, financial, and social systems. How will our landscape change as telecommuting and remote work becomes the norm? What will money look like as decentralized payment platforms get more advanced? What does it mean to be educated when we can have all the information we would ever need at our fingertips? What is the nature of relationships in a time when you can be always connected to anybody? What does democracy look like as we forge new identities that cross geographical boundaries? We are on the precipice of a great unknown and I, for one, feel lucky to be alive during such a revolutionary time.

NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent or reflect the views of any company or organization.