Ten years ago, if you were a daily commuter, you'd struggle to do much more than watching a few pre-loaded movies or TV episodes or play single-player games on your smartphone as you traveled to work. Today, there are all manner of streaming services which, thanks to 4G, allow you to download and upload high-quality content straight to and from your mobile device.
With 4G being largely established, the next step is 5G, but while it will ramp speeds up massively yet again, it will do much more besides. I spoke to
Why 5G isn't just a faster 4G
Antony: 5G is becoming more of a buzzword, but I don’t think people realize the difference between 5G and 4G given that by far the biggest difference to your average person in the benefits between 4G and 3G was speed, seen primarily in our smartphones of course. What benefits does it have over 4G apart from speed and bandwidth?
Sandra: 5G is really the true convergence of computing and communications and the idea that everything that can and should be connected will be. I tend to think of 5G as having both revolutionary and evolutionary elements to it. The evolutionary elements are faster speed on your smartphone, enabled by beamforming and millimeter waves and massive antenna arrays, but essentially they’re all technologies that give you more bandwidth and faster speed.
The revolutionary part is that you’re bringing the compute much closer to the end point – the point of data creation or data consumption. We tend to think of this as person to person communication, or a person communicating with their own data, for example watching movies, using Facebook or Twitch. The benefits of 5G here is that it will bring better experiences, lower latency, less buffing and faster response times. Beyond that there’s the ability for billions of things connected to one another – these things could be any type of machines such as autonomous vehicles, smart meters in a city or a smart appliance in your home or a smart robot in a factory.
All the data that gets created gives valuable insights into what’s happening in your home, in factories and in cities and enables us to act on that such as improving traffic flow, making it safer for pedestrians, when to warm your house up or turn your appliances on. In a production line, how do you pick our defective products on a production line using computer vision or manage the workflow and efficiency on a factory floor, how do you understand the maintenance schedule of an item so you can call an engineer out before a machine breaks? All of that data aggregation and the insights it gives is really what 5G, by bringing that compute closer to the endpoints, creates a whole new class of applications either because they were technically not possible, perhaps due to latency or bandwidth constraints or cosmetically not feasible.
5G deployment timeline
Antony: 5G has been on the cards for several years and 2018 saw several trials and services get underway. How long do you think it will be before 5G will be readily available – such as in decent numbers of smartphone handsets, autonomous cars and other forms of transport, IoT, perhaps getting to levels we saw with 4G two or three years ago?
Sandra: We’re actually still in the early days of 5G. If you look at how long these transitions take, they’re typically measured in decade-long windows of time and if you go back to the 2G to 3G or 3G to 4G timescales they’re typically 10+ years. For 5G we’re in those first couple of years of that 10-year run. So, this wave one, which is well underway now that we have a global standard. This isn’t something we had with 3G or 4G and I think this stifled some of the investment. Some of the investors were reticent or had to be selective and focus on the markets they thought would be big enough to get returns on those investments. Having a global standard creates a global landscape for investment to come into the market.
The release 15 standard has been nailed down and with each release will come more functionality. Release 15 is a lot about the air interface and connectivity – the actual interoperability and protocols allowing 5G devices to talk to other 5G devices across the globe. Release 16 is where you’ll see the ultra-reliable, low latency capability, which is really required for things such as autonomous vehicles, operating machinery remotely in dangerous areas that might require high-resolution camera feeds or with highly responsive and accurate telemedicine or telesurgery - that applies to plenty of industrial equipment too. That’s release 16 that will come out later in 2019 and we’ve already completed several proofs of cncepts here from working with autonomous cars to industrial IoT (internet of things). Now there are standards, the next phase will be the commercial phase in terms of asking what is commercially and financially viable over the next couple of years.
Antony: So what we’re dealing with here is much more of a phased roll-out compared to 4G?
Sandra: For sure – it’s because there’s significant new functionality that happens with each of the releases and asking what is attractive to invest in for large commercial scale and in terms of the infrastructure that will be there will take several years. In the beginning, if we kind of pivot our minds to the fact that these are decade-long transitions and see that this will be a phased roll-out. If you look at the 2023-2025 time frame – I don’t think we really know frankly.
When you consider what the technology will be capable of – attending an event such as a sports game or event at the Tokyo Olympics virtually. Could you buy an e-ticket and experience the best seat from home? At what point does that become commercially attractive to deliver it and offer it at scale. It’s difficult to say – I wish I had all the answers, but if you lower the barriers for entry and give those tools to the innovators, these things happen and we’ve seen this happen over and over again – the Air BnBs, the Ubers, the Amazons and Googles – all things we didn’t perceive 10 or 15 years ago.
5G use cases
Antony: One area that certainly excites me about 5G are use cases both those we know about and perhaps even more tantalizing those that will inevitably spring up that we don’t yet know about thanks to new capabilities. Could you tell me use cases that you’re most excited about that will benefit from 5G and why.
Sandra: One of the use cases I find so exciting is collaboration and how you make this more effective and more fun. One example is where you have a headset and you’re collaborating with someone, who could be anywhere in the world and you’re working together to build an object and you can imagine how this can be used in a more collaborative environment where you could be building things together or prototyping things together or for a learning or training opportuning. I think that whole idea where you use technology for increased collaboration, efficiency and creativity is so powerful and fun.
Similarly one of the demos I’ve seen is where you can play Rubik’s cube with someone, but again this could be anything collaborative and using tools. I think all those AR and VR devices are really great uses of this technology. Once you have that compute nearer the edge of the network with 5G, you’ve actually created this platform of innovation you can use for all types of AI and collecting all this data and creating all these insights that you can take action on. In the case of building up the whole edge compute capability you have the option to do computer vision, facial recognition and object recognition perhaps for security purposes – there are a lot of these capabilities where you won’t have the latency of going to a centralized crowd – you now have the compute near the smart venue or enterprise location and this opens up a whole new set of use cases.
Another area I’m excited about is smart retail. For example, how do you keep track of your inventory, can you offer retail in areas that you can’t afford staffing, can you try on clothing using a smart mirror or smart environment – great if you like me you hate trying things on in stores. The retail experience could become more localized and more fun. There are so many fun use cases.
5G's impact
Antony: Do you think there are any products or services out there that 5G might make obsolete - for example could wired Internet connections be a thing of a past?
Sandra: I think if you have fiber to the home already then you’re going to want to take advantage of that. But if you don’t have it or it is cost-prohibitive or you have to dig up the street then the idea that you can have Gigabit capability at home or work without laying cables I think enables the whole experience much faster. It might not obsolete it, but it certainly aids the roll-out. For example, last year we helped stream the U.S open in 4K without running cables. We used 7mm waves to stream the event from the 7th hole so we didn’t have to contract with the labor unions we didn’t have the added production time and cost involved when you need to run cables.
It’s certainly possible that over time that model becomes more attractive than laying cables. Something that I’ve been asked is will 5G cost jobs? I think about toll booths and when you pay the booth collectors – these are repetitive low value tasks so if you automate that by just scanning a pass and charging someone and you don’t slow down in your car as a result – it’s just a repetitive task that’s not high-skilled and those people can easily be trained to do something else. It’s the same with cleaning factory floors – you could have robots do these low-skilled, repetitive tasks freeing up those people to do more creative or challenging things.
Intel and 5G
Antony: How extensive is Intel’s involvement in 5G – are we talking about a few key areas or end to end?
Sandra: Our strategy has been end to end and when I say end to end I mean we’re involved in the standards so we have leadership roles there, we’re involved in the open source projects because 5G is enhanced and accelerated by open source. From an ecosystem perspective it’s in Intel’s DNA - we are investors in as well as supporters and enablers of broad ecosystems and we believe if you lower the barriers of entry you accelerate the speed of innovation. Here at CES you have a lot of well-known brands, but also a lot of start-ups and new innovators and not just in 5G but in AI and autonomous driving and PCs and cloud gaming. More broadly, it’s very much from the client to edge to the network to the cloud and we are uniquely positioned to have that broad portfolio.
I'd like to thank Sandra for taking time out of her busy CES schedule to talk to me about 5G and you can read more about 5G and Intel's involvement with it here.
