I’ll tell you about the 5G opportunities not to be wasted

22 August 20204 years ago babelfish

How to plan forward-looking investments for 5G and the sectors that will be the first to take advantage of the new technology. The analysis by Ottavio Carparelli, a former senior manager in the telecommunications sector, now a consultant in corporate strategy

In the previous 2 weeks I have briefly expressed the following opinions:

Among the many application fields that can be facilitated by "5G type" hyper-connectivity, those associated with augmented reality are the most evocative and perhaps with the most impact on society
In turn, the possible fields of application of augmented reality are numerous (remote healthcare, games, virtual cultural visits, online and proximity purchases, etc.), and a telecommunications operator who wishes to become a truly significant player in this transformation should strive to position itself significantly in proximity to both application developers and the economic sectors that will evolve first

Today I make some considerations of a very different nature, linked to the possible interest in planning the infrastructure investments associated with the one that Alessandro Puglia and Andrea Melissano, global 5G experts at CapGemini , have recently and witely defined as "A brave new ultra connected society ”(winking at Huxley's“ New World ”).

Let's start from the beginning, in the past I have associated some major evolutions of society with the purchase of "superpowers" by humanity: the ability to transform things thanks to fire, the ability to move quickly thanks to the wheel and the motor, the ability to repeat actions in a precise and identical manner brought by the machines of the industrial revolution, the ability to talk to people at a distance, and so on, have all been macro examples, perhaps trivial, of human "superpowers" that have changed society.

But these superpowers have been obtained each time not thanks to an improvement of the human being per se, but thanks to a transformation of the world around the human being. It took roads, electricity and telecommunication networks, and many other infrastructural investments (which have truly transformed the world in a physical sense), to be able to allow man to use the new "superpower". The new ultra-connected society, which would allow the human being to travel in time to see things as they were and how they will be, and which would allow the human being to obtain results in the physical world thanks to semi-telepathic gestures (the apriti-sesame ), requires the enrichment of the surrounding environment with various things, for example it requires sensors that capture human gestures and expressions, it requires proximity computing resources that interpret those gestures and expressions to derive an understanding of intentions, and requires a series of mechanisms that "realize" the consequences desired by the human being. And this, on a large scale (not just at home or in the playroom).

There is no need to spend too much time on the consequences associated with any physical transformation of the environment around us. Transformations are made with the use of energy, and the fact that our energy consumption is not yet based on a "circle" creates, nowadays, an almost existential problem for the new "superpowers", we can " almost to say that “we cannot afford them”. But to imagine that it is enough to say no to 5G to block the new scenarios is not very credible.

WiFi-6, for one thing, allows and would allow the realization of similar scenarios, only with different cost structures and technological rules (better or worse depending on the case, here we do not intend to judge and compare both useful technologies). Furthermore, it is difficult to imagine the whole of humanity saying no to "new superpowers", and therefore it would be worth considering how to allow them with minimal impact.

It should also be remembered that the spread of 5G is a process that will take several years, in the early days we will see the spread of "extremely fast" communication, which will practically be an evolution of what we already have, essentially allowing us to have very high definition video quality and maybe in 3D; the more transformative aspects of augmented reality also require very fast and deterministic response times, and this will only be possible later in time. So imagine a world that is transformed in an absolutely unregulated way, along a path of several years, with the possibility of installing completely different infrastructures and in total competition, all using the 5G connection (or alternative …).

The problems of energy, environmental degradation and privacy (and many others that we are just beginning to glimpse) would probably be irremediable (at least in the cultural sense that we apply today). Many recent studies have shown that a good part of the environmental impact of new technologies comes from the proliferation of devices (of all types) more than from the use in itself … simplifying perhaps a little too much, it would be like saying that devices connected in 4G, bluetooth, fiber etc. that we buy during our lifetime to see and listen to movies online will cost more environmentally than using those devices to see and hear the movies themselves. According to this line of thinking, it is important to control the wild proliferation of equipment.

It is clear that, as always happens, the construction of the infrastructure will be patchy, starting from those areas where the demand for new services is highest. Ports, some health facilities, large sports facilities, but also the most crowded and visited city centers, and many other "campuses" (universities, airports, and so on), will be the first to "request" the new infrastructure. An active and multi-year collaboration of the various administrations responsible for the development of the priority areas with telecommunication operators, actors in the IT world, actors in the world of advertising would be truly desirable (yes, there is also a very large advertising aspect in the framework, that maybe we will deal with in the future), and universities, with their contribution in experimentation and innovation, so that the new superpowers arrive in the least destructive way possible.

It is not just a challenge, it is probably a real opportunity that would allow enterprising and collaborative communities to differentiate and emerge.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/5perche-dobbiamo-investire-nel-5g-e-non-solo/ on Sat, 22 Aug 2020 05:58:42 +0000.