GATINEAU – What is 5G and what will be the new killer application driving 5G network adoption? Those were two of the main questions that a number of speakers at the Wireless World Research Forum’s (WWRF) 5G Huddle conference in Gatineau last week attempted to answer.
As was noted many times during the event about new wireless networks, the applications that end up dominating and driving usage tend to have not yet been conceived when new networks begin rollout. Take SMS on 2G networks and video streaming on 4G networks, the application that will be the define 5G isn’t likely known at this point in time.
The WWRF event explored what some of those applications might be. Some had specific views while others didn’t. For Johanne Lemay, co-president at research firm Lemay Yates and Associates, the connected car could be a big application for 5G.
“I would put a bit of money on connected cars being the killer app for 5G,” she said, adding that this includes self driving cars.
Lemay provided some evidence to back her suggestion. According to a Hitachi report, 25 GBs of data per hour is going to be transmitting to the cloud in the future or more than 100 times the amount of data transmitted per hour from OnStar.
As well, there are several Silicon Valley technology companies exploring apps in the connected car space, meaning there’s a good bet this could be an initial application that comes to the fore. She added research Lemay Yates has done in the U.S. indicates there is a high level of interest from consumers south of the border to purchase connected and self driving cars if they got a break on their vehicle insurance rates.
The connected car may in fact turn out to be one of those killer apps for 5G, acknowledged Jonathan Segel, executive director of strategic innovation projects for the mobile networks group at Nokia.
But he said there will be a series of applications, depending the need for speed and bandwidth requirements of specific verticals. For example, there will be video and data apps that require higher speeds and throughput in certain locations. There will be others that will require ultra-reliable, low latency communications (URLLC). Many conference speakers seemed to think that these URLLC services will be the real 5G apps.
Segel said these highly reliable and low latency devices and networks will power apps such as augmented reality, industrial automation or others.
“Then the network is adding some specific value to that. It can’t just be a dumb fat pipe.” – Jonathan Segal, Nokia
However, he added, the network has to integrate a high level of intelligence.
If 5G is going to tap into new sources of revenue, new sources of profitability, if it’s going to affect materially the value chain of vertical industries, “then the network is adding some specific value to that. It can’t just be a dumb fat pipe,” said Segel.
Other industries such as agri-food could also benefit substantially from 5G networks, according to Mark Dietrich, president and CEO at Compute Canada.
“There’s already huge amounts of data sitting on farms, the estimate is something on the order of 500 petabytes that’s locked up on farms that could be processed to create better results for agriculture and greater outcomes,” he said.
The challenge, Dietrich added, is how to get that data off the farms so that it can be used. Rural broadband networks are often rudimentary and can’t handle real-time, thick data transmissions.
There are also other sectors, even resource-based ones that see major opportunities arise from 5G networks. The mining industry is one according to Jaco du Plooy, CTO at Ericsson Canada.
For example, using URLLC in mining equipment could substantially improve the efficiency of operations. By implementing URLLC in combination with other techniques could result in a digger acting exactly like a human operated machine. At times, the machine operator will just be feel that the skip has 100% capacity whereas a machine may not.
This means the network is critical in ensuring the maximum efficiency can be achieved, he added.
What became pretty clear as the two-day event progressed is that 5G is going to be a transformative type of technology that promises big changes, new applications and services for a variety of industries.
Martin Proulx, director general of engineering, planning and standards at Innovation Science and Economic Development (ISED), noted that moving to 5G is a time to take a bigger picture look at its potential impacts. “I think 5G launching is an opportunity to step back and rethink the entire network. I think that if we think of 5G as something that’s only incremental to 4G access, we’re missing the fundamental transformational aspects of 5G,” he said.
Proulx pointed to a study done for the city of Paris, France that showed adopting a completely new type of transportation infrastructure could have major positive downstream impacts. Reducing the number of vehicles on the road in the city by 80% to 90% with automated, car sharing services would result in “no loss of comfort and convenience in terms of getting from point A to point B,” he said.
And while there are many unanswered questions on 5G, there are some certainties though. These 5G networks will have very high throughput rates, estimated to be somewhere in the range of 10 Gbps. They will also have very low latency, one millisecond. And devices could have batteries that last 10 years before needing to be charged.
