Tomorrow’s Cellular Networks Will Generate $3.5 Trillion in Economic Output
Today’s cellular networks can guide you to a destination in an unknown city; tomorrow’s will transport you there.
In a report released in January, IHS Markit, a London-based research firm, says the arrival of 5G, sometime around 2020, will elevate wireless to an elite category economists call general purpose technologies that includes the printing press and the steam engine. The study estimates that 5G will generate $3.5 trillion in economic output and 22 million jobs worldwide by 2035.
Perhaps the biggest advance will be a vast reduction in latency—that is, communication lag times. Low latency is more or less a prerequisite for the commercialization of a slew of new technologies, including driverless cars, which need to ping one another multiple times per second to avoid collisions, as well as telesurgery and robotics. To shorten delays, 5G networks will have built-in processing power, store data closer to where it’s needed, and run on a new swath of radio-frequency spectrum.
This summer, AT&T and Verizon will each begin trials in select cities using 5G to beam movies and TV channels into homes wirelessly, competing with cable and satellite TV operators head-on. Australia and South Korea will demo their own 5G networks next year, the latter during the Winter Olympics. But the bulk of deployments will start in 2020, with carriers prioritizing cities.
bloomberg.com |
