Wazzup Pilipinas!
Most gadgets already have some sort of
connection to the internet. Web based email accounts, storage applications like
Dropbox, spreadsheets and word processes from Google - and a myriad more
applications - are just different ‘Front Ends’ to the cloud. Credible
estimates suggest that the cloud is already responsible for nearly 60% of
company IT spend and that this trend will continue, rising to 80% of company IT
budgets before the end of the decade.
And now, here comes 5G for any new gadgets
that come to market. 5G is likely to change the nature of what we do, the ways
that we do it and could result in the currently cheap
cost of mobile data services rising quickly, to be a higher proportion of
family and business expenses.
5G
may be here much sooner than you think - in around 2 years
A host of gadgets are going to make use of
5G. 5G technology, which will supersede 4G / LTE connectivity, from the year 2020
(trials will start in most countries as early as 2018), will offer data speeds
so fast that for most users, downloads will seem to occur instantaneously and
bandwidth will seem infinite. It’s this sort of super speed that will turbo
charge the move to the cloud for business and consumers alike.
What's more, gadgets that use 5G will
benefit from something we've never experienced before : near zero latency. (5G
connections will respond in less than 1 millisecond. Humans can only detect
responses less than around 200 milliseconds.
An
example of the difference 5G can make to your gadgets
As soon as you hit enter, whatever gadget
you’re using, you'll get the response to your query. Both aspects of 5G favour
web based interactions, over larger, more expensive to maintain and
inconvenient to download native apps.
At the moment, using Google Sheets, (Google’s
free web based Excel equivalent) for example, can be slower than undertaking
the same task on Microsoft’s software. The difference users experience is precisely
because of the latency between the submission of information to each cell and
the time it takes the page to download / respond.
To the user, this appears as
a delay between pressing return and seeing the numbers they’ve typed in appear
on the page. In Excel, the information is held and worked on locally rather
than in the cloud which works better when processing power and storage is local.
The principal applies both to laptop and smartphone interactions.
What
could happen to the apps we use when 5G gets here
More than 50% of all internet transactions
are already performed from mobile devices. When 5G arrives, the new technical
features of the technology are likely to cause an even faster migration of the
things which are not currently in the cloud, across to web based.
In simple terms Google's free 'Sheets'
software will function just as effectively over a 5G connection as Excel does
now. We will all benefit from the change. Sheets is free, to begin with, can be
worked on by many people at the same time and is automatically backed up.
Since
processing is done centrally, it’s more efficient. Instead of the processor in
your phone or laptop being unused most of the time, it’s far more likely that centralized resources will be better utilized. That’s the primary reason we have networks, after all, to make resource utilization more efficient.
Ironically, the centralization of
everything in the cloud could lead to things being more, not less available.
When Doctors can operate remotely, using a 5G connection, as if they were in the
same room as the person being operated on, they can remove the need for
patients to travel to them.
At an individual level, the phones we use
may become much cheaper – since expensive processors and storage will no longer
have to be bought by the user – they will be available online for a fraction of
the cost. Prices for digital services are likely to fall as standards rise and
the world moves to a ‘pay per use’ model of everything.
5G is likely to be so successful at driving
adoption of web based services that WiFi, the last mile of current fixed
connections will have to be improved or it will be sidestepped. Our
expectations of technology are rising rapidly and are re-framed by every new
‘optimal’ experience we have. When we’re used to infinite bandwidth and
immediate turnaround from 5G, why would we settle for less elsewhere?
If there is a fly in the ointment, it’s the
relative costs involved. Mobile data is typically far more expensive than fixed
equivalents, where only the final steps are over a mobile, wifi network. Mobile
phone bills are already around 5% of household bills. Even with the ongoing
reductions in the price of data delivered by phone companies over mobile
networks, the move to the cloud will end up costing even more than it does now,
for consumers and businesses alike.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
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