Prakash Per­sad

It is es­ti­mat­ed that by the year 2020, some 50 to 100 bil­lion dif­fer­ent de­vices will be con­nect­ed to the In­ter­net as so­ci­ety be­comes more con­nect­ed. The mas­sive amounts of da­ta that will be flow­ing be­tween in­di­vid­u­als and de­vices will have to be ac­com­mo­dat­ed. For this to be­come a re­al­i­ty, 5G or fifth gen­er­a­tion net­works are be­ing de­signed. With this new tech­nol­o­gy, it would be pos­si­ble to run wire­less da­ta con­nec­tions at rates of up to 800 Gbps (gi­ga­bytes per sec­ond).

In 2013, Sam­sung re­port­ed that it was test­ing a 5G net­work run­ning at one Gbps. It caused sig­nif­i­cant ex­cite­ment. At that speed, it would be pos­si­ble to down­load an HD movie in less than half a minute. With a net­work run­ning at 800 Gbps, 33 HD films could be down­loaded in a sin­gle sec­ond!

The en­ter­tain­ment and so­cial net­work sec­tors would cer­tain­ly be im­pact­ed as the present trend in smart tele­vi­sion and stream­ing videos will no doubt see vast im­prove­ments in speed and qual­i­ty. 5G net­works will al­low for dri­ver­less cars to be im­ple­ment­ed. These au­tonomous cars, for safe and ef­fec­tive op­er­a­tion, will be re­quired to be in con­tin­u­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion with each oth­er and the in­fra­struc­ture. House au­toma­tion and se­cu­ri­ty will al­so be fur­ther en­abled as in­di­vid­u­als can mon­i­tor and con­trol their in­tel­li­gent ap­pli­ances and alarm sys­tems from afar.

The prac­tice of re­mote med­i­cine will al­so get a big tech­no­log­i­cal boost. One of the lim­i­ta­tions that present­ly ex­ist is the is­sue of la­ten­cy; which is the time lag be­tween and ac­tion and re­sponse. This is typ­i­fied by the fa­mil­iar time de­lay/lag that is ex­pe­ri­enced in skype and some long dis­tance calls. In re­mote ro­bot­ic surgery, it is crit­i­cal that the la­ten­cy be sim­i­lar to that which ex­ists as when the sur­geon is op­er­at­ing the ro­bot­ic de­vice on site.

Er­ic­son pre­dicts that 5G la­ten­cy will be in the re­gion of one mil­lisec­ond. This would be 50 times faster than that which is pos­si­ble with 4G net­works and would be un­per­ceiv­able to the hu­man. In oth­er words, even if the sur­geon is not at the lo­ca­tion of the op­er­a­tion, he could still op­er­ate the ro­bot­ic sur­gi­cal de­vice with the same ef­fect as if he was on site.

Though it is pro­ject­ed that full 5G will be es­tab­lished around 2020, sev­er­al tri­al net­works are en­vis­aged in the in­ter­im. Sam­sung hopes to launch a tem­po­rary one for the 2018 Win­ter Olympic to be held in Pyeongchang, South Ko­rea. Huwei al­so hopes to im­ple­ment a ver­sion for the FI­FA 2018 Soc­cer World Cup in Moscow. These are gi­ant South Ko­re­an and Chi­nese elec­tron­ics com­pa­nies re­spec­tive­ly. One pos­i­tive sign for the de­vel­op­ment of the 5G net­work is the co-op­er­a­tion be­tween the large glob­al com­pa­nies.

The suc­cess of this new tech­nol­o­gy re­quires not on­ly har­mon­i­sa­tion of ra­dio fre­quen­cies but a fun­da­men­tal re-look at the struc­ture of the spec­trum. The ra­dio spec­trum is split in­to fre­quen­cy ranges or bands and these are al­lo­cat­ed and re­served for spe­cif­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions ac­tiv­i­ties. Thus there are bands for tele­vi­sion broad­casts, mo­bile da­ta and nav­i­ga­tion sig­nals etc. This process is over­seen by the In­ter­na­tion­al Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union.

The need for com­pre­hen­sive re­struc­tur­ing arose from the prob­lems en­coun­tered when new tech­nolo­gies were squeezed in­to the var­i­ous gaps that ex­ists be­tween fre­quen­cy bands. The in­tent is to al­low parts of the spec­trum fa­cil­i­tate the 5G net­work da­ta whilst al­low­ing 4G and 3G net­works to con­tin­ue to func­tion. This is nec­es­sary as in many coun­tries, in­clud­ing T&T, full 4G ca­pa­bil­i­ties are yet to be ful­ly re­alised and thus it is re­al­is­tic to an­tic­i­pate that we would al­so lag in the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the pro­posed 5G tech­nol­o­gy.

The in­tro­duc­tion of this new tech­nol­o­gy will open up tremen­dous op­por­tu­ni­ties for in­no­va­tion, en­tre­pre­neur­ship and the cre­ation of new busi­ness­es. All at­tempts should be made to en­able the coun­try to lever­age it for eco­nom­ic growth.