5G GOING FOR GOLD AT THE GAMES
Let the 5G Games begin. ❚ The Winter Olympics underway in Pyeongchang, South Korea, showcases heated competition among the world’s finest athletes. But these Olympics are also a showcase for technology that will eventually touch all our lives: the emerging next generation of wireless commonly known as 5G, an effort backed by muscular tech from the likes of Intel, Samsung and KT (Korea Telecom).
“We are confident this is the largest 5G deployment,” Intel chief strategy officer Aicha Evans says. “The learning that we will get in terms of the key measurements will be applicable at any 5G deployment worldwide,” including the U.S.
Talk of 5G inevitably invites a discussion around super-fast speeds and near-zero latency on your phone, latency being industry jargon for how quickly the network recognizes that you have requested data and in turn delivers such data to your device.
But 5G isn’t merely about a promise to deliver data speeds of 10 to 100 times what 4G LTE connections are capable. It’s going to take a while before most of you carry such a speed demon in your pocket, anyway.
Rather, most nascent 5G deployments and trials have focused on fixed wireless solutions where data are transmitted from one stationary point to another. Think of it as an alternative to broadband in the home and elsewhere.
Mass adoption will take time as technical standards are hammered out and the infrastructure completed, but the ultimate expectation over the next couple of years is that 5G will affect everything from self-driving cars and the so-called Internet of Things (i.e. Webconnected devices like refrigerators) to virtual reality, remote medicine and smart cities.
“Last year was about trials and understanding the performance of 5G in different conditions. And this year we’re really transitioning towards deployment and why 5G matters to people, consumers and businesses,” says Alok Shah, vice president of networks and business development at Samsung Electronics America.
One way tech companies want to use 5G: to change the way viewers watch sports, whether they’re inside a stadium or miles away watching in virtual reality.
The Winter Olympics, coming as the major carriers plot out their next 5G moves, provide a testing ground for possible uses — and vulnerabilities.
Intel and KT will let spectators get a real flavor of the action over 5G via interactive “time-sliced” views of certain events, in which multiple cameras are strategically placed around a venue. Watchers of the figure skating in the Gangneung Ice Arena can summon real-time 360-views of a skater, with augmented-reality statistics and other data layered on top.
“If you think about how much data all those high-resolution cameras will be generating in a venue, you could see why it would make sense for 5G to be part of that,” Samsung’s Shah says.
Cameras placed on a bobsledder or skier will let you experience what it is like to be that athlete on the course.
Passengers on an autonomous 5Gcapable bus can watch video streams from their seats.
“In many of these cases, the content that the person would have the ability to view is only achievable through 5G,” Shah says. “It’s not that they’re going to be getting faster speeds to their phone, it’s that the ability to visualize what’s happening on the skating rink or bobsled track — to capture that data or that video — is just not possible in a pre-5G world.”
Far away from any such debates in South Korea, we’re about to find out if 5G tech is ready to earn a medal. Intel’s Evans, for one, thinks so.
“We have more than crossed the finish line,” he said.