5G Matters to the Enterprise and Its Customers

by Adam Mendoza

It’s hard to get through a day without hearing talk about the rise of 5G telecommunication networks and the impact they will have on life as we know it. Everybody understands that 5G will bring significant changes, although many people might not grasp what those changes will be.

“Why do I need 5G?” Although not part of every person’s vernacular, this question on the need for 5G networks can be asked by quite a number of people, professions and industries. Consumers of today’s cellular offerings often don’t consider what it takes to use the features they seemingly take for granted — snapping photos and sending them to friends, watching and listening to live-streaming entertainment events, or even being frustrated with poor service or access to a favorite app or content. You could say that all of these cellular-enabled features are all part of a consumer service — one that is both ubiquitous and seamless.

Now, take all of the people accessing the consumer service and multiply that number by 1,000 times to include new applications, devices, automated functions and a variety of network-connected capabilities, from medicine to entertainment, over the next five years. In other words, we’re talking about a flood of new 5G-enabled services and consumption of those services.

At this point you begin to see that issues related to service access and poor service quality are not just about the frustrations of certain users and groups. They are issues that can have serious consequences — or even life-or-death consequences in the case of healthcare applications, first-responder systems, autonomous vehicles and more. In use cases like these, as well as everyday applications, access to high-bandwidth, low-latency-enabled 5G services will be as essential as electric power and running water.

5G networks must fundamentally provide a great experience, but the key to success is really about providing high-quality services that corporations, professionals and, yes, consumers, can rely on and appreciate. This appreciation then turns into a groundswell of new business opportunities that inherently make themselves worth the extra infrastructure costs and that help users of 5G networks grow their own businesses and improve their own experiences.

For example, a real estate company that owns office, industrial and residential buildings might use 5G (on-premises private) networks as a competitive differentiator, offering enhanced user experiences and communication services within a building. The same for a security firm that analyzes video streams in real time to identify security threats before they impact people and businesses. The same also for a healthcare application that continually monitors patients for symptoms that could be indicative of a serious or dangerous trend, and that requires additional diagnoses. This information must be accessed in real-time and requires significant bandwidth. This list of examples of 5G use cases could go on and on.

In this new world, the 5G experiential evolution goes from an unnoticed, ubiquitous and invisible network infrastructure to a highly sought-after capability that is very noticeable when it is not available.

So, “Why do I need 5G?” turns into: “I need 5G because it really makes a difference.”