How 5G will enable innovation across sectors

In a world which increas­ing­ly seems to focus on what is new, even when new does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean bet­ter, it is worth remind­ing our­selves why 5G net­works are real­ly dif­fer­ent from their pre­de­ces­sors.

For the typ­i­cal end-user, for exam­ple a teenag­er with a smart­phone, a mobile net­work is judged sim­ply by com­mu­ni­ca­tion speed and cov­er­age. Oth­ers may also keep an eye on oth­er para­me­ters such as trans­mis­sion reli­a­bil­i­ty or com­mu­ni­ca­tion delay.

Based on these cri­te­ria, 5G does not appear to be a game-chang­er. Yes, it is sig­nif­i­cant­ly faster and it cer­tain­ly can sup­port low­er laten­cy, but if we look only at those aspects, 5G just appears to be a log­i­cal pro­gres­sion from 4G, rather than a rev­o­lu­tion.

How­ev­er, 5G has not only been designed for down­load­ing music or videos faster. The new aspect and the big promise of 5G tech­nol­o­gy is that it will allow the devel­op­ment of break­through solu­tions for the sup­port of ver­ti­cal indus­tries, such as auto­mo­tive, ener­gy, food and agri­cul­ture, city man­age­ment, health­care, man­u­fac­tur­ing and so on. This has poten­tial to dras­ti­cal­ly change the way these sec­tors work.

5G’s real selling point is flexibility

In the con­text of the Euro­pean 5G Pub­lic-Pri­vate Part­ner­ship (5G PPP) research ini­tia­tive, sci­en­tists and researchers, in more than 60 projects, have worked hard to design, eval­u­ate and val­i­date solu­tions for 5G net­works and ver­ti­cal solu­tions enabled by 5G.

These high­ly inno­v­a­tive solu­tions enable ser­vices that will change our way of life, open­ing new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties for Europe and cre­at­ing new jobs across the ver­ti­cal sec­tors.

Exam­in­ing some ini­tial ver­ti­cals’ require­ments can cre­ate the impres­sion these could, to some extent, be sat­is­fied by exist­ing net­works such as 4G LTE (long-term evo­lu­tion), which is of course a superb sys­tem in its own right.

Yet a key les­son learnt from the tri­als per­formed in the con­text of 5G PPP projects is the crit­i­cal new capa­bil­i­ty that 5G net­works pro­vide is not nec­es­sar­i­ly com­mu­ni­ca­tions speed and more reli­able net­works, but rather flex­i­bil­i­ty. 5G brings a sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er lev­el of flex­i­bil­i­ty in the deploy­ment and man­age­ment of new ser­vices, which 4G net­works can­not offer.

This flex­i­bil­i­ty is because the net­work com­po­nents are no longer mono­lith­ic sys­tems fine-tuned to serve a spe­cif­ic set of ser­vices, such as phone or video calls and access­ing the inter­net. The net­work is now sup­port­ed by mul­ti­ple mod­u­lar net­work func­tions that can be adapt­ed to serve dif­fer­ent ver­ti­cals, chained togeth­er in mul­ti­ple ways and placed much clos­er to the end-devices.

5G was designed to be more secure

While pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion net­works were designed for human-cen­tric appli­ca­tions and oth­er, ver­ti­cal appli­ca­tions had to adapt to the net­work, 5G revers­es this par­a­digm and now the net­work adapts to the ser­vice through net­work slic­ing.

This par­a­digm shift cre­at­ed by the intro­duc­tion of 5G has enabled researchers to cre­ate inno­v­a­tive ser­vices, parts of which can be imple­ment­ed over dif­fer­ent sets of net­work func­tions, called net­work slices, which oper­ate over the same hard­ware nodes.

More­over, this flex­i­bil­i­ty has great­ly reduced the time to deploy new appli­ca­tions and ser­vices where and when need­ed. This flex­i­bil­i­ty and speed of ser­vice deploy­ment will be of upmost impor­tance for the mar­ket suc­cess of both oper­a­tors and ser­vice and appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers.

It is also worth not­ing that 5G net­works are designed to be more secure than pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions. This will prove to be a crit­i­cal fac­tor for the adop­tion of 5G net­works from mar­ket sec­tors where secu­ri­ty is of prime con­cern.

Over­all, these new 5G fea­tures are expect­ed to become the cat­a­lyst for the cre­ation of an inno­va­tion ecosys­tem that will shape the full digi­ti­sa­tion of ver­ti­cal indus­tries. From a tech­no­log­i­cal per­spec­tive, it is safe to say the flex­i­bil­i­ty brought by 5G net­works is cre­at­ing a new and future-proof play­ground for ser­vice devel­op­ers, which may lead to dis­rup­tive new solu­tions that can­not be eas­i­ly pre­dict­ed.