Did you know that there are a total of 1.2 billion 5G users around the world, and 560 million in China alone? Yeah, catch up Malaysia!
So, I was invited by Huawei Global for this year’s MWC in Shanghai to find out how 5G is used throughout all of the industries and how mind-blowing the technology of 5.5G is going to be happening here in China and globally as well.
From 5G To 5.5G
What is this extra 0.5G? Is it an extra 0.5 gig or something? Well, believe it or not, it’s like going from a scooter to a SPACESHIP because it’s all about SPEED, my friend. Download zooms from 1 to a whopping 10 Gigabits per second, while upload speeds leap from 100 Megabits to 1 Gigabit per second!
So yeah, this is not just about streaming your favorite cat video or downloading a Marvel movie in Ultra HD in a matter of seconds, my friend, because we’re talking about game-changing shifts in the industry across the board.
Now, as we dive into the world of consumer tech, we look at some of the examples of how 5G is changing everyday stuff since you guys and this channel are all about the consumer tech industry.
5G New Calling
Now, first, there is 5G New Calling. So, picture a scenario where you make a dinner reservation based on video calling the restaurant, and then AI staff will help you pick the best sushi or steak from the menu. Now, if you’re worried about language barriers, no worries because there is real-time translation to help you with that.
So with this, restaurant owners can skip hiring a reservation staff. So, as Huawei puts it, this is indeed a “GUIDE to the Intelligent World”. So yes, this surely reshapes the overall audio and video experience.
5G 3D Streaming
Then there’s 5G 3D Streaming. Now, remember those 3D goofy glasses that you used to wear when you wanted to watch some 3D content at home or even in the cinema? Well, you can say goodbye to those because 3D is back and it has never been better.
Now, with a dedicated 3D tablet or laptop, you can live stream in 3D right from your phone or laptop, and it’s all processed in the cloud, all thanks to the warp-speed bandwidth of 5G.
Internet of Vehicles (IoV)
And for my absolute favorite part, the Internet of Vehicles or IoV, and specifically, this Neolix L4 autonomous ice cream vehicle. And oh my god, with this kind of weather that we experience here in Shanghai, especially in Malaysia, this is a real godsend.
Now, imagine a fully automated vehicle equipped with 12 cameras and 5 radars. Now, if you’re wondering why it needs five radars and cameras, well, the radars are used for real-time obstacle sensing and avoidance, and the cameras are to send a real-time viewing experience that stitches the high-quality video to get the best quality monitoring to the new 5.5G network all around the vehicle.
Now, on top of that, since it is using 5.5G data. There are other real-time data including the speed of the vehicle, the battery level, and also the vehicle number as a great reference for the company that’s manning the vehicle to track which vehicle is at each based on the data being uploaded to the cloud.
So, Neolix has two different model vehicles – one is to deliver to the stations, and the other is to deliver to consumers like us. And this model is how the end-user or the consumer vehicle looks like.
Then the process of buying the ice cream is super easy by just scanning the QR code, choosing the ice cream flavor, making payment, and you’ll have yourself a nice, ice-cool, delicious ice cream. Hmm, nice! And oh my God, I hope that this comes to Malaysia, man.
And with this, it makes 5G from Good to Great, and as a first-time visitor here in Shanghai, from landing at the Shanghai airport, I got one of the best 5G speeds compared to any other airport. So, I could immediately make a video call to my cat to let her know that I have reached Shanghai safely.
But how does 5.5G make the overall experience better? Now, with 10 times the connection, with 10 times faster speeds as mentioned earlier, we can expect up to 100 times more business opportunities!
Now, another good example is on the on-ground monitoring, where for 5G, it currently operates on just communication. But with 5.5G, it will upgrade it to have sensing capabilities to transmit data to send it to the vehicles nearby.
Then there are the upgraded cloud phones where everything is on the cloud, so you can have less worry about the storage space on your phone.
So not only does this benefit us from a consumer level, but also other old and new industries like manufacturing, ports, mines, oil fields, and healthcare, because ultimately it’s more of a software-level upgrade more than building a whole new hardware systems altogether.
All right, so that is all the cool facts that you need to know about the current and the future development of 5G and 5.5G. This is Adam Lobo, signing off from Shanghai for MWC 2023 with Huawei.
