Cyber Security
Why 5G matters in a world of IoT, VR, AR, AI and Edge By Guy Matthews, Editor of NetReporter
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hen 4G launched, it offered some significant performance improvements over 3G. But with 5G something far more profound is going on. The doors of possibility have been blown off their hinges. So what lies beyond? With all the buzz that surrounds 5G right now, it is an interesting contrast to look back at the much more straightforward early days of 4G and LTE, believes Patrick Filkins, Senior Research Analyst with independent consulting firm IDC. “Back then, we saw the emergence of four pillars cloud, mobile, social networks and Big Data,” he recalls. “All these fantastic technologies were starting to emerge, but in silos. Now we’re at a stage that I call ‘multiplied innovation’.” Under this umbrella of multiplied innovation, Filkins sees a sometimes bewildering array of different technology categories: AI, IoT, blockchain and much else besides: “We have all these new standardized natural interfaces that allow applications to flow more freely than ever, and we have the advent of new platforms and communities,” he says. “It's all very exciting. It's all very intense. And it's all very complex.”
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A unifying force is needed that has the power to tie all this innovation together and make sense of it, and that, in the opinion of Filkins, is where 5G comes into its own. “We have new insights being driven by AI-based automation, enabling real time decisions,” he explains. “We have IoT endpoint sensors. There's so much information being generated out there in the technology ecosystem, it's becoming a problem that the industry is trying to manage. Now, we also have the new dynamic edge, and more reach than ever. There are service providers, cloud providers and enterprises themselves defining this new edge, driven by the ability to host applications and carry out processing in areas where we couldn’t before. So in this context, you can start to understand how 5G can help.” Filkins looks ahead to more applications coming to the fore across multiple ecosystems, as well as API stacks, bringing new expectations, new societal norms and new ways of building networks. Added to this mix are new challenges driven by COVID-19, and the all-important imperatives of trust and security. Filkins believes we should judge 5G not simply by its list of capabilities, just seeing it in term of bits and bytes: “It's about supporting new applications,” he enthuses. “It's about supporting new use cases. We need to look at what
