Building World’s First Fully Virtualized Cloud-Native Network
With our new mobile network, all these network services are directly connected to the internet,” saysRakuten founder and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani. “Our firewall is probably much stronger than any other hardware-dependent mobile network. It is a pretty wrong idea that hardware is stronger in terms of security than software. It’s kind of a syndrome.”
Rakuten is in taking a revolutionary approach to building out Japan’s fourth major mobile. Network. “The journey that we are embarking on in Japan will enable a complete transformation in the telecom infrastructure buildout,” explains Rakuten Mobile Network Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Tareq Amin. “We are building the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualized cloud-native network.” At the Rakuten Technology Conference, last October, Amin said that they are deploying a very different architecture and leveraging Rakuten IT skills.
“The majority of the telecommunication companies in the world have been on this journey of transformation. And yet I would argue that very little progress has happened to deploy a true end-to-end cloud-native network,” says Amin. “In fact, there is not a single telco in the world that has moved all of its workloads to the cloud. I think Rakuten is going to be the only company in the world that’s going to enable this.”
Rakuten Mobile Network Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Tareq Amin Announcing New Mobile Network for Japan.
Last night on CNBC Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani discussed how the network is set to deploy 5G nationwide in Japan by June 2020:
Rakuten Rolling Out Revolutionary 5G Mobile Network In Japan
We are rolling out our 4G network before we launch 5G. We are going to deploy what we call mobile edge computing in Japan. We are going to have over 4,000 edge servers all over Japan. Therefore, we do not have to create a new network for 5G. What we need to do is modify our edge servers a little bit. Our core network throughput is really fast. What we have to do is just add a 5G antenna, which we already have developed together with Qualcomm as well as NEC. We will be rolling out 5G in June 2020.
As 5G rolls out consumers will understand the benefits. The key is an edge computing. There is a very low latency between your device and edge. It’s just a millisecond latency, so it’s almost like you have artificial intelligence. You hold your own artificial intelligence in your hand. Definitely, the speed is going to be much faster, maybe 1,000 times faster than 4G. Of course, latency is going to be much shorter. So autonomous driving and other autonomous applications are going to be really becoming true.
Rakuten Rolling Out Revolutionary 5G Mobile Network In Japan, Says Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani
“We’re a platform that helps some of the biggest brands in the world really understand their customers in live time and communicate with them while they’re in an experience,” says Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch. “Instead of a survey after they’ve left a hotel, they communicate them while they’re there, check in on the experience and improve it. This helps them retain their customer and perhaps sell them another experience. It’s this machine learning platform that does that.”
Leslie Stretch, President and CEO of Medallia, discusses the company’s IPO and how the company uses machine learning to react to customer signals in real-time rather than after they leave an experience in an interview on CNBC:
Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers
We’re a Silicon Valley tech company. We’re a platform that helps some of the biggest brands in the world really understand their customers in live time and communicate with them while they’re in an experience. So instead of a survey after they’ve left a hotel, they communicate them while they’re there, check in on the experience and improve it. This helps them retain their customer and perhaps sell them another experience. It’s this machine learning platform that does that.
Anything is a signal to us, a survey, an IOT signal, a transaction, somebody buys something, they have a bad experience at the pool, or they’re on an airline and they don’t quite like the service that they’re getting, they can feed that back immediately instead of waiting until the experience is finished. We’re all about platform and signal. We’re very different from the survey companies, the feedback companies, which are the old experience economy companies. It’s the application of deep Silicon Valley technology to the problem.
The Customer Is At the Center of Every Digital Transformation
Customer experience has become really a major theme for every big brand in the world today. I also think that our technology is innovative and very different. The application of machine learning and the platform and just the operationalization of a private Silicon Valley company are really what I’ve done in the past. Just bringing basic blocking and tackling to go to market and marketing and building up the salesforce. So very simple and taking the story out to a bigger market.
We actually just signed a revenue share partnership with Salesforce. We have a partnership for Marketing Cloud with Adobe. They’re great alliances for us. We can present our machine learning, our unstructured data, into their Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud. That’s brand new for us this year. It’s great to go to market with leaders like that. Both Adobe and Salesforce completely understand the customer is at the center of every digital transformation and we are at the center of that.
It’s Not For the Faint-Hearted, But We Invested a Ton In It
We spent more than a half a billion dollars building this plot platform. That sets us apart from the traditional simple survey vendor. We’ve spent a ton of money on the privacy layer and on the security layer. We’ve worked already for a decade with some of the biggest brands in the world whose customer information is precious. We’re HIPAA certified for healthcare as well. So we take that very seriously. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but we invested a ton in it and it’s worth it.
Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers, Says Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch
“Everything we do is laser-focused on growth opportunity out in the market, cost reduction internally, and transforming ourselves into a simpler operation which then transitions into both cost and customer effectiveness,” says AT&T Communications CEO John Donovan. “This meets that hurdle. It’s wide, it’s deep, it’s formidable. It meets all those criteria. It’s one of those rare things that affect revenue costs and then how you serve your customers. In that regard, we love it.”
John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, discusses their new long-term cloud alliance announced today with IBM in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
It’s Wide, It’s Deep, It’s Formidable
If you think about the history we have with IBM, the risks of moving to the cloud in a really aggressive way, the kind that not only transforms your company internally and your cost structure but also how you address customers and therefore opportunities for growth, you worry about technology, you worry about how to transform your applications, and then you worry what happens if I get in trouble.
We’ve had a 20-year relationship with IBM. They know us. So when you think about expanding Red Hat, with the experience that those guys have inside of our operations, and then the ability to go to market together, those things combined for us to form a low-risk and really high opportunity kind of situation.
Everything we do is laser-focused on growth opportunity out in the market, cost reduction internally, and transforming ourselves into a simpler operation which then transitions into both cost and customer effectiveness. This meets that hurdle. It’s wide, it’s deep, it’s formidable. It meets all those criteria. It’s one of those rare things that affect revenue costs and then how you serve your customers. In that regard, we love it.
5G Coming Out Of the Chute As an Enterprise First Network
5G is the most important network that we’re going to launch in my career. We’ve been about 10 or 15 years in an architecture where everything was consumer first. This one’s coming out of the chute as an enterprise first network. It’s really about consumers seeing everything they do, whether it’s to shop or go to the hospital or new experiences with toys being statically different. Us getting the right enterprise relationships done early on 5G will be the foundation for how fast this thing scales.
AT&T Communications CEO John Donovan On IBM Alliance: It’s Wide, It’s Deep, It’s Formidable
“We are on the cusp of ubiquitous automation,” says ROBO Global President William Studebaker. “We have an undeniable inflection point because of the performance capabilities of computing and the cost curve declining such that these now are technologies that used to be science fiction but now have actual use applications. Fast forward six years later and we are at a launching pad in terms of the economic activity that we’re seeing and the innovations. Every sector of the economy is going to benefit from robotics and AI.”
William Studebaker, President and Chief Investment Officer of ROBO Global, discusses how robotics and AI are at an inflection point where soon every sector of the economy is going to benefit in an interview on CNBC:
Every Sector of the Economy is Going to Benefit From Robotics and AI
We were fortunate six years ago to develop an index that tracks the growth in robotics and AI because we saw these technologies changing the way we live and work. We are on the cusp of ubiquitous automation. We have an undeniable inflection point because of the performance capabilities of computing and the cost curve declining such that these now are technologies that used to be science fiction but now have actual use applications. Fast forward six years later and we are at a launching pad in terms of the economic activity that we’re seeing and the innovations. It’s being spread out to all parts of the economy. Every sector of the economy is going to benefit from robotics and AI.
We try to identify the companies that we think have the highest revenue threshold that corresponds directly to selling the technologies. We’re looking for high revenue purity. We’re also looking for large technological mode around their business and we have an interesting lens to capture this. We actually have seven PhDs on our team. They’re really the who’s who in robotics and AI that have built technologies, built businesses, or academic researchers, etc. That gives us a great lens to see not what yesterday’s winners are but what the future winners are likely to be. That gives us an interesting lens.
A World of Prediction, Prevention, and Individualizing Medicine
The official fee is 95 basis points. We do rebate securities lending which is effectively their 25 basis points. So the actual costs are 70 basis point to investors. With a team of industry experts that we have tracking this, I think that we do a pretty good job. We are generally the Alpha that investors are looking for. The index is up a little over 20 percent year-to-date and the last three years is probably close to up 15 percent. We think the inflection is starting here and we’ve got years if not decades of growth ahead of us.
Healthcare is probably one of the most exciting areas for investors to think about. Why? We’re going to a world of prediction, prevention, and individualizing medicine. Effectively, we’re going to create much healthier livelihoods for us but more pulling longer longevity. We live in a world that’s been historically sick care. We deal with the problem after it happens. We’re now going to a world of prevention, prediction, and individualizing medicine. A lot of healthcare structures tend to focus on therapies. We’re actually focused much more on the prediction and the prevention; diagnosis, medical instruments, regenerative medicine, and prevention. These are the kinds of technologies that investors need to embrace when they’re thinking about healthcare.
Every Sector of the Economy is Going to Benefit From Robotics and AI, says ROBO Global President William Studebaker
“5G is not really hype, it’s here and it will emerge over time,” says Boingo CEO Mike Finley. “I think it’s going to come faster than 4G did. You have all the U.S. operators engaged and you have operators all over the world that are launching and want to launch 5G products. At Boingo, we’ll take the 5G capabilities and implement them into all the venues that we have. Take (5G) cellular today and mix that with Wi-Fi that’s coming in Wi-Fi 6 and it’s really an incredible offering that comes to end-users.”
Mike Finley, CEO of Boingo, discusses how the combination of 5G and Wi-Fi 6 is already bringing higher and faster internet speeds, lower latency, more device connections, and better security, in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:
Wi-Fi 6 Is Starting To Come Out Now
Wi-Fi in and of itself continues to evolve. Wi-Fi 6 is starting to come out now. We’ve recently done a trial in the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California. Essentially, that’s higher speed, faster speeds, lower latency, and many more devices can be used at the same speeds with better security. As Wi-Fi continues to evolve you’ll start to see devices and capabilities come with that.
The second piece of it is at Boingo we are an activity company. We offer a combination of cellular and Wi-Fi together. As new technologies come out and if that’s satellite those types of capabilities will be enabled in devices. When you have a company like Boingo that’s a neutral host company in large airports, multi-family housing, military bases, in stadiums, and places like that, we’ll enable all of that technology so that the end user can benefit from the capabilities that are in front of them.
5G Is Not Really Hype, It’s Here
If you look at where 5G’s at, it’s here. 5G has been launched here in the US. There are infrastructure companies outside of (China’s) Huawei that have been in front of that and are the networks that the U.S. operators are launching with. Devices are coming in rapid fashion. There are chips that companies like Qualcomm have not only developed but now have in the marketplace. There have been devices that have launched. A laptop with Lenovo and Qualcomm was announced last week that has 5G in it.
5G is not really hype, it’s here and it will emerge over time. I think it’s going to come faster than 4G did. Part of that is because you have infrastructure vendors and device makers that are seeing that it’s going to scale quickly. You have all the U.S. operators engaged and you have operators all over the world that are launching and want to launch 5G products. That’s been being worked for a long time. At Boingo, we’ll take the 5G capabilities and implement them into all the venues that we have. Cellular today and you mix that with Wi-Fi that’s coming in Wi-Fi 6 and it’s really an incredible offering that comes to end-users.
Boingo Continues With Double-Digit Revenue Growth
We’ve had 18 consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth. We’ve exceeded our guidance for 20 quarters in a row. We’ve met the guidance that we have for the first quarter and that we’re claiming for the rest of this year. We’re performing according to our plan. We continue to invest and we have lots of opportunity in our cellular business and our Wi-Fi business continues to grow. The combination of those two together really is what separates us. We also have a new opportunity in multifamily or apartment buildings and student housing that we’re developing now as we speak.
Combination of 5G and Wi-Fi 6 is Incredible, Says Boingo CEO Mike Finely
“What’s interesting is that IoT has been around for a long time but as companies start to enable it and start to leverage it more and more there’s just huge volumes of data that have to be managed and be able to analyze and be able to execute from,” says John Barcus, Vice President Manufacturing Industries at Oracle. “One of the technologies that is really exciting is this whole concept of AI. It really allows you to use that information and correlate it with a lot of different pieces of information.”
John Barcus, Vice President Manufacturing Industries at Oracle, discusses how technologies such as AI and blockchain are now helping companies manage huge volumes of IoT data in an interview with technology influencerRonald van Loon:
Companies Are Moving Toward Selling Products as a Service
I think that (manufacturers connecting all the processes digitally) is the way that will differentiate them. It’s really the only way the companies will be able to survive into the future. There are all these business models and it has become significantly more competitive than it has been in the past. Companies have to work faster and they have to be more responsive to what their customer needs are. The only way really of doing that is to connect the various aspects of the business. They can’t work in silos anymore. That really will give you the whole value of the business.
One area that companies are moving away from is selling products. They’re going into selling more services which we’ve actually seen for some time. But what they’re now getting into is these new models where they might be selling products as a service. If you think about how do you sell a product as a service and the ability to support that it is a lot different than it was before. Connecting to that product and being able to anticipate activities, anticipate needs, anticipate failures, and to be able to monitor how it’s performing, how the customers use it and are able to expand on that to be able to provide a better outcome for the customer are important components.
Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value
What’s interesting is that IoT has been around for a long time but as companies start to enable it and start to leverage it more and more there’s just huge volumes of data that have to be managed and be able to analyze and be able to execute from. One of the technologies that is really exciting is this whole concept of AI. It really allows you to use that information and correlate it with a lot of different pieces of information. You can correlate with the data that might be in your ERP and your MES and other sources of information and actually provide some real value and provide the real outcomes. It can now do some predictions where it would be actually physically impossible for people to do the same type of calculations that they’ve been doing in the past with this huge volume today.
The second area where there seems to be a little hesitation at the moment is around blockchain. But the technology is there and people have been trying to identify how best to use it. Some of the use cases that are coming out now are going to be quite impressive. I think the little bit of a lull was deserved. People who looked at it anticipate a little bit more than what was possible and now they’re really starting to develop some good use cases. I think there’s a lot of opportunities in that area.
Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value, Says Oracle VP John Barcus
“There’s this explosion of innovation that’s going on,” says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. “I’ve called it the four superpowers; cloud, mobility, AI, and IoT. These are just causing so many new companies, investment of capital, major new IPOs that are going on. I think with each sort of wave of these innovative cycles there’s an explosion of new companies, but then there’s also a consolidation of existing companies.”
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, and Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell, discuss the explosion of innovation that is going on in tech in an interview on CNBC:
There’s This Explosion of Innovation, Says VMware CEO
There’s this explosion of innovation that’s going on. I’ve called it the four superpowers; cloud, mobility, AI, and IOT. These are just causing so many new companies, investment of capital, major new IPOs that are going on. I think with each sort of wave of these innovative cycles there’s an explosion of new companies, but then there’s also a consolidation of existing companies. All of the layers start to reform. Up here you’ve got a whole new set of them emerging in many of these areas and in the existing areas there is some level of consolidation. I do believe there will be some because fundamentally at the infrastructure layer I believe customers want fewer more strategic vendors.
As I talk to CIOs I say my job is every one of your engineers is looking down the stack at infrastructure I want to enable you to have them look up to the application and business differentiating services. We’re increasingly going to automate, standardized, and cloud deliver those infrastructure layers so you don’t have to do it. We’re doing it for you in an automated AI standardized way so every one of your resources gets to look up to create business differentiating services. So yes I believe both of those will be true consolidation and explosion of innovation.
Customers Don’t Want to be Systems Integrators, Says Michael Dell
Well, certainly the combination of Dell, EMC, VMware, and Pivotal was the biggest ones (consolidations) yet to date. That was a pretty big one and last year we added more than $11 billion in revenue so that was some additional industry consolidation there for you. I think customers to Pat’s point have told us very clearly they don’t want to be systems integrators anymore. They’re looking for fewer partners. Bringing together a broad set of capabilities across the infrastructure, security, client devices, the cloud, digital transformation, enabling all those capabilities for customers. They’d much rather work with one leading company than 20 or 30 smaller ones.
There’s This Explosion of Innovation, Says VMware CEO
“The transitions, 3G to 4G, 4G to 5G, are very important in order to maintain your leadership position and also it enables you to really open up and expand your business in the new areas,” says Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf. “5G is really designed so that other industries such as automotive, self-driving cars, connected healthcare, connected education, connected infrastructure, are really set up to use cellular for the first time at massive scale.”
Steve Mollenkopf, CEO of Qualcomm, discusses how 5G is for the first time enabling industry to use cellular technology on a massive scale in an interview on CNBC:
5G is Designed So That Industries Can Use Cellar at Massive Scale
In this industry, you do not want to miss the transitions. The transitions, 3G to 4G, 4G to 5G, are very important in order to maintain your leadership position and also it enables you to really open up and expand your business in the new areas. This is more so true on 5G than any other G transition. We wanted to make sure that we were able to position the company do that. We did that while at the same time we brought a lot of other costs discipline within the envelope. We’re very pleased to be able to do that. It was a good call to make. I’m very proud of the team to be able to execute on that in the midst of what probably looked like a lot of distractions from the outside.
5G is really designed so that other industries such as automotive, self-driving cars, connected healthcare, connected education, connected infrastructure, are really set up to use cellular for the first time at massive scale. Our problem today is not, do we have a great technology lead? It is how do we scale that across new industries? This is a good problem to have and I’m looking forward to tackling it with all my energy.
The Energy of the Companies is on How to Ramp up Quickly
Really talking about the past and some of the he said she said is not that helpful. I can tell you where the energy of the two companies is right now. The energy of the companies right now is let’s figure out how to ramp up as quickly as possible. The relationship is focused on that issue. I’ve had a lot of discussions not only within my team but also with the Apple team. That’s the focus. We talk all the time. The companies to get to an agreement as complex as this you’ve got to talk. But I can tell you, companies like this they move on and they move on to the things that are natural to work together which is products. We’re all excited about doing that.
We are two product-focused organizations. We’re working on products, we’ve done it in the past and we love doing it. We’re good at doing it. That’s where the focus is that’s what we’re excited about. The reality is when you’re working on technologies that are meaningful and are relevant to many industries worldwide you’re going to grab attention. As long as you have a technology lead you can work your way through that. We were able to do that in the past and certainly were able to do that over the last five-plus years. I’m sure it’s going to be a little bit more calm but I can tell you I’m very happy to have that technology position.
5G is Designed So That Industries Can Use Cellar at Massive Scale, Says Qualcomm CEO
Kentucky’s First Y Combinator Startup Wants To Streamline Hail Damage Detection And Repair
Louisville, Kentucky startup WeatherCheck was selected from a pool of 12,000 competitors to become part of the Y Combinator’s winter 2019 startup school cohort, the first company from Kentucky to earn the distinction.
WeatherCheck uses tech and statistical models to determine where hail damage occurred so that homeowners can start the repair process in a timely manner and insurers don’t have to rely on homeowners to discover hail damage months or even years after the fact. In 2017, 11 million properties in the United States alone were affected by hail and racked up a national bill of $1.7 billion in property damage. On a local level, some states saw more than half of their properties damaged by falling hail including Kansas at 57% and Oklahoma at 55%. Though hailstorms happen frequently, our current system of predicting risk and assessing damage falls woefully short.
Coming in as one of TechCrunch’s favorites from Y Combinator’s 2019 Winter Demo day, WeatherCheck helps take the guesswork out of weather damage. Co-founder and CEO Demetrius Grey speaks about his business’s involvement in Y Combinator’s winter 2019 Demo Day as a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity.’ Garnering much well-deserved attention, WeatherCheck is doing what has never done before by tackling the concerns that arise from some of the most unpredictable yet destructive forces on Earth: the weather itself.
Over the course of 2017, extreme weather caused $330 billion in global property damage and resulted in over $135 billion in insurance claims. In the last thirty years, the average number of global natural catastrophes has grown by nearly 175%, with hailstorms, in particular, hitting more frequently than ever. Compared to other types of weather damage, hail is among the most destructive, and it can also be the most challenging to predict.
Hail can happen anywhere. Born from updrafts during thunderstorms, water droplets fuse together in the lower parts of storm clouds, held aloft and growing in size by powerful winds until the frozen droplets become too heavy and begin dropping to the ground. Falling at speeds sometimes greater than 90 miles per hour, exposed cars, unprepared roofs, and even our own heads may become victims of these pea-sized to softball-sized ice chunks. Risk increases exponentially with the size of the hailstones themselves, by the time they reach 1.5 inches or more, property damage is almost a guarantee.
Occurring globally once every 7-9 days and amounting to thousands of instances every single year, hailstorms are among the most unforgiving of weather events and the need for insurance and reliable prediction is only growing. WeatherCheck allows insurance agencies to gather the right local data they need down to specific street addresses to assess the potential risk for hail careering out of the sky. As the Internet of Things capabilities continue to move forward, insurers can look to AI to monitor both properties and incoming storms, in turn, giving them opportunities to precisely quote for coverage and recommend best practices for homeowners living in high-risk hail areas.
Though the weather can always turn without warning, high-tech tools to keep us safe and prepared will help us predict risk, mitigate damage when it does occur, and be ready for it in the future. Here’s how WeatherCheck is making it possible.
“You can begin now to conceive of robotic manufacturing that is always on and always connected via 5G networks,” says Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T Inc. “Just to put this into perspective, the Internet of Things, the devices and sensors that are connected all over the place, with today’s networks in a square mile you can connect a thousand, two thousand, or possibly three thousand of those. In a 5G world, you can connect millions of those in a square mile.”
The G means generation. So 2G is second-generation technology. When you went to your flip phone and you remember how you used to text using a 10 key device. That was 2G and allowed that kind of service. 3G is when the internet became mobile. Third generation networks allowed mobile use of the internet. The first iPhone was on 2G, but when it went 3G is when it exploded because you’re literally using the internet on a mobile device. Fourth-generation is what really enabled all of us to consume CNN video on a smartphone. It literally mobilized video. But for 4G technology, Instagram would not be what it is today. It’s all video. Facebook is virtually all video now. Just consuming all this video on a mobile device is facilitated by 4G.
5G is going to prove to be the most transformative of all the G’s that we have seen to date. First of all, it’s a step change faster. It also will have zero latency meaning you issue a command and it’s immediate. You’re just always connected. It’s a real-time network. It’s just like turning a light switch on, it’s real-time. This is really important when you start to conceive of services like autonomous cars. You don’t want to be in an autonomous car that’s dependent on a network with latency. It’s very serious. If a kid runs out in front of a car it needs to be a real-time, always on, and always connected network. This is really really important as you begin to conceive of these services.
In a 5G World, Millions of Connected Devices Per Square Mile
You can begin now to conceive of robotic manufacturing that is always on and always connected via 5G networks. Just to put this into perspective, the Internet of Things, the devices and sensors that are connected all over the place, today’s networks in a square mile you can connect a thousand, two thousand, or possibly three thousand of those. In a 5G world, you can connect millions of those in a square mile.
With each of those devices that are connected to the network you can now locate (very precisely) on a 5G network. Today, you can locate (only) within a certain number of meters. With 5G we will be able to isolate that device to within centimeters. Think about what you can do as you begin to get that kind of precision on location and so forth, and that kind of speed. I couldn’t conceive of the iPhone when we built a 3G network. You and I can’t conceive of all the services that are going to materialize with this kind of capability.
We’ve been talking about 5G for a very long time and now the opportunity is really here, says Kathrin Buvac, President and CSO of Nokia Enterprise. “We’ve said for a number of years that 5G will enable the Industrial Revolution.” Buvac added. “It’s clear that 5G has to be a lot more than mobility services. When I talk with enterprise customers I really do believe that these productivity gains that are spoken about are real. Operational efficiencies, process automation, all the way to dark factory operations to full autonomy, that is really what’s coming.”
We’ve been talking about 5G for a very long time and now the opportunity is really here. We’ve said for a number of years that 5G will enable the Industrial Revolution. It’s clear that 5G has to be a lot more than mobility services. When I talk with enterprise customers I really do believe that these productivity gains that are spoken about are real. Operational efficiencies, process automation, all the way to dark factory operations to full autonomy, that is really what’s coming.
Before we go to the deep depths of 5g technology I think they’re really two things. One is the convergence of IT and OT technologies. Enterprises need to bring their enterprise IT services and the operations technology together. That is not so easily done. The other thing is digital. Think about Amazon and Netflix and what they’ve done transforming physical goods, books into eBooks, and DVDs into streaming. That will not be possible unfortunately with Industry 4.0, meaning we cannot digitize a crane or a truck in a mine. That’s just not possible.
Industrial Digital Twins Powered Via 5G
What we will do is create digital copies of the big machines or robots. That is what we call the digital twins. What that has to do with 5G technology is that it all starts in connecting these sensors, these machines, these robots, these devices, the co-workers in the factories, in the minds, and in the energy networks. That is where ultimately we will need 5G technology because of the big promise of lower latencies or higher bandwidth capacity, etc.
I think there are a few geographies that are leading the industrial automation. I would say from our standpoint it’s clearly the US. It is clearly Germany where car manufacturing and many manufacturing opportunities are coming. It’s Japan and it’s a few other geographies across the globe that are really leading the pack right now in terms of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that we have to look into.
The Industrial Opportunity is Striking
One thing that is striking me is the industrial opportunity. Over 15 million industrial sites will be deployed in the next decade. We have today 6.5 to 7 million base stations deployed in LTE worldwide. So it’s more than double the number of industrial sites that we somehow all together need to deploy to enable IoT. How are we going to do that?
There is the issue of spectrum availability. We have to be super creative, whether that is shared license, CBRS, 3.5, large scale carrier subleasing spectrum, and making money through that. It’s so critical and that also determines which country, which geography, which enterprise customer will go first. Industrial devices will just not be as quickly available as the smartphone’s which will be made available this year. There is still a lag.
5G Is a Complete Redefinition of the Network
5G is a complete redefinition of the network. We have all discussed AI, edge, and cloud. But we have to bridge now for a couple of years for enterprise customers as we take them to 5G. The question is really because enterprise customers want to leverage productivity gains now, not tomorrow, like yesterday. The question is really how do we do that? Can we potentially provide private wireless networks, with the help of our telco customers, to enterprises that can then just be a software upgrade to 5G? We would do this while we deploy industrial sites today based on LTE technology.
Enterprise customers are wired a little bit differently than us consumers. think about uplink video. We’re just so used to down-linking from tablets as consumers. We need a lot of uplink capacity if we use email or if we browse. If for a millisecond the network doesn’t work it bothers us, but it’s not the end of the world. But we need six nines reliability in the network in order to make sure we have the unmanned vehicles in the mines or the robots and the factories running precisely with that accuracy. A lot of work is needed still to get the 5G networks where they need to be, but it’s really exciting times to build that infrastructure.
“We have done a study and we believe that by 2022 there will be over 400 million 5G connections,” says Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. “This is one of those great examples where the reality is going to match the hype building up to this.” Robbins adds: “If you think about what this is going to create, we believe in 2022 the amount of new traffic created in that year will actually exceed all of the traffic that has been created since the inception of the internet.”
Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, discusses how technology is now defining enterprise strategy and how 5G is going to impact connectivity in an interview on Fox Business:
Technology is at the Heart of the Strategy
This technology is at the heart of the strategy of our customers. It is no longer enabling their strategy. They’re taking the technology and then they are defining their strategy based on what it makes possible. A lot of the focus over the last decade has been around consumer tech. If it’s on your phone you know what it does. If you use a social media app then you know what it does. What we do isn’t that clear to the everyday investor.
The technology that we are building are really enabling our enterprise customers and public sector customers to digitize and really take advantage of new methods of revenue stream. In the case of the public sector, new ways of delivering citizen services. Putting video connectivity out into rural areas and delivering citizen services virtually. There are all these things that are happening that are leading to continued demand.
5G Reality is Going to Match the Hype
We’ve been talking about 5G for many years. The trials are beginning this year. This is one of those great examples where the reality is going to match the hype building up to this. The fundamental difference that this technology is going to bring is (massive). In 2022 you’re going to see speeds that average 4-5 times more than we get today. If you think about what it enables, not only higher speeds and lower latency for mobile devices, but we are going to get connectivity into rural areas that we haven’t been able to because the cost of digging trenches and laying fiber has just been prohibitive. Now we can do this with 5G.
We are going to be able to connect people who have not been connected before. We have done a study and we believe that by 2022 there will be over 400 million 5G connections. What happens is when you get to a place where you have all of this high bandwidth capacity out at the edge of the network then the core infrastructure has to be updated to actually accommodate that. That’s one of the big roles that we are going to play is delivering innovation that actually allows our customers to deal with all this traffic.
5G is going to provide everything from the ability to connect IoT devices to things in your home and vehicles, all the way to connecting enterprise branch locations. The whole notion of lower latency is really what’s required to do real-time video applications. If you think about what this is going to create, we believe in 2022 the amount of new traffic created in that year will actually exceed all of the traffic that has been created since the inception of the internet.
Symantec CEO Greg Clark says that there are many new cybersecurity threats showing up including threats around the Internet of Things. “The injection of consumer IoT in the enterprise and all through the home is important,” says Clark. “What we found in the last couple of years at Symantec where we’ve been putting things like the Norton Core product into the home is that the number of resident malware platforms that are in there is substantial. There is definitely an ever-present threat in the IoT.”
Greg Clark, President and CEO of Symantec, discusses new cybersecurity threats including threats to the Internet of Things in an interview on CNBC:
The Cyber Crisis Continues
The cyber crisis continues. We definitely have a new set of threats that are showing up. I think it’s a testament to the fact that it’s ever-changing and the partners that you pick to help you defend it are really important. Cyber defense is a continuously moving target. There are a bunch of things that that should be there for the long haul. At Symantec, we put those things together and we deliver them to you integrated. What’s important is that there are a bunch of problems that emerge that are not solved and it takes a vibrant startup community and investment community around that to address some of those.
Really, it’s the sum of big cyber investments like we have at Symantec and some of the other big players in the industry as well as the vibrant startup community. The combination of those things integrated is what we call Integrated Cyber Defense. I think it’s very important for our customers and partners in really addressing a bunch of the crisis. Net is that it moves all the time and so there are all kinds of different things that need to happen. The big transition at the moment, from cloud to mobile, new attack surface, new methods of beating people and stealing information. It’s definitely a very vibrant time for cyber defense.
An Ever-Present Cyber Threat in the IoT
The injection of consumer IoT in the enterprise and all through the home is important. What we found in the last couple of years at Symantec where we’ve been putting things like the Norton Core product into the home is that the number of resident malware platforms that are in there is substantial. There is definitely an ever-present threat in the IoT. We’re addressing that threat. I think what people have to also realize it’s not just about antivirus or your PC or your mobile phone endpoint.
There is a resonant threat in the network now and many consumers in the world have seen an email from somebody who has their mail password. When they’ve got your mail password extortion is rampant targeting consumers. Also, account takeover on things like Uber is rampant. It’s important to protect yourself in the network. Make sure that if you’re roaming around on other infrastructure you have a VPN engaged. These are very serious items right now and we’re seeing a lot of threats coming into that space. It’s not just on the endpoint, it’s also in the network, it’s in the IoT, and it’s in the home. Definitely, a different set of solutions are required now than what we saw ten years ago.
Cyber Espionage Will Continue Forever
We’re always going to see from now on cyber espionage. Espionage has been going on for hundreds of years and it will continue in cyberspace probably forever. Big corporations, governments, there’s some heavy lifting that needs to be done there. We’re very invested in that at Semantic. Then on the consumer side, people at home and smaller businesses, there is definitely an extortion and ransom crisis going on there.
The US government has been addressing that with some great support for us around consequences by saying to third world countries where a lot of these guys are resident, if you don’t have cyber laws on the books in a few years you may face US sanctions. We’re starting to bring some consequences into that which is very helpful. But it’s in two spaces. There are organized criminals stealing from people and companies and then there’s a bunch of nation-state activity. I think they’re with us for a long haul.
An Ever-Present Cybersecurity Threat in the IoT, Says Symantec CEO
Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon sees enormous potential for 5G to change the form factor of devices. “The most important thing is as you change your experience with 5G you’re going to want a different type of device and a different type of screen size and resolution,” says Amon. “The apps are also going to become way more powerful and you will actually have more powerful hardware that goes along with.”
I feel that there’s enormous potential for 5G to change the form factor of devices. We’re very proud of this partnership with Samsung and how they have been a great partner pioneering this new technology with us. We also see a number of different devices being announced and we see a potential for form factors to change. The most important thing is as you change your experience with 5G you’re going to want a different type of device and a different type of screen size and resolution. The apps are also going to become way more powerful and you will actually have more powerful hardware that goes along with.
Bigger screens are here to stay. I think you will see the opportunity for larger screens as you have flexible OLED technology. You’re also going to see devices that are more specialized for more capable gaming because 5G will allow you to have mainstream gaming on 5G devices. You’re going to see devices there are going to converge between productivity. Over time, we expect to see virtual reality or augmented reality devices as well as a companion to your phone that is going to be using 5G technology. We hope that they look like eyeglasses.
Qualcomm 5G PowerSave Technology
One of the big announcements we’ve made at the show (MWC Barcelona 2019), we’re very proud of it, is the Qualcomm 5G PowerSave technology. That is actually a technology that is allowing the first generation of 5G phones to allow you to have all-day battery life. We have a very mature smartphone base today and users won’t settle for any less than we have on your phones currently. I think that’s the bar for those new 5g flagships. We’re happy a number of OEMs announced phones at this show with this technology.
I will do a comparison because I think sometimes we forget about what happened in 4G. When we were about this time launching 4G technology, that was over a decade ago, we had two operators and four devices. Look where we are right now. We have 20 operators and 30 devices. It’s an order of magnitude different. Actually, it’s a proxy about how much faster 5G is going to get deployed.
President Donald Trump tweeted his support today for the US to be the leader in 5G, “and even 6G.”
“I want 5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible,” tweeted the President. “It is far more powerful, faster, and smarter than the current standard. American companies must step up their efforts, or get left behind. There is no reason that we should be lagging behind on something that is so obviously the future.”
Trump added: “I want the United States to win through competition, not by blocking out currently more advanced technologies. We must always be the leader in everything we do, especially when it comes to the very exciting world of technology!”
The report by the Senate Small Business Committee is a response to China’s “Made in China 2025” strategic plan. In that plan, the Chinese lay out their strategy for becoming the world technology leader.
Twitter Embeds:
I want 5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible. It is far more powerful, faster, and smarter than the current standard. American companies must step up their efforts, or get left behind. There is no reason that we should be lagging behind on………
….something that is so obviously the future. I want the United States to win through competition, not by blocking out currently more advanced technologies. We must always be the leader in everything we do, especially when it comes to the very exciting world of technology!
The world of oil and gas in the Middle East, although very lucrative, still operates in a very traditional way. But that’s changing. The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) is the state-owned oil company of the United Arab Emirates and holds the seventh-largest proven reserves of oil in the world at 97.8 billion barrels.
ADNOC is embracing digitalization and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in a big way. They are calling it Oil & Gas 4.0.
ADNOC is a national oil and gas company that has been in business for more than 45 years. We have been a solid and reliable provider of oil in the market, of energy, of refined products, and of petrochemicals. We are also a company that fueled the growth of the UAE. We are so proud of our company that we thought maybe we need to go to the next step. We are looking forward in how we are going to develop ADNOC to meet the challenges of the new and future demands.
Global energy demand is growing and is fueled by a bigger middle class coming on the market with more consumers. To understand this and to become an oil company of the future we have to change. We have to embrace innovation. We have to embrace change. We have to embrace digitalization. We look at this as our way of fueling Future Industry 4.0, the future revolution. We call it Oil & Gas 4.0.
Digitalization Starts With Big Data
We see this as a methodology for us to be agile, to be flexible, and to impact and speed up the decision making process. In this day and age of information superhighways that are changing and social media everything gets impacted by everything. You hear people in the East impacted by people in the West. Where does an oil and gas company fit into this? Do we transform ourselves into just an energy company? Are we a product company?
Regardless of where we go and regardless of our smart growth strategy and how we want to be a reliable supplier, digitalization fits right in the center of this. Where does our digitalization start? Our digitalization starts with our big data. Everybody says it’s culture. Yes, but the foundation is big data.
The Foundation is Connectivity
The foundation is connectivity. We have 14 operating companies that are all connected. In reality, we are operating in one geographical location. On the ground we are connected through pipelines throughout our facilities. We share facilities and products. We supply and give to each other and we do a lot of work together. Yet, our decision making process was not compliant. It was silo-based because we are 14 operating companies. Upstream and downstream.
All of you know the difference in culture between upstream and downstream, between manufacturing and the cowboys of the upstream. They make so much money, and we need them definitely, but digitalization has always been a part of the downstream. Remember, we are the original IoT. We had sensors everywhere. We were operating the plants using sensors in a closed network. We were doing this for such a long time. Now, this has moved out.
Real-Time Data Screen Like the Star Trek Enterprise
What did we do in ADNOC? Based on our big data and our connectivity that was already there, a lot of subsurface activity in data, we collected all this in one location. We did this through a fiber optic network, through 4G wifi, and made this connection is a secure closed network. We brought all the data in real-time to ADNOC’s head office.
We put this screen (below) on one floor as a panorama. It was an exciting journey to build that place. It’s a 50-meter screen and beautiful. The place looks like the Enterprise on Star Trek and it will help ADNOC to go where no other company has gone before!
Real-Time 50-Meter Data Screen Like the Star Trek Enterprise
Oil & Gas 4.0
The way see it is data is there. We collaborate with people in the oil and gas industry but we are looking beyond that. The new technology of artificial intelligence, algorithm, and data analytics, are much more advanced in other industries such as social, marketing, sales, and everywhere else. Yet, we in oil and gas have always been very traditional. In the beginning of the 20th Century and beyond we were the innovators. We drilled where nobody could go. We led the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions. We were fueling it.
Now how do we fuel the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Oil & Gas 4.0? We do this by harnessing our big data and by putting together connectivity. But what’s more important I think is changing our culture. The culture that we have currently is still a very traditional culture. Our decision-making process takes a very long time. A company of the future needs to take decisions very fast. They have to be accurate. They have to de-risk their investment and understand how to de-risk it.
Oil & Gas Coping with Technology Moving at Warp Speed
Things are moving at light speed, at warp speed. We really have to cope with this. To do this we need the information readily available for our management, for our leadership, for our engineers. At the same time, we need to allow these decision processes to go fluidly into the business process. That means we have to reduce costs. We have to look up how we optimize. It’s not oil and gas at any cost. It’s oil and gas at a cost. The cost is very important in the future because that’s sustainability.
Digitalization will help reduce the environmental impact of our facility. At the initial stage, it’s measurement, monitoring, knowing what we are producing, knowing what we are wasting, and knowing how we impact our environment. How do we do it? We do it through measurement, through optimization, reducing our energy footprint, doing a lot more carbon capturing, and doing less with more. Digitalization helps with that.
Easy oil is over. Now we have to go with very difficult to extract oil and gas which are very unsafe. Some of our oil reservoirs have 25 percent H2S. It’s a very poisonous gas that can kill. How do we reduce the impact on the environment and the impact on the people? We do this by going into remote operations, by doing a lot more with robotics, drones, all the new technology that is used everywhere else. We need to start adapting it.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson defended AT&T’s aggressive 5G E marketing following the filing of a lawsuit by Sprint. During the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, some of their competitors criticized them, saying AT&T is “slapping 5G stickers” on upgraded 4G phones.
Stephenson says that 5G Evolution (5G E), represents new technology that they are deploying that delivers radical increases in speed and performance on their network.
Description of 5G Evolution on AT&T website.
Randall Stephenson, Chairman and CEO of AT&T, defends their 5G E marketing amid a lawsuit filing by Sprint in an interview with CNBC:
It’s an Evolutionary Step to 5G
It’ll play itself out obviously. We feel very comfortable with how we’ve characterized the new service that we’re launching. What we do is go into a market and we turn up a significant block of spectrum, wireless airways that we own. I mean it’s rather dramatic. We’re deploying new technology that I won’t go into the details of it, but when we go into a market and we turn up this technology and we light up this spectrum our customers are seeing radical increases in speed and performance on the network.
This is a step that’s required to get to ultimate 5G. It’s an evolutionary step to 5G, a critical step. So we are characterizing this 5G E, 5G Evolution. We’ve obviously done our homework. We’ve done a lot of work around how we characterize this. We’re being very clear with our customers that this is an evolutionary step.
It’s Not a Play Everybody Can Run
But this is a dramatic step-change improvement in what the customers experience where we turn this up. I fully understand why our competitors might be upset with this. It’s not a play everybody can run. It’s a play that we really like. It’s a play that’s going to differentiate us in the marketplace as we begin to roll this out over the course of this year.
The future of fintech is cloud, AI, blockchain, IoT, 6G and quantum computing, says Anton Ruddenklau, Global Co‐leader of FinTech at KPMG. Those are the technologies that are fueling the digital transformation and will be central to financial services in the UK and the world going forward.
Anton Ruddenklau, Global Co‐leader of FinTech at KPMG discusses the future of fintech in an interview by Charlie Barrett, who is the FinTech Lead at AWS:
By 2027 Large UK Banks Will Go Cloud Native
The first tipping point is 2027. That is the date that IDC predicted when large UK corporate banks go cloud-native. They base it on spend analysis they get from CIOs across the industry. They say that 75 percent of the industry would have gone cloud native, the other 25 percent would have gone bust. There is an interesting thing.
Just as a sidebar, we’ve seen one CEO who has already been fired in the last couple of weeks because they didn’t actually adhere to their cloud strategy, and that’s Sage. So it’s starting. People are getting serious about cloud.
If you move back from those dates, what do the CIOs say? By 2020 they will spend more money on cloud services and data than they will on legacy technology. That’s a big tipping point for us and the cloud providers in the industry full stop. By 2022 the analysis shows that people will spend more money and resources on digital propositions and products supported by data and cloud than they will on legacy. We are moving to really a digital economy on financial services.
Blockchain, IoT, 6G, and Quantum Computing
The other one is blockchain which we think which is roughly between 2022 and 2024. That will be predicated on a number of things. Our tipping point analysis shows that ten percent of consumers and SMEs will have adopted distributed ledger cryptocurrency and that whole gamut of tokenization.
Then the internet of things (IoT). The new 6G is coming down from the mobile operators which is specifically for sensor technology and location based services. That’s sort of early 2020s. That will really fuel up the connection of machine to machine and all the things we want to see as consumers coming through.
Quantum computing is also a big one that is a big question mark for people. It’s super nascent right now. If we believe what people are saying to us, by 2024 or 2025 the quantum will arrive and that will just change the bandwidth for everything including the distributed ledger which really needs a lot of power to really make it work at scale.
Machine Learning Baked Into Cloud Services
More nearterm, I think for us is machine learning being baked into cloud services and cloud data warehouses? We see the likes of Amazon really moving hard on that and bringing machine learning to the masses. You don’t need to be a data scientist to do it. I think that is a fundamental change that’s coming. The small and medium sized fintech firms can adopt that a lot quicker.
However, they don’t have the distribution in scale. The opportunity for us is to get the large banks to understand that. It comes back to new types of skills and moving IT from the back office to the front office.
There will be real-time enterprise solutions based on 5G, says Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg. He predicts that this is a way to transform an enterprise. Vestberg also says that 5G will continue to aggressively roll out this year and that there will be a Motorola and Samsung 5G phone possibly released within the next six months.
Hans Vestberg, CEO of Verizon, discussed on Fox Business at Davos 2019 the advent of 5G and how it will spark massive innovation and technological change:
5G Will Transform the Enterprise
With business, we are already global as well as with our media strategy with our Yahoo brands, etc. With the consumer, we are only in the US and that is where we are focusing right now. With the 5G coming up that’s, of course, opening up new markets for us that we hadn’t had before. When it comes to wireless consumption for consumers there’s not so much more growth to do. What we see with 5G are so many other use cases. Consumers get the best service now and with 5G they will get even better service than they have today.
We also have 5G Home which is a market that we don’t address today. Then, of course, there will be real-time enterprise solutions based on 5G. This is a way to transform an enterprise. It can be the production floor or a business campus that you transform with 5G. We see other use cases beyond consumers when we go to 5G. We will always take care of our consumers. We are the best network and we have the best performance and that will continue as well.
5G Phones Coming Very Soon
5G phones are coming soon. I have already announced that we will have two 5G phones coming out this year, preferably in the first half of the year. They will be from Motorola and Samsung. What it’s going to mean for consumers is when we have the 5G Ultra Wideband you are going to have 10X throughput and speeds.
I’m sure you are wondering about new use cases with 5G. Remember when 4G came, we didn’t know. I can tell you that when there are so many people on 5G phones people are going to innovate new services with the speed, the throughput, and the low latency. Our plan is to work with the different developers using our platform or our network service in order to get the innovation on top of it. That’s going to create a lot of new services.
5G Home Launching in More Markets
The home service has been predominantly a cable or fiber service. Nowadays, we can see that you can also do that with wireless. You can get it quicker and we also see an increase in cord cutting. We want to give optionality to our customers. If they want a wireless offering they should be able to have that as well.
We see that as a good opportunity. We already launched 5G Home last year in four markets and this year we want to launch in more markets.
This is the year that many of the technological innovations that Ford has been working on will start to come out. That’s the message that Ford CEO Jim Hackett is telling the media at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit which started today. Hackett says that the vehicles of the future will be so intelligent that they could drive themselves.
Hackett indicated that many of the innovations that will start to appear in Ford vehicles will related to the Internet of Things. IoT features would allow cars to be connected with other intelligent cars on the road which would ultimately make autonomous driving a much safer feature. They could also connect to intelligent cities of the future via the cloud to improve traffic flow.
Jim Hackett, CEO of Ford, talks about technological innovations that Ford will be announcing in 2019 with Fox Business:
Ford Working on Vehicles of the Future
It’s my history to take some time, not too much time, to be very thoughtful about a very powerful way that Ford’s going to win. We are through that phase. This is the year that we start execution.
A series of announcements are staged in time for when they need to come out. That together forms what we believe are the vehicles of the future. They will be ever more intelligent and ever more fun to drive. They are so intelligent that could drive themselves.
They relate to a world that in itself has gotten even more intelligent. For the listeners, it’s called Edge Computing. For others, it’s called the Internet of Things. All it means is your vehicle and the things it has to interact with will suddenly be talking to each other through vehicle connectivity, the cloud, and the brains that are inside the vehicle itself.
This is the Year of Intelligent Vehicles
There’s a period where all this is evolving and people are going to wonder if we are getting out of the car business. Not at all. It’s just the adoption of all this kind of performance changes what the vehicles can do. We’ve been hard at work mapping all that out and thinking all that through. This year you are starting to see some pieces of that come forth.
New Ford Investors Focused on New Technology
The market has begun to see these new technologies as attracting outside investors. There’s news in the last three days of people buying into artificial intelligence drive systems and of people putting money inside other car companies. It’s all about them investing in this new technology.
Ford is probably even more attractive to people like that because of how run the company is and how well architected the vehicles are. There’s not as much risk in that part.
Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg says that 5G is much more than just your typical mobile network speed improvement. 5G is a transformative technology that will power the Fourth Industrial Revolution and dramatically change society in the process. Like the three Industrial Revolution’s before this one, the innovations that are enabled by 5G are what will define this technology advancement.
Last year Verizon launched the first 5G network with 5G Home. There is so much to come from 5G this year and the years to come. 5G will change everything. The pace of technology change that we have seen in the last decade has been fast. The only thing we know for sure is that the pace of change is going to be faster in the future. We are going to see technology changes that are going to transform people, businesses, and society.
We are facing multiple challenges on this earth, our daily work life, things around us, climate change, and we are heading into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Think about all of these challenges and the Fourth Industrial Revolution together with 5G. Together with all the new technology acronyms like VR, AR, AI, and more. All of that together is really what we are talking about when it comes to the technology change that is inevitable that we are going to see in the future.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution Will Be Built on 5G
For us here we are on the cloud. It’s really to see that we are using this change and shape it in a direction that is actually transforming and doing good. The next area of technology advancement is going to be built on 5G. Most importantly, this is a different industrial revolution. The first one was the steam engine. The second one was electricity and the third one was digitization. All of them have a general purpose technology as a base. Then you innovated tremendously on it.
The steam engine, of course, on steamboats connecting continents, trade resulting. Electricity changed everything. Then of course, with digitalization that brought out all the PC computers, the internet and all of that. These were enormous transformations. The general technology for the Fourth Industrial Revolution is actually the total connectivity that 5G can bring. That’s what I see as a huge opportunity for all of us and our society to use in the next era of technology transformation.
5G is a Quantum Leap Compared to 4G
So what is 5G? 5G is a promise of so much than just an increase in wireless technology. From the beginning we had the 1G, the 2G, the 3G, and then the 4G. They were sort of leaps of differences when it comes to speed and throughput. When we think about 5G we think about 10 gigabits per second for throughput. We think about 10x improvement in latency. We think about 1,000 times more data volume to the network. It’s just radically different. It’s a quantum leap compared to 4G.
We have already done some real type of examples. We had an Indianapolis 500 driver that had blacked out windows driving extremely fast with 5G. Latency was so low you could actually drive it.
https://youtu.be/Dw2GT95Vyxc
Those type of things require innovation. Innovation requires a lot of different people and constituencies working with us. When I think about technology I also think a lot about how that can do good for our society. We are entering an era of more challenging things around the world and technology is one of the most important things that can transform it and make it sustainable. At Verizon, we call that human ability. We coined that word because we think about the human in the middle of technology to do right.
The Eight Currencies of 5G
When I think about 5G one of the big differences when we started developing 5G it was thought about giving a new type of solution for industry and for society. Ultimately consumers will have it. The capabilities of earlier wireless technology usually have speed and throughput assets as a different capability. We have eight capabilities in 5G. I call them the eight currencies.
The Eight Currencies of 5G
With the eight currencies of 5G you can do a service on them, you can monetize on them, you can build on them. This is very different than any previous wireless technology. There’s the Peak Data Rate and Mobile Data Volume, but it’s also the Mobility. It’s also how many Connected Devices that you can have. It’s Energy Efficiency and Service Deployment. And then, of course, it’s Reliability and Latency. There are eight currencies that 5G can give to the user. Whether it’s a device, a person, or an industry, that depends on how we are going to innovate on that.
It’s important that we have already started on a journey. Verizon started years ago to start building a network because you need a lot of fiber and you need a lot of dense networks to build these eight currencies. You need real estate to do mobile edge compute. Not only that you need spectrum. In some cases you need millimeter wave spectrum that is giving you enormous throughput and bandwidth.
Peak Rate and Thoughput
What I’m excited about is what innovation can we do on this currency? Let’s talk about the currencies that we have here. The Peak Rate and the Throughput are extremely important when it comes to doing things with speed. The first thing that comes to mind is how quickly can you download a movie on 5G. Today on 4G it takes 3 to 4 minutes with a 90-minute movie. It’s going to take you 10 seconds when you have ultra-wideband. So that’s a use case, but that’s really to limit yourself with what you can do with it.
There’s so much more that you can do when you have that type of Speed and Throughput. It’s a quantum leap compared to what we have today. It’s about rethinking how you can use the increased speed and throughput when you talk about speed at 10 gigabits per second and throughput probably 1000 times more than today. I’m excited about those two currencies, but there are other currencies.
Mobility and Connected Devices
Two other currencies are Mobility and Connected Devices. Mobility or mobile connections, that’s how it’s actually measured in speed. In a 4G network today you can basically capture a radio signal up to 350 kilometers per hour. In 5G it’s roughly 500 kilometers per hour. Why does that matter? Think about high speed trains. Think about things that are going to move extremely fast in the future that are going to bring efficient transportation. With 5G you can captures that.
When it comes to IoT and Connected Devices, one of the limitations of wireless technology today is that you can roughly connect 100,000 devices per square kilometer with 4G. With 5G you can do 1 million. Suddenly you can have massive IoT in order to transform big cities, industry, or behaviours where we need to address challenges that we have today. These two currencies are also very different and address different business cases.
Service Deployment and Energy Efficiency
Let’s talk about two other currencies or capabilities, Service Deployment and Energy Efficiency. Service Deployment is a little hard to explain, but what it’s really about if flexible service deployment where you can match your software with specific customer needs. Think about if you want to do a virtual classroom with five different cities and you want them to have the same software. Today on the 4G network that would take me weeks or even months.
The promise of 5G is that can go down to minutes where we can spin the new service based on the software demands of the customer. These are enormous changes. We just need to think how can we innovate on that?
Now there is of course Energy Efficiency. Here the world is facing the challenges of climate change and our industry needs to think about all of the equipment we are using and that everything we are using is improving how much CO2 we are doing. There are a lot of things coming out but we just need to continue and we need to do that collectively.
5G is promising to reduce up to 90 percent of the power usage that we have with 4G. This is about making the Fourth Industrial Revolution a positive change. The first and second industrial revolutions produced a lot of CO2 emissions because they were the steam engines and electricity. Here we have a chance together to actually power and uniquely address those two as well.
Latency and Reliability
The last two currencies are Latency and Reliability. On the latency side today in the mobile networks we can get to 100 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds. In 5G we will go down to 10 milliseconds. Why is that important? Everything realtime, AR, VR, needs to come down to at least 20 milliseconds in order to avoid delays. There are so many other use cases you can do as well.
Latency and Reliability are very important in the network. It comes down to how we can innovate. It’s just so dramatic how much difference with what you can do things with 5G than with the previous technology cycles.
