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The Future of 5G

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| 32 Smart Cities A smart city is one that deploys various types of IoT sensors (representing meters, controllers, lighting, displays, etc.) and uses the resulting data in a way to manage a city and its resources efficiently— including transportation, power, water, waste, crime, and pretty much any area of a city that can produce data. For example, as waste vehicles collect recyclables, they can calculate mass and predict the flow of trash to waste facilities and determine the facilities' ability to process the waste. The idea of a smart city has been around for more than a decade, but what has been missing is a way to efficiently communicate with the mass of sensors that exist within a city: For example, where sensors distributed around an area can detect flooding (including depth and flow). 5G technology provides the platform through which all these sensors can coexist and communicate between themselves and centralized cloud infrastructures. Only a 5G wireless network can support the scale of data that IoT sensors produce and amass at the scale of a city, with the cloud providing the scalable processing necessary to manage this elastic set of processing demands. Entertainment The application of a 4G network commonly occurs in delivering content to endpoints such as phones or tablets: Consider users watching videos on their devices. Some types of data, such as sporting events or concerts, delivered in real time cause issues. Even if many users are streaming the same content, the network delivers it independently to each user. Multimedia Broadcast/ Multicast Service (MBMS) enables users to share the content delivered through one stream, reducing the bandwidth that the data uses. This functionality has been extended with MBMS on demand (MOOD), which allows dynamic switching from a unicast to a multicast delivery when the number of devices accessing the same content exceeds some defined threshold. With the growth of content that will travel through the 5G network, MOOD can transform digital television. Cloud-Based Gaming Cloud-based gaming (also called gaming on demand) enables users to play a game the cloud hosts on a peer device (such as a smartphone, computer, or smart TV), where the game video-streams to the peer device in much the same way other videos stream. The recently announced cloud-gaming platform developed by Google®—called Stadia™—could be a significant recipient of 5G capabilities. The platform pushes the high-level computation of a game and video rendering to the cloud using a peer device, such as a tablet, streaming the game video and taking user input for game control. 5G bandwidth and low latency make it ideal for gaming in the cloud. Cloud Storage Another interesting application of this new, fast 5G conduit is the so-called Storage as a Service, which extends the storage capabilities of a device by employing elastic storage in a cloud infrastructure. Equipping a device with cloud-based storage makes your data secure, not tied to a given device. The result is data sharing between devices as well as an increase of reliability and availability of the data through cloud-based data protection. It also opens availability to a user's full library of content, which can otherwise be limited by the storage capability of an end device. A 5G network offers the bandwidth and latency to empower this application. Summary As technology evolves, it eventually reaches the limits of what's possible. Product developers then attempt to work around the limitations to fit their features into the available technology. The new 5G wireless infrastructure provides the platform and technological leap to extend communication limits for a new frontier of product offerings. Whether the limitations result from bandwidth, latency, or density, the 5G network represents a catalyst for new products and new experiences for consumers. 5G technology also provides a new fabric for mixed computing environments such as the IoT, where devices continue to rely on cloud-based infrastructures.

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