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opinion

Ray Sharma is the founder and CEO of Extreme Venture Partners.

The hype surrounding 5G is building to a crescendo.

The next, or fifth generation of mobile networks is no mere upgrade – indeed 5G feels more like 10G, with a data speed 100 times that of 4G.

And less appreciated is a 98-per-cent reduction in latency. Latency, the time difference between cause and effect, is not well understood but is the critical reason why the implications of 5G have the potential to be massive.

For example, medical innovators have eagerly been waiting for the ability to conduct remote robotic surgeries. This is something that is real and has already been tested. The East beat the West in this technology race earlier this year with China playing host to the world’s first remote robotic surgery on a lab animal, with the surgeon being 50 kilometres away from the site on a 5G network. An ultra-low latency network is something that is obviously imperative for remote surgeries because of the precision and risk involved.

Online gamers and especially e-sports enthusiasts are perhaps best versed in the implications of latency. Google will soon be launching a service called Stadia that we believe will revolutionize the gaming industry. Stadia is the Netflix of gaming and there could not be a more perfect fit for 5G networks. Gamers have experienced the frustrations of relatively high latency (known as “lag” to players). The Stadia platform will allow gamers to purchase and stream titles, without the need for a console, onto any device with a screen. A tablet or large-sized smartphone is the perfect match for Stadia. Add 5G latency and it’s game over: Watch the console market lose out to mobile the way PC gaming lost out to present-day consoles.

We can take the Netflix of games analogy one step further. That is, if we do not need our games on physical drives then why do we need our apps on our physical device? Games are by orders of magnitude the most demanding of applications. Therefore the combination of the power of cloud computing with ultra-low latency 5G will result in a rethinking of all other app architecture. During a live stream, the app is able to be hosted and can go back and forth to the network hundreds of times during the blink of an eye. No longer would we require phones with SD card slots. No longer would we need to worry about choosing an iPhone with either a 64-, 256-, or 512-gigabyte drive. The app architecture of Apple’s App Store and Android’s Google Play will be transformed. If you own a Chromebook, you already have a small taste of this new world with apps such as Google Docs. You have also seen the drawbacks of high latency when saving files or inserting a chart: With 5G, the files within mobile apps do not need to reside on a device, unless there is a privacy reason to do so.

Imagine manufacturers saving the equivalent of $100 in components a device with annual sales of one billion devices. That is easy math – $100-billion saved a year. Surely that can only result in lower costs throughout the industry.

This crazy potential has other downstream implications. If you abstract the app layer from device to the cloud then why do you need high powered smartphones? This could result in a splitting up of the marketplace. Low-cost Chromebook-like smartphones. Generic devices that do everything, such as the iPhone and Galaxy. And then there will be opportunities to shift computing power to create interesting niche devices. Imagine a medical device outfitted with sensors for your specific need. Or an ultra secure phone that uses the computing power to hide every aspect of device and internet usage. Or a device with such high end cameras and supporting technology that it would evolve to a holographic device capable of projecting images into free space. Instead of the generic smartphone we will have classes of medical, ultra-secure, and holographic devices.

5G is worthy of the hype. The rollout of our next generation mobile networks is about so much more than faster downloads of movies. The implications of an unprecedented reduction in latency experience will change many underlying assumptions of the mobile Internet.

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