By 2027, 5G networks will carry 62 percent of the world’s smartphone traffic, according to a report by Ericsson.
As 5G continues to enable unprecedented levels of connectivity, its significant economic and social values will be determined by the success of its new use cases and applications for consumers and businesses, shares Chafic Traboulsi, Vice President and Head of Networks for Ericsson Middle East and Africa in an interview with ITP.net.
“5G can be used to advance socio-economic changes in the countries and the economies that adopts it by allowing the possibility for an enhancement and an evolution of the broadband in the country,” said Traboulsi.
“With the pandemic, we have seen that internet connectivity and connectivity in general are a necessity for economies to evolve and 5G is the next milestone into this evolution,” he added.
Investments in 5G are gaining prominence, in which Traboulsi shared: “It not only brings new frequencies allowing the operators to launch better and faster services, but also increases the adoption of new technologies in manufacturing because of specific capabilities that the technology is enabling.”
5G is slowly emerging as the most powerful, scalable tool to tackle climate change, shared Traboulsi. The technology’s uses and applications across various sectors is driving down costs, energy usage, emissions, waste and mitigating climate change.
“5G brings with it specific technology, such massive Internet of Things (IoT), allowing us to connect hundreds and thousands of devices to the network and conduct operations in a more digitised and evolved way – this is cutting human movement and reducing the need for us to do things in a more traditional way,” explained Traboulsi.
“Post-covid, we are working from home, we are moving less, and this could not have been there without 5G and connectivity in general,” he added.
5G and edge computing
Edge computing is also becoming a must have for 5G success, highlighted Traboulsi.
While 5G technology promises greater speed in the circulation of information, as well as a reduction in latency, the network needs to be complemented by edge computing – a distributed computing paradigm that brings data processing closer to the end user.
“5G is bringing a very low latency connection on the radio interface, which will allow us to do what we call edge computing,” he said.
With that, 5G and edge computing are both poised to improve the performance of applications and enable huge amounts of data to be processed in real-time.
On how edge computing is equipping service providers with a competitive advantage, Traboulsi said: “Service providers can evolve their offerings around edge computing in order to allow typical industries like banks and retail to remove a lot of the compute that they have in store and on premise and do it on the edge instead.”
Edge computing allows for processing to take place at the ‘edge’ of a network rather than transmitting data to the cloud or a central data warehouse to be analyzed, which reduces network latency, increases bandwidth, and delivers significantly faster response times.
Ericsson is also enhancing its 5G capabilities with the launch of its Time-Critical Communication (TCC) solution, which is designed to resolve lags and interruptions in 5G networks, according to Traboulsi.
“TCC plays an essential role in ensuring the quality of services…it’s a software feature that allows us to configure networks in a certain way where we can guarantee certain levels of service on the 5G network,” he explained.
Through its new Critical IoT product, which is easily deployable as a software upgrade on public and private 5G networks, it can guarantee the consistent low latency and high reliability demanded by time-critical applications and services for consumers, enterprises, and public sector.
