First 5G deployment in San Francisco

First 5G deployment in San Francisco

November – San Francisco Bay area is going to be primary area for the first phase of deployment of 5G for mobile devices. It is going to be one of the smart city where information and communication, including mobile connectivity are going to improve quality of urban life – from professional to private. From social networking, to real-time GPS navigation and maps, mobile payments, video streaming and access to the Internet at the fingertips anywhere, anytime. 

A lot of trials and testing are going on right now. 5G wireless communications needs new transmission equipment in the network to be sure that every IoT device out there is connected to the right network and can deliver significant performance increase. For enjoying media content, we now use a second screen and often a third screen. In this connected world we are talking not just about the million additional devices but billion of them.

What need to be bring to the table is mobile operating system because people are consuming videos and media on the mobile devices more and more. There are also different requirements for various situations: if you using it for surgical operation in healthcare or if you remotely driving a car or if you are just sending a message to the network. 

What does 5G technology mean for us? When you push some content and you see on the screen that little “loading or buffering wheel”, the icon that shows you that time is elapsing – that is 4G. With 5G all those things are going to go away. No waiting time for download. Things are going to happen instantly. Today 65% of content consumption traffic on tablets is video traffic. Slightly lower, around 42% is on the smartphones. Deployment of 5G will allowed that performance on the devices will be much faster and it will be instant.

5G plays significant role for connected cars, airplane traffic or smart factories.  It is important in the era that has a flood of automated data. By 2020 average internet user is going to create around 1,5 GB of traffic per day but smart hospital will produce 3,000 GB and autonomous vehicle 4,000 GB per. Airplane data will even use 10 times more than a driverless car – 40,000 GB per day. The top of the list ranked smart factory with 1,000,000 GB daily.

For the initial testing, why choose San Francisco?  Being located as part of the extended Silicon Valley, it is a foundation for Internet of Things (IoT). This means all applications are easily going to find it and will are going to find route here – explained an executive from Ericsson at the Mobile World Congress Americas in September. Ericsson is building a pipe that will supply all the devices. By 2022 the company predicts that there will be 500 million IoT devices ready for 5G. In addition to the network, there is going to be new applications development for IoT on the top of 5G.

Initial roll out of 5G is going to happen probably early 2019 and 2020 but the momentum for expansion to other cities will be later on. Things are going to be perform faster, the quality of experience for mobile devices is going to be significantly better and low latency.