Etisalat UAE | How the 5G era will drive more innovations for the IoT ecosystem

Most of us are probably stuck with old smart phones due to the pandemic that disrupted our lives and finances. So much that essentials must come first before other things like buying a brand new phone with better features, design and speed like the newly-manufactured different 5G android smart phones or Apple 12 Max.

But there’s more to 5G besides its huge impact to our smart phones.

So what exactly is 5G? 5G is the new global wireless standard connecting virtually everyone and everything together, including machines, objects and devices. Its speed is said to be 10 times more than previous networks that we used in the past—1G, 2G, 3G, 4G and even LTE.

In the UAE and across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Etisalat was the first telecom firm to introduce the 5G network.

5G’s greatest value is its impact on innovations on the Internet of Things (IoT) which essentially control how we live, do business, create things and products, get access to social services and healthcare, education, global trade, among many other things.

Apart from enabling individual consumers get high-speed access to internet, live-streaming and connectivity, 5G is seen to drive innovations on IoT on an industrial scale to different industries like manufacturing, retail, healthcare, automotive, etc., which will essentially speed up the process tremendously, resulting to better service and production output.

How exactly this works?

Picture this: a noodles factory with virtually no people in sight, mixing flour and other ingredients, each measured in exact quantity, processing them into tiny bits of noodles before packaging them for shipment. All this while making actual inventory on the system, sorting items for storage in warehouses and those that should be dispatched for deliveries.

Its entire production is run by robots powered by Artificial Intelligence connected through IoT. Because machines and robots are not paid salaries like people, they can be utilised 24/7 at no extra cost to the manufacturing firm without complaints.

For some smart factories, these scenes are all too familiar by now but with 5G coming, the speed of production will get even more faster. This means more revenues coming while cutting operation costs on salaries, utilities, as well as saving time and other resources.

Tech giant Ericsson said combining 5G with IoT has enormous potential benefits so much that many businesses are convinced they can save more using this revolutionary network citing as basis its survey.

5G networks offer manufacturers and telecom operators the chance to build smart factories and truly take advantage of technologies such as Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality for troubleshooting, and the Internet of Things (IoT), it added.

According to Ericsson’s study titled “The 5G Business Potential” the 5G market will balloon to $113 billion by 2026 with many businesses opting to invest on it and take advantage of its many benefits in their operations.

And it’s not just the businesses in general that are excited about 5G. The global education sector is equally upbeat about its impact on creating new possibilities in the digital age.

The pandemic has accelerated digitalisation and nowhere has its impact been felt more than in education. Studies were done online. Tests were conducted online. Graduations were held virtually and so on.

Indeed, online education became the norm in different countries and cities and the trend is likely to continue with COVID-19 mutating to more variants.

And it’s not just the governments and private sectors that promote education online but people across many fronts have also turned sights to online self-learning to upskill themselves. YouTube reportedly generates more than 1 billion visits a day for its learning and education videos.

With 5G, schools, institutes, colleges and universities are all upbeat about the possibilities of creating a well-informed and educated people across the world. How? Well, speed creates a huge difference.

5G will help students and educators interact on real-time at faster speed, eliminating downtime in delays and failures, thus, provide better learning opportunities.

5G is leading us to a new era of higher speed and connectivity. The sky’s the limit.