With 5G adoption on the rise, businesses find themselves at pivotal juncture

The number of media reports chronicling the rise in 5G adoption across both public and private sectors continues to grow.

Last month, the Australian Federal Government announced that it would partially fund the NBN’s $750 million upgrade of its fixed wireless network, which will expand the NBN’s footprint to cover over a quarter of the premises currently served by satellite connectivity and increasing speeds to between 100Mbps and 250Mbps. This will help organisations located in those areas to compete with those based in metropolitan areas of the country.

In addition, many organisations across metropolitan areas of Australia are also working through their digital transformations, and demand for faster internet, which 5G delivers, and greater capacity, is at an all-time high. Last year, Cradlepoint conducted research* that found that 89 percent of organisations in Australia are confident that 5G will deliver the promised speeds within the next 12 months.

No Time to Lose

Additionally in Australia, 74 percent of organisations believe that 5G will deliver business benefits and 81% believe it will be useful for AI and AR in the next 12 months^[1].

With so many business leaders seeing the benefits of 5G in taking their organisations to the next digital level, the window is closing for those who have taken a wait-and-see approach toward 5G. The early adopters will get a jump on competitors in terms of accumulating knowledge of operating with 5G. And the Australian Government is taking note, launching round 2 of the 5G Innovation Initiative grant funding last month, which provides grants to organisations with innovative ideas that want to trial 5G applications to bring those ideas to life. This Government initiative is further proof that those organisations that invest now in 5G increase their chances of thinking up new apps that remove the distance between them and their customer, forge stronger customer loyalty and improve the customer experience — in short, it becomes a competitive advantage.

Now is a critical time for business and government decision makers in Australia — a period to learn where the 5G market is, where it’s heading and what’s needed to best implement the technology.

Discovering Innovative 5G Apps

A wave of new 5G wireless applications crop up nearly every week.

In Korea, the government plans to “introduce 5G-equipped buses across the country by 2023,” according to a report in the Korea Herald which will give citizens access to free wireless internet that is up to four times faster. More than 29,000 of the country’s 35,000 buses will be equipped with 5G network service and provide internet speeds up to four times faster than the current LTE Wi-Fi they rely on.

For drone aircraft, 5G speeds and reliability will help boost the commercial applications of the technology. For years, safety concerns of aviation authorities around the world have prevented drone aircraft from flying beyond the visual line of sight (VLOS) of operators, which greatly limits the distance drones can operate.

But 5G has begun to eliminate those concerns because the latency of 5G is so brief, the connection to the drone is more secure. The 5G signal is also 360-degrees, which helps strengthen the link between the drone and control applications.

Israel launched a pilot program last summer that seeks to control smart traffic cameras over 5G in partnership with Israel’s National Transport Infrastructure Company. Officials there seek to upgrade communications infrastructure around the country with the help of smart applications.

The rise of 5G is also enabling some organisations to become more nimble. WISE Employment, an employment service dedicated to servicing the disadvantage isn’t locked down by physical locations. If one location isn’t working, they pack up their networking equipment and set up shop in a more promising spot within a day.

You can’t do that with a wireline connection.

Finding the Right Partners

Network managers should look for specific attributes from any cellular-network provider they partner with, including:

• Experience: If you’re evaluating vendors, you first and foremost need to look at companies with an established track record in cellular.
• Gear: Any partner should design and manufacture their own products, such as routers and adapters. The devices should connect quickly and efficiently to the carrier network with very little manual provisioning.
• Expansive network management: Team with vendors that can manage servers, display uptime and show how much traffic your SIM cards are using. A cloud management tool will have the ability to assist you to deploy your wireless WAN network and troubleshoot if something goes wrong.
• Cloud: This technology represents the evolution of management. With cloud connectivity, organisations are able to remotely manage large, highly distributed networks such as hundreds of retail POS locations, or autonomous vehicles, or thousands of IoT devices. Cloud connectivity enables a manager to track all of it on a single pane of glass. It also removes the need for you to manage any hardware.
   

As organisations gain more confidence in the benefits of 5G and the endless applications that it enables, those that are working with it now will be ahead in what is a race to becoming a leader through digital innovation.

Reference:

[1] State of the Wireless WAN 2022, IDG (Commission by Cradlepoint)

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Wit