Lots of well-informed, smart people believe the deployment of 5G access networks is something of a race for economic leadership. It is a complicated matter, though, since many of those observers also believe 5G is intimately connected with reaping the benefits of artificial intelligence and the internet of things.
Some of us would position the matter the other way around: economies, industries and countries that learn to innovate with AI and IoT will reap rewards. 5G is mostly along for the ride. In other words, firms, industries and countries that learn how to use AI and IoT to boost productivity and create important new use cases with big economic impact will “win.”
“The rollout of 5G is expected to enable and widely disseminate technologies, such as: the Internet of Things, self-driving cars, autonomous drones, and Star Wars-inspired hologram phones,” says a study by the World Economic Forum. And that is the point: 5G is infrastructure for reaping the benefits of potential innovation in IoT and from applied artificial intelligence.
But it will take time and perhaps some luck to discover and create all those new use cases. Deployment speed, in other words, might help, or might not, if innovation actually requires not only time and experimentation, but other enablers as well.
To use an older analogy, deploying higher-speed internet access networks is a necessary, but not sufficient, driver of economic innovation. What really matters is the ability to wring economic benefit and innovation from the existence of those assets.
Yes, for some use cases, the ability to sustainably deploy IoT systems might hinge on 5G-specific capabilities (ultra-low latency or device density per cell site). In other cases innovations can occur using 4G, Wi-Fi or other access methods, plus edge computing.
To use another analogy, there are many reasons why Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu or JD.com arise, and where they arise. Plentiful broadband access helps, but does not automatically lead to creation of sustainable, global platforms, services and apps.
For whatever reason, internet platforms with scale have developed mostly in the United States and China. There are scale reasons, to be sure: both countries have huge internal markets. Still, innovation in the internet apps and platforms arena does not happen everywhere, even when goog internet access is everywhere.
Nor will innovation happen everywhere good 5G is available. Other forces are at work, and must be at work, for global scale and leadership to emerge.
The so-called race is about the ability to harness the power of AI and internet of things in economically-important ways, not the race to deploy 5G access networks, as such.
No comments:
Post a Comment