5G promises to revolutionise telecommunication speed for the transfer of data, but what does it mean for the water market?
5G’s potential divides industry opinion
With the promise to turn the physical world from dumb to smart, 5G has been hyped to transform our digital communications.
Called fifth-generation cellular network technology, or 5G for short, it has even sparked an international digital arms race to get the first networks up and running.
Reports show South Korea is taking an active role, signing up more than one million people to 5G mobile contracts in a record 69 days. Meanwhile, US company Verizon claims to have been first to the mark by offering 5G in parts of Chicago and Minneapolis.
But what exactly is 5G and what impact could it have, at all, on water technology and the ability to send and diagnose data?
Put simply, 5G is the next jump up from 4G telecommunication networks and promises to enable the Internet of Things (IoT) connections to jump from the millions to the billions.
To date, implementation has been somewhat lengthy, mainly because the jump from 4G to 5G is much more significant than that from 3G to 4G.
Yet the promised speeds are impressive: a potential 20Gbps connection will eventually enable people to download 4K movies in mere seconds, rather than minutes.
Potential benefits of 5G for the water market
For the water sector, some believe the increased speed offered by 5G will come in useful for incident response/emergencies, where time is of the essence and pulling together all the relevant insights to make the best risk-based decisions will be essential.
“5G will give water professionals the ability to connect more parts of the business via collaborative comms platforms, data, information and work sharing,” says Mark Kaney, director – asset management (Europe) for consultancy Black & Veatch (B&V).
“In making the internal operations of the water company more efficient, it should enable external service providers to improve.”
In its 2018 Smart Cities & Utilities Report, B&V said that 34 per cent of municipalities it had surveyed rated “high-speed data networks as one of their top three priorities”.
Dr Benjamin Tam, Managing Director of consultancy Isle UK, says 5G will enable “a smarter workforce that can operate efficiently with access to new tools, such as virtual reality and augmented reality, powered by high-speed streaming”.
Meanwhile Keith Hays, vice president from Bluefield Research, believes "5G has transformative potential as IoT grows, the greater capacity needed to carry more data real-time from more devices. Combined with quantum computing, 5G could be a game changer in how our networks are managed and the realisation of full digital twin model.”
