Explainer | How 5G will unlock the industrial internet, driving another dimension of mobile connectivity
- The stakes are high for industries around the world, as global spending on the internet of things is forecast to exceed US$1 trillion in 2022
This is the second in a series of articles analysing the impact of 5G mobile technology on people’s everyday lives.
In Hangzhou, capital of eastern China’s Zhejiang province and one of the country’s major technology hubs, evidence of the city’s smart infrastructure can be gleaned from how its public services function. Police officers are notified of major car accidents soon after they happen, traffic lights automatically adjust to changes in the volume of vehicles on the road, and in emergencies, fire trucks and ambulances are not stopped by a single red light until they arrive at the scene.
Those advances are enabled by Hangzhou’s City Brain project, a cloud computing and artificial intelligence-driven urban traffic-management system. It covers a total area of 420 square kilometres (162 square miles) – that’s seven times the size of New York’s Manhattan island.
When 5G mobile services start to roll out worldwide from next year, smart cities such as Hangzhou are expected to get smarter as the next-generation wireless technology helps industries realise the full potential of the internet of things (IoT).
“From 2G to 3G to 4G, all of them serve people,” said Cui Kai, a Beijing-based IoT analyst with technology research firm IDC. “But 5G, from the beginning of its infrastructure design, has the internet of things in mind.”
IoT envisions a self-configuring, adaptive and complex network that interconnects physical objects, each containing embedded technology to communicate, gather data and interact with mobile applications or other networks.