5G Hype vs Reality: How Does it Affect your Business?

5G, 6G, 7G, 10G, 20G, 57,000G… What the G difference?!

If you’ve been on the Internet or watched a piece of media or seen a billboard in the last two years, you’ve seen an advertisement talking about 5G. “5G is coming, 5G is coming, 5G is coming, 5G is here…” Why is this?

Telephone companies don’t really have very many exciting things that they can talk about the drive up their stock price or make people interested in them, and really one of the things they can talk about is speed and what speed they can do. And if you’re a wireless company, every time there’s a new speed tech that comes out–whether it was 2G to 3G, 3G to 4G (which is LTE), 4G to fake 5G, which we see now, an actual real 5G– you’re really excited about this.

And there’s all these things that come out of it:

• We’re gonna be able to do better IoT,
• We’re going to have more sensors,
• We can do connected cities,
• We can have self-driving cars
• We have drone deliveries….

“All these things are going to be empowered by 5G” and the answer is: it’s not really true.

So what is 5G? 5G is a much faster wireless data spec. So instead of being in a position with 4G or LTE of saying, “Hey we can have 100 Mbps symmetric wireless service (which by the way 100 Mbps symmetric to a wireless device is smoking fast) but the spec goes up even faster so now of course, in theory, you can push more data back and forth and you can get more service about it.

For us, this is a big hype cycle!

Why?

Because all these services are metered. As a business do you care that you can go from 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps or a 1000 Mbps on a wireless service if the connection is still metered and you’re paying per bite of delivery?

If you have to look at a service and say, “For every GB that we deliver across this wireless link we’re paying, and our rates go up.”  Of course not! What you want is PREDICTABILITY! 

You want to know: “I signed the contract for this dollar amount and it’s going to be this dollar amount every month, and this is a service I’m going to get every month, and I can base my business and understand my operations around it.”

You want predictability, you want consistency.

So is 5G going to be the “second coming” and change the world? Anytime technology gets faster and we can do more things and push more data to wireless devices and mobile users things will improve.

Will it drastically change the face of the planet? Only if the wireless carriers changed their service plans. 

Are they planning on doing this? Of course not: because they want to be able to juke and suck as much money as they can out of their services.

If you’re in a conversation somebody is pushing, hyping you on 5G, 5G, 5G, 5G is going to transform your business- it probably isn’t.

Could it improve your business? Absolutely.

Is it going to drastically transform your business? Probably not.

Now if you’re looking to support a mobile workforce and manage mobility at scale, and support retail installations, or far off locations, you’ve got a research installation going into Antarctica, you want to fill on the beaches of Hawaii and how you ship data back and forth?

Now those are all good conversations and we can talk about solutions that are available to you today to actually support your business.

Give us a call at ITBroker.com. We’d love to have a conversation with you and walk you through what is available to you, what is hype, what isn’t hype, what will help your business, what was just noise. If you’re looking to save money and grow your business, give us a call at ITBroker.com and we will help you.