5G will become the golden key to open the era of the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is not new. At the beginning of the Internet, some people proposed that everything can be connected through the Internet, which is considered to be the earliest definition of the Internet of Things. In fact, as early as 1995, Bill Gates also mentioned the Internet of Things in his book "The Road Ahead", but it did not attract much attention at the time. Today, with the integration of the Internet and advanced communication technologies, mobile Internet has become a reality; therefore, the vision of the Internet of Everything seems to be within our reach. So what is the reality?

The Internet of Things is still in its infancy

Since 2011, a wave of QR code entrepreneurship has emerged in China, and QR code is also considered to be the touchstone for the opening of the Internet of Things era. However, nearly five years have passed, and the Internet of Things is still in an embarrassing situation for us, where we can only hear footsteps but not see people leaving the city. In fact, as early as 2009, the Internet of Things was officially listed as one of the five emerging strategic industries in the country and written into the "Government Work Report", and it was considered to have broad market prospects.

Data from the "2014-2018 China Internet of Things Industry Application Field Market Demand and Investment Forecast Analysis Report" shows that in 2010, the market scale of the Internet of Things in the fields of security, transportation, electricity and logistics was 60 billion yuan, 30 billion yuan, 28 billion yuan and 15 billion yuan respectively. In 2011, the market scale of China's Internet of Things industry reached more than 260 billion yuan.

However, it is embarrassing that the domestic Internet of Things is still in the passive Internet of Things era. The connection between object information and the Internet is mainly achieved through barcodes, QR codes, RFID, infrared, laser scanning and other devices, and the application is also limited to limited fields such as merchant commodity circulation management, smart security, smart home, food traceability, etc. In addition, the domestic Internet of Things industry has the following bottlenecks, including small enterprise scale, lack of core technology, lack of technical standards, single business model, and low level of application demand.

Among the many restrictive factors, the most fatal one is the low level of application demand. Without large-scale consumer-level applications, it is not enough to drive the development of the industry.

5G will become the golden key to open the era of the Internet of Things

In November 2016, at the third World Internet Conference held in Wuzhen, the 5G technology prototype that can realize the "Internet of Everything" was selected as one of the 15 "black technologies" - the world's leading Internet achievement 5G is moving towards gigabit mobile networks and artificial intelligence.

In the 4G era, faster transmission rates have led to the explosion of various mobile Internet applications, from social applications to video calls, from various O2O applications to online education, mobile games, etc. However, in the 5G era, with more abundant bandwidth resources and faster transmission efficiency, the expensive traffic before the 4G era will become very abundant and cheap.

According to current research by various countries, the peak rate of 5G technology will increase by dozens of times compared to the current 4G technology, from 100Mb/s of 4G to tens of Gb/s. In other words, more than 10 high-definition movies can be downloaded in one second, and the number of user connections that can be supported will increase to 1 million users/square kilometer, which can better meet the needs of massive access scenarios such as the Internet of Things.

Wu Hequan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chairman of the Internet Society of China, said that with the application of 5G networks, various types of IoT will quickly become popular. He said that currently there is no communication between cars. With the 5G network, cars can communicate with each other, cars with data centers, and cars with other smart devices. This will not only enable higher levels of autonomous driving, but also use various types of traffic data to plan the most reasonable route for cars. Once a large number of cars enter this network, intelligent transportation can be smoothly realized.

It can be said that 5G technology is prepared for the interconnection of all things, and 5G will usher in the era of the Internet of Things.