Is it true or false that 5G brings new business opportunities?

5G is a very popular buzzword recently. According to the beautiful vision described by manufacturers:

With 5G, everything can be connected to the Internet (IoT), bringing a better smart life. In addition, new technologies such as VR, AR, 4K, and 8K can bring better audio-visual experience to humans with the bandwidth of 5G. Really?

Simply put, fake.

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Manufacturers have described 5G as the savior of so many applications, saying that because the bandwidth has increased, it can quickly transmit these large amounts of content in real time, and these applications will be very popular. But these beautiful visions are not yet possible. Is it because 4G bandwidth is not enough? Obviously not!

• The main reason why the Internet of Things is not popular is that the new value generated by connecting everything to the Internet is lower than the cost.
• The main reason why VR and AR are not popular is that the equipment is too expensive and there are no killer applications.
• The main reasons why 4K and 8K are not popular are that the equipment is too expensive, there is no content, and users cannot feel the difference in picture quality between resolutions above FHD.

If the above key factors are resolved in the future, these applications will indeed use higher network bandwidth, but not necessarily mobile network bandwidth. At present, many people's home networks have reached 100Mbps. Let these people be willing to watch VR and 8K on the sofa first, and then think about why they have to walk on the road and use 5G to do these things.

So what is the significance of 5G? Let's look at two types of networks from the perspective of mobility:

• Mobile network: This is the 4G that is commonly used now, and the highly anticipated 5G. Its features are wireless, and users will move over long distances (more than several kilometers). It can be used both indoors and outdoors, and mobile phones are representative applications. Generally speaking, the speed of 4G is at the 100Mbps level, while the speed of 5G is at the 1Gbps level. But that is in an ideal environment. Since the mobile environment is easily affected by shielding or distance, 50% of the speed is generally very ideal.
• Fixed-point network: To put it simply, it is a combination of Wi-Fi and wired network, forming a stable and high-speed network at a fixed point (usually inside a building). In Taiwan, ordinary people can apply for 1Gbps fiber to their homes, and Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong even have 10Gbps services. 1Gbps-level Wi-Fi 5 is already very popular, and 10Gbps-level Wi-Fi 6 has just started to enter the market. In other words, it is not difficult for ordinary people to have a 1Gbps-level fixed-point network.

The significance of 5G is to increase the speed of mobile networks to the same speed as fixed-line networks, so that they can serve a large number of connections at the same time.

Therefore, 5G can replace fixed-point networks, but its stability will be relatively poor.

When it is not convenient to set up a fixed-point network, the network stability is not so important, and the 4G network speed is not enough, it is suitable to use 5G. For example, if you hold a short-term event in a place with 1,000 people participating and there is no ready-made fixed-point network, then use a 5G router to connect Wi-Fi to provide it to users.

It sounds weak and has nothing to do with ordinary people? Yes, that’s why manufacturers have come up with applications such as VR, AR, 4K, and 8K, which sound more powerful.

So 5G is useless for ordinary people? Not true. According to Open Signal's network experience report, the average 4G network speed in Taiwan is about 30Mbps, which is sufficient, but not enough in extreme cases, such as when you are on a bus during rush hour. Since the network is shared, with a large number of people crowded in a small area, the bandwidth allocated to each person will be too small to be enough, or even impossible to connect.

That is to say, 5G currently has only two meanings:

• 5G can be used in places where it is inconvenient to set up a point network but a high-speed network is needed.
• In extremely congested situations, good enough mobile network quality can be provided.

That’s all 5G will be for the next year. What happens after that?

Let’s take a look at what the manufacturers claim about (Internet of Things) IoT, VR, AR, 4K, and 8K.

First of all, it is unreasonable to watch 4K or 8K in a mobile environment, because given the size of the mobile phone, the human eye cannot distinguish resolutions above 1080P. It is reasonable to watch 4K or 8K indoors on a large-screen TV.

VR should be used indoors because after wearing VR glasses, you cannot see the external environment, so there is no need to use VR outdoors.

Both of the above categories must be used indoors, which means it is reasonable to use fixed-point networks instead of 5G.

Only the Internet of Things and AR are left.

The Internet of Things is a very large category, and the devices vary greatly. Refrigerators, lights, electric meters, cars, industrial equipment... everything can be called IoT. But as mentioned earlier, 5G is not the first 1Gbps-level high-speed network, but a high-speed mobile network. Indoors, fixed-point networks such as fiber + Wi-Fi should be used, which are much more stable than 5G. In short, all long-term indoor IoT should not use 5G.

What are the outdoor IoTs? Cars, traffic signals, surveillance cameras, etc. However, cars are not suitable for using 5G, mainly because 5G signals have poor penetration. When a car travels between different locations, the signal will inevitably be unstable and unstable, so it is better to use 4G.

Some online articles mentioned that 5G network latency is very small, which is suitable for applications such as the Internet of Vehicles that require fast response. This view is wrong. The latency of 4G is 0.05 seconds, which is actually fast enough. The biggest problem of mobile networks is not latency but stability. An unstable signal will cause several seconds of lag. Moreover, due to physical characteristics, the penetration of 5G signals will be much worse than that of 4G, and it is more likely to be unstable.

Outdoor fixed-point IoT is an appropriate scenario for 5G. For example, outdoor surveillance cameras are very suitable for 5G because they have large traffic and are fixed-point. If the signal at the point is confirmed to be good, the stability of the signal will not change. However, if you want to make surveillance cameras, you don’t have to wait for 5G. Generally, the traffic of 1080P streaming video is about 3Mbps, and the current 4G is enough. You can start with 4G and upgrade to 5G when 4G is used more and more and the allocated bandwidth is not enough.

What about AR? In the long run, I think this is the new generation application that is most likely to make high use of 5G, or should I say, "smart glasses" may be the revolutionary application that needs to use 5G the most. This topic is more complicated, and I will write a special article to discuss it later.

So what new applications can 5G bring us in two or three years?

Let's take a look at the comparison between network speed and application to understand the average person's demand for bandwidth.

• Watching 1080p streaming video requires about 3Mbps, which is pretty good for current 4G.
• Watching 8K streaming video requires about 100Mbps.
• The access speed of a local hard disk is about 1Gbps. That is, when the network speed reaches 1Gbps, the user experience will not be different when accessing a cloud hard disk or a local hard disk.

Blurring the experience gap between cloud drives and local hard drives is a qualitative change brought about by 5G. Hereinafter referred to as "invisible cloud drives".

This has several benefits:

• Local devices can be made thinner and more power-efficient, and can store an unlimited amount of data.
• 100% of the data is stored in the cloud

In actual application scenarios, the effects are:

• Different devices of the same user, whether mobile phones or computers, share 100% of the same data. Unlike most people who use cloud drives now, most of them put selected content in the cloud. When there are many devices and the selection criteria are not well thought out, data will be lost and out of sync.
• A further possibility is that the software no longer needs to be installed. Anyway, the speed of real-time download and installation is as fast as that of local installation.
• Going a step further, since cloud drives are as fast as local hard drives, why not just move the operating system (OS) to the cloud! This means that no matter whether you use computer hardware provided by different places such as home, library, and hotel, the same OS is downloaded from the cloud for you to use, and you can get exactly the same user experience.

100% of the data of different users can be used by the same Big Brother (Google, Microsoft, Dropbox...). The more Big Brother gets, the more potential AI applications may emerge.

Although some people may question whether this will cause privacy issues, just like most people's emails are now read by Google, everyone is used to it. Historical facts tell us that as long as the benefits are large enough, consumers do not care so much about privacy.

The second qualitative change brought about by 5G is that local computers are no longer computers, but only play the role of image players. This is referred to as "full-time cloud computing" below.

This means that the local computer in the user's hand (broadly speaking, including mobile phones, computers, smart TVs, etc.) does not need to bear the computing work, but instead transmits the user's operation signal to the supercomputer in the cloud. The cloud then transmits the calculated image back to the user's computer for broadcast. Therefore, the local computer can be very simple and only needs to be responsible for display and input, which reduces cost and size, but has the performance experience of advanced computers/mobile phones.

Similar applications have been around for more than a decade, but they have never been popularized. For example, Windows' "Remote Desktop" is still used by professional engineers for professional purposes. "Cloud gaming" is a hot area. As early as 2010, OnLive provided such services. Since then, Yahoo, Sony, NVIDIA, and Google's upcoming Stadia have all wanted to grab a piece of this pie, but no one has succeeded yet.

As for "full-time cloud computing", 4G network speed can already provide a good experience. (Source: IoT Home Network) But 5G can ensure that even if more people use these new applications in the future, there will be no traffic jams, increase market opportunities, and give manufacturers more motivation to invest more resources to promote it, and have a better chance of forming a popular ecosystem.

Finally, we come to the conclusion:

• 5G will not bring any immediate breakthroughs, but will become a fixed-point network with poor stability. It will be more reasonable to use it in outdoor fixed-point scenarios, including outdoor fixed-point activities, outdoor surveillance cameras, etc.
• The impact of 5G in the next two to three years will mainly be to give products that are already mature in technology but not in the market a better chance of success, including seamless cloud hard drives and full-time cloud computing.
• In the longer term, future AR glasses or smart glasses, combined with 5G and AI, will have revolutionary breakthroughs comparable to those of smartphones back then.