What new opportunities will the powerful combination of 5G and AI bring?

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As an investor in emerging technologies, I am always on the lookout for technologies that can improve existing markets or create new ones.

This is what interests me about 5G, an advanced digital cellular network protocol that expands the spectrum range for communications, bringing more traffic and lower latency. 5G technology has the potential to change the entire market, it will enable a large number of new applications and solve some of the world's problems.

5G is far superior to 4G. It expands the use of electromagnetic spectrum and brings new entrepreneurial opportunities and use cases. For example, the frequency band between 28 GHz and 39 GHz, also known as the "millimeter wave band", can further improve the mobile experience of end users and change the landscape of communication operators.

Before the birth of 5G, operators such as AT&T and Verizon could not get involved in Comcast's cable TV business at all. The bandwidth and coverage of these companies caused them to be excluded from the market. But the ultra-fast data transmission rate of 5G technology will change all this. The current fastest wired communication technology (optical fiber, etc.) has a transmission rate of about 100 times that of 4G LTE. Of course, this competition is fair, and wired service providers can also take advantage of the 5G boom to grab the market of wireless operators.

This means that consumers, mobile workers, and businesses that are eager for 5G technology can use 5G services anywhere and get better performance.

This huge change will open up new markets and incubate more applications. This is where artificial intelligence and 5G technology come into play. Self-driving cars are the most typical example.

In fact, driverless cars are data centers on four wheels. Currently, these cars are equipped with multiple 4G LTE modems because they need a "brain" to process data, but with the ultra-fast transmission rate of 5G, these problems will be solved.

In addition to driverless cars, many other applications will be born with the help of the wider frequency band of 5G.

For example, electromagnetic waves in the low-frequency band (900 MHz) can provide low-power connection channels for IoT devices. Currently, this market is occupied by companies such as LoRa and SigFox, but 5G will bring new standards. Artificial intelligence will also play a role in this regard. For example, sensors that monitor the operating status of equipment usually do not transmit large amounts of data to the cloud. Their information processing is localized and small in scale. However, the 5G protocol can complete the connection between sensors and the cloud.

As artificial intelligence develops, 5G will become the foundation of global technological communications. China is eager to cover the entire country with this technology.

China is a vast country, and transportation in the western region is also a problem, and pollution is even more of a headache for it. If China wants to make smart cities successful, then artificial intelligence and high-speed communication technology are the key. The country has now spawned many unicorns in the field of artificial intelligence, and 5G technology will help it connect driverless cars, security cameras, etc.

Lieyun.com Note: The author of this article, Ben Yu, is a managing director of Sierra Ventures, which has invested $1.9 billion in enterprises and emerging technology startups over the past 30 years.