With 5G’s impressive speed, low latency, and reach, business can happen virtually anywhere. The result: a growing ecosystem to help you unlock new kinds of innovation in new places.
4 minute read
KEY TAKEAWAYS
● 5G’s high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity can be customized to your business needs, well beyond the smartphone.
● Virtually anywhere your people are—urban or rural, desk-based or in the field—5G can help everyone stay connected and productive.
● 5G is here now, helping industry innovators from airlines to entertainment find new efficiencies and deliver more meaningful experiences when they matter most.
Unlike Wi-Fi, which is fixed and location-specific, 5G’s wide-ranging capabilities are available within buildings, across campuses and cities, and throughout rural areas. That leads to increased productivity, scalability, and innovation—virtually anywhere and everywhere.
“Business breakthroughs don’t just happen inside a company’s walls or within the reach of Wi-Fi—they often happen out in the field,” says Allan Samson, Sr. Vice President, T-Mobile for Business. “With 5G, you don't need to think about the limits of the technology, but about the possibilities of the outcome.”
In a video that explores some of the many ways businesses use 5G across industries, Samson notes that one of the driving factors in 5G’s growing adoption is its ability to enable new kinds of innovation in new places.
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“Inside of a building with really fast Wi-Fi, you can do some interesting things,” says Samson. “But that all breaks down the moment the application or the device leaves the building and goes out into the world.” 5G technology surpasses those limitations. With 5G coverage across the United States at Wi-Fi-level speeds, Samson says, “you can look at problems differently.”
5G is a popular and in-demand capability among consumers and businesses eager to benefit from its performance advantages compared to Wi-Fi and earlier generations of cellular technology.
“When you talk about innovation, it’s not just how fast my iPhone can download my Facebook page,” says Samson. “It’s really thinking beyond the phone and about all of the different capabilities.”
For businesses across industries—like healthcare, entertainment, retail, and others—5G offers flexibility for a wide range of use cases and application requirements. Of course, different businesses can have dramatically different requirements. “Some have incredibly high bandwidth demands; some need very low latency,” says Samson. “With 5G, you can have all of these, tailored to a specific need.”
In transportation and logistics, 5G can better connect fleets of trucks on the open road, and orchestrate vehicles, goods, and wearables on people in a dynamic Internet of Things (IoT) network. Synthesizing those 5G-enabled data streams can offer more timely analytics and forecasting opportunities for business planners, including technologies like digital twins to further optimize routes and delivery windows.
5G may also facilitate the transition to assisted or self-driving long-haul trucking fleets. As operations get closer to 24/7 uptime, the daily range of a single vehicle might grow from 600 miles without automation to 1,200 miles with it.
Small fleets of self-driving trucks already operate in controlled environments, like landfills. Until recently, most of these industrial systems were running on Wi-Fi or mesh networks, but 5G is emerging as a potentially better alternative because of its broad geographic reach. Elsewhere, companies are testing autonomous trucks for curbside garbage collection. 5G is perfectly suited to the task with its potential for citywide coverage, ultra-low latency, and even signal propagation through building walls and other obstacles.
“There's a ton of autonomous and semi-autonomous 5G innovations that are available right now… making all of these different industries more efficient and delivering better customer service.”
Beyond rugged industrial settings, 5G is fueling new efficiencies and experiences in healthcare, education, and across the service industry. For instance, airlines are exploring how 5G can support improvements in customer care and on-time departures, areas of strategic differentiation in a highly competitive market.
In healthcare, 5G is already being used for patient monitoring, virtual visits, and robot-assisted surgery. “5G is not just for specific industries,” Samson explains. “The list goes on and on.”
Here are some of the other ways that 5G is being used to create new business opportunities:
These are just the beginning of a fresh wave of opportunities that 5G provides beyond the traditional walls of business. “5G creates an ecosystem of innovation,” says Samson.
This is true across industries, whether a business is based in a big city or miles down a country road. With 5G, “talent can stay rural and do their jobs remotely over broadband,” adds Samson. “They have access to amazing jobs just the same as if they lived in New York.”
In other words, the potential benefits of 5G extend well beyond improved efficiency, productivity, and network performance. Businesses can cast the talent net wider and attract and retain employees with in-demand skills.
5G is a great enabler, a powerful tool to get more business done. “It's connectivity that’s always on,” says Samson. “The leaders of tomorrow will take that capability and rethink how they deliver products and services.”