5G and smart cities: intelligent solutions for the future
5G is not just an evolutionary upgrade it is a revolutionary technology that will eliminate the bounds of access, bandwidth, performance, and latency limitations on connectivity worldwide. With the potential for 5G networks to provide anytime and anywhere connectivity, the number of applications will be quite large.
What is a smart city?
The EU Commission defines it as “a place where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital and telecommunication technologies for the benefit of its inhabitants and business”. Smart cities will soon use the Internet of Things to collect data in real-time, and understand how consumer demand is changing, and respond with faster and cheaper solutions. Digital cities will be designed to operate on ICT facilities, capable of connecting numerous networks of mobile devices, sensors, cars, appliances, and data centers.
The dissemination and availability of new technologies are essential to transform a city into a smart city, contributing to a high level of sustainable urban development and a better quality of life for citizens. The number of connected devices worldwide is expected to increase to 75 billion by 2025. The increasing number of interconnected objects will generate an unprecedented volume of data.
5G and VR/AR
With its higher bandwidth and lower latency, 5G promises to deliver a more inexpensive, efficient, and overall superior virtual reality and augmented reality experience in the future. In the coming years, eXtended Reality technologies will be the digital media used in a wide variety of sectors. The application scenarios are extremely varied and can be found especially in industrial design, sport, education, and numerous applications in the field of Marketing & Sales. A specific application area will be the smart city. XR will represent the new interfaces for all smart city services and applications.
With technological progress over the next five to ten years, dedicated VR and AR devices will be available and will open the field for a much richer variety of application cases.
