The Arrival of 5G Networks: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

December 13, 2018 – The world of 5G is getting closer to reality. We read about it in the headlines when the Five Eyes countries talk about shutting out China’s telecom giant, Huawei, from being a supplier of telecommunications infrastructure. For the general public, the fear of a Chinese telecom company participating in the infrastructure of democratic countries is one perpetuated by our governments’ security services who continue to think in terms of Cold War politics. The truth is all telecommunications equipment providers have a backdoor into the systems they build. Whether its Juniper, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, or another vendor, our networks are all accessible by those vendors who create them.

Today we live in a 4G and 3G telecommunications world. By 2020 we will see the emergence of the first global 5G rollouts and my guess is we will never look back. So here is what’s good, bad, and ugly about this coming communications revolution.

5G Good!

1. 5G means increased feeds and speeds in mobile networks. Today we are at the top of state of the art at 1 Gigabyte per second download. With 5G we will go 10 times faster.
2. 5G will make the Internet-of-Things (IoT) really work so if you are planning to have a smart home equipped with lights, door locks, appliances, and gadgets galore, the capacity to handle the traffic from all of these devices, some equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) will be a no-brainer.
3. Smart agriculture will love 5G as field sensors will connect to survey drones, farm machinery, and farmers making the determinations of when to plant, fertilize, water, and harvest.
4. Smart cities will use 5G to move traffic more effectively, implement on-demand autonomous vehicle transportation, manage smart street lights, smart roads, sense the environment to ensure air quality, and manage city services like garbage collection and recycling with new levels of efficiency and sustainability.
5. Personal well-being with 5G will mean individuals will be far more aware of their health status and will be able to share vital signs data with professionals leading to faster and effective interventions, and much better health outcomes.
6. Telepresence, virtual and augmented reality will all become ubiquitous in the world of 5G. The retail bricks & mortar experience will become an augmented reality ride even before you cross the threshold of a store. As you shop you will learn about the products that surround you. Your grocery shopping cart will automatically tally the cost of everything you put in it and apply it to your credit or debit card. No checkout required.
7. Entertainment will be turned upside down by 5G whether you are watching a movie in a cineplex or on a home screen. Throw on a pair of virtual or augmented reality glasses and become immersed in the story. It won’t be a holodeck but it will be a near thing.
8. The way we are governed will be altered by 5G with e-voting and participatory democracy facilitated by the technology’s deployment.

5G Bad!

1. With 5G the radio spectrum being deployed and the number of network nodes multiplying by the billions will mean the air around us will be filled with radio waves at new frequencies which we have no way of knowing could lead to long-term negative health consequences. Think the Cuban mystery illness that befell American and Canadian embassy employees in Havana for which we still have no explanation. Now multiply the symptoms that these workers have experienced by billions of people and wonder if in deploying 5G we have opened Pandora’s Box.
2. If you have built your communications infrastructure around 4G or 3G technology then the advent of 5G will make everything you have invested in and rely on obsolete.
3. Existing smartphone technology will not translate to 5G. The applications that run in 4G will not work in 5G.
4. Much of the infotainment and entertainment technology we own today will become obsolete and you can bet its replacements will come with a pretty hefty price tag when first introduced.

5G The Ugly!

1. The deployment of 5G may make the surveillance state a reality. Smart sensors and devices will be everywhere. Policing of neighbourhoods could impact privacy and individual human rights.
2. Smart weapons and autonomous killing systems will be enabled by 5G making war unrecognizable and even more inhumane.
3. The workforce will be further squeezed by smart machine replacements as more robots make repetitive jobs done by humans go the way of the Dodo.
4. Existing system security will no longer be adequate requiring new encryption and network resilience protocols and countermeasures.
5. With smart machines able to communicate with each other will the deployment of 5G bring on Skynet?

So you may be asking why we are going ahead with 5G knowing that there are so many unknowns and cautions in its deployment. The answer is 5G will be needed as 4 billion more of us become connected through a global telecommunications network. And with all those humans will come hundreds of billions of smart devices and sensors to share network bandwidth. Without 5G none of this is likely to happen.

So in putting together this abbreviated list of the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to 5G, I hope to have given you the means to walk into the future with your eyes wide open. That means you can talk to legislators, telecommunication providers, and equipment builders to ensure that they understand how to mitigate the risks of the bad and enact necessary rules, regulations, and policies to ensure the ugly never happens.