“It will be a lot like 3G,” says Declan Gaffney, Radio Access Network director with Three Ireland. “The network operators didn’t know what it would be used for at first and then the smartphone came along. You have to build the network first and then see what it’s used for.”
The answer is to access those services remotely but that creates another problem. It’s not really feasible to have a car driving at 100kph waiting for a distant computer to tell it when to apply the brakes when an obstacle appears. Any delay could be fatal. But the real comparison is with human reaction time which is about 200 milliseconds. 5G is actually more than 40 times faster and is already being used in advanced driver assistance systems in some cars.
That’s tens of thousands of sensors and other devices to be connected to each other as well as to a centralised control platform. The kind of real time connectivity required across that number of devices is really only made possible with 5G.