Insight on leveraging 5G and the edge as an even stronger platform for innovation.
In a recent podcast Erik Ekudden CTO said the best way to think about what 5G can do for us is to go back and see how evolution of mobile network has happened in the past. And despite the enormous steps have been taken with innovations with 2G to 3G to 4G, the applications and the networks, have “been sort of ships passing in the night”.
“Where applications try to guess what the network could offer them as capability, mostly looking at congestion and network has guessed what the applications are trying to do mostly looking at utilisation, said Ekudden. “That’s not the best way to utilize the capabilities that these modern networks can really bring to the fore, and I think 5G has real opportunity to truly change that for us.”
Bikash said he believed that 5G gives organisations the opportunity to turn “into a true platform” that’s not “locked down into this proprietary sets of harder and software”.
“You really allow the abilities to optimise application delivery by utilizing the best of what cloud can do and what network can do and really offer that as a way that applications can directly access with APIs and so on,” he said. “We finally have this convergence of compute storage and networking at the edge coming together and I think that’s really the most exciting innovations that are happening with, with 5G and the experience that it can bring to the applications and the consumers as a result.”
Bikash acknowledged the pandemic has really highlighted the need for all industry segments to be agile and adaptive because the changes have come so fast.
“Digitisation of industries [was] happening before but it has accelerated across the board. Cloud is no longer about data centre migration because of efficiency, right, it is truly about digitising the whole industries where you know healthcare visits are now remote,” said Bikas. “We order food and grocery from our smartphones; we do banking from our mobile devices increasingly, right. So retail, healthcare, financial services, media and entertainment, manufacturing, they’re completely at the forefront of digitisation of industries that we see across the board.”
Bikash said organisations will continue to innovate, but when it comes to 5G and edge he believed they have two primary perspectives how do the leverage that as a way to change the customer experience and how do they leverage 5G and edge as a way to increase operational efficiencies.
“I can give you an actual concrete example of this right, how do you completely change the experience that a consumer has as they walk into a car dealership.
This is something that Fiat Chrysler automobiles and Google Cloud are actually working together to solve as part of Fiat Chrysler’s virtual showroom in the recently concluded CES event. You could actually walk and experience a new 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4XC where you could scan a QR code on your smartphone, you can walk into the car, you can change the colour, you can even place the car in your driveway, and see whether you like that right.”
He noted this is possible because of the power of edge and the abilities to render these highly complex models, very close to the consumer and enable interactive applications with low latency that again 5G and edge together are going to deliver.
“That is true digitisation of an industry segment, edge cloud and 5G together will truly make it possible for the very first time,” Bikash said.
Tags: 5GEricssonErik Ekudden
