Is 5G the missing piece of the Digital Experience puzzle?

Soma Tah 

Winning the hearts of Digital Natives ain’t easy and 5G technology could be the solution to many user experience headaches faced by the businesses in this always-on digital era  

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic crisis has transformed businesses and customer expectations radically. The growing dependence on digital technologies not only forced companies to change their business models to adapt to the new market reality, it also made it hard to keep up with the ‘always-connected’ customers and their expectations. Now, with 5G around the corner,  and given its potential to transform the businesses and digital experiences, it becomes even more important for businesses to pull their socks up.  

There will be many use cases which will emerge out of 5G technology alone. But there are many existing use cases which will simply be augmented by it. 5G, with the good high speed connectivity, higher bandwidth and lower latency will enable new business models with a wider range of services and immersive experiences across industries such as BFSI, Retail, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Automotive, Education, Media & Entertainment, etc. which can be offered even on the mobile handheld devices. Let’s look at some of the use cases, where digital services and experiences will transform radically by 5G.  

Smart City

​​5G just might be the final piece of the smart city puzzle. Smart cities involve always-connected sensors and devices generating an exponential amount of real-time data. If managed well, this real-time data can create new opportunities like smart buildings, smart lighting, smart metering, smart transit, and improve the smart governance and service delivery efficiency within the smart city infrastructure.  

Smart Transport

Truly connected vehicles will become a reality. With 5G, the vehicles will become a software-defined, network-aware, ultra-connected that will interact with the road and every other vehicles around it. 5G-enabled vehicles will allow drivers to enjoy their favorite entertainment apps, such as music streaming services or audio book services, from the comfort of their vehicles. Smart vehicles and real-time traffic management will make the daily commute faster as well. In fact, 5G will allow drones to fly with a lot of accuracy making drones a crucial part in transportation and logistics. 

Smart Home

By offering a viable alternative to fixed internet access, 5G looks set to cause a fast-paced adoption of the smart home products and solutions in households. The impact of rolling out internet connectivity to smart home devices and appliances can be huge, and it will eventually change the way we live and work, especially considering the fact that Work from Home and remote work have become the new reality over the last two years. 

Immersive Learning & Training

5G has the potential to transform teaching, training, and learning to a great extent making it truly immersive. The forces of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Extended Reality (XR) have started driving education into a more experiential dimension and with 5G will create more opportunities in education and training environments and make it easier to explain complex and abstract concepts to students in an experientially rich environment.

Immersive Gaming & Entertainment

5G can finally deliver a platform-agnostic future for gaming. Mobile-first gamers are increasingly exposed to immersive, and multi-player gaming experiences that were previously restricted only to consoles and PCs. Cloud gaming, XR gaming and 5G will make many more of those premium gaming titles available on mobiles.   

With India being one of the most promising gaming markets, it will result in the emergence of a large number of mobile-first gamers, feels Avneet Rana, Co-Founder & Director- Technology, Baazi Games. “5G network will enable smartphone gamers to experience higher-quality and uninterrupted cloud-based gaming sessions by providing quicker and lower-latency connections. In addition to the variety of premium games with HD streaming and longer play sessions, users will have access to VR gaming across several platforms and modes. Furthermore, combining 5G with AI can significantly improve and enhance the gaming experience. 5G will also be able to provide a glitch-free, lag-free, and higher speed experience, all at the same time,” said he.  

Internet-streamed content has radically changed customer behavior and the home entertainment space, and it will continue to evolve further with 5G. Live events will capitalize on the speed and potential 5G. Sports, Concerts, Live Performances, Movie Premieres, and all such location-based activities will be able to reach a truly global audience across time zones. 

Metaverse

As 5G continues to blur the boundaries between the physical and the virtual worlds, it’s impact on the Metaverse economy can be far more interesting than what we expect it to be. For example, now you need either a wired connection or fast Wi-Fi to connect to the Metaverse, but the high-bandwidth and low-latency 5G networks  will allow people to use a fully-featured VR headset or some similar kind of hardwares on the move.  

Tejinder Singh, Head-Product, Lava International said, "Metaverse is a new horizon which has potential to change how people connect, interact both in social life and work space as well. There will be many use cases that will emerge in the Metaverse which will be powered by 5G technology.  The real time digital movement to other locations in the Metaverse with the ability to touch and feel will only be possible if high speed networks will support the same which will be possible via 5G networks.”