How fast, furious, and fictile?

Amidst a slew of controversies and projections, 5G also stares at a new pocket of applications that could shape its real inflection point. Is this pocket well-lined?

- PRATIMA HARIGUNANI

From 0 to 100 in five seconds! That’s the true swag of any new sports-car beast. No matter how many new pistons it houses or whether it is V8 or V12; when you are taking the silk covers off its hood, the line that cracks its machismo is always about ‘how fast it roars up’.

So, it is not so hard to understand why despite all the other breakthrough increments that 5G is promising above 3G and 4G, the aspect of low-latency is its biggest brochure-line. While it does promise a lightning-fast speed in comparison to other wireless technologies, its ability to offer true low latency and network slicing is its distinctive feather.

But wait. Are the highways ready for accommodating this blink-an-eye response time of 5G? Do we have the problems or applications all set for this supersonic racer? Of course, the use-cases can be endless – don’t remote surgeons, driverless cars, robotic bomb squads, TSN (Time Sensitive Networking) manufacturers, IoT blankets, untethered factory robots, distributed cloud/ edge apps, live VR Soccer players and remote office workers need the end-to-end low latency that they always dreamt of? Why lose a game over signals that were not so real-time –after all its 2020.

That’s what makes 5G a creed apart. Once any technology shrinks the gap time or transmission time for a packet of data, the response time - between getting a signal at a cellular tower and the desired action- is, staggeringly, shaved off. Cutting off the delay in many latency-critical applications can almost turn into a lifeline for them.

Looks like the low-latency dimension of 5G can be quite a game-changer.

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