Get ready to surpass the cloud

With 5G, there will be no cloud computing, because it’s not about the cloud, it’s about the best way to work, store and transmit information

- ANURAG MEHROTRA

With every passing year, human society has made advances in storing more data per unit of space and transmitting more data per unit of time. The rise of cloud computing in the last decade has been a result of this. The sky isn’t actually involved in cloud computing; the term basically means that instead of hardware and software being locally owned as a product bought by users, be they individuals or companies, it is instead rented as a service. Cloud providers have the hardware and software, and their clients can connect to them over the internet and use them as they need. This outsourcing of entire IT departments that has steadily occurred would not be possible without faster communications technologies.

But such technologies are still improving. Passing a certain threshold in their capacity allowed for cloud computing. As more thresholds continue to be crossed, cloud computing improves. And past another certain threshold, new forms of computing will be enabled that surpass cloud computing, just as cloud computing surpassed what was prevalent before it. 5G is a technology that has the potential of doing both. The 5G telecom standard, which began to be adopted in 2019, can deliver transmission speeds at least ten times faster than its predecessor, 4G – and that’s a conservative estimate. It also offers low to no latency (delay or lag), whereas 4G is far from being so close to perfection. Due to these improvements, it bears the promise of both enhancing existing cloud operations and opening up new ones.