Milk and tea of tech: 5G brews IoT to perfection

Enterprises must act now to blend the power of 5G and loT, unlocking real-time insights, scale, and predictive operations across sectors.

- BY PRATIMA HARIGUNANI

At some point, in some classroom, for some reason, most of us must have come across the term called 'cross-elasticity'. What seems like a chapter in Economics has profound implications in the world of technology. We never know when two technologies behave as tea and coffee, and when they play out as tea and milk. When they compete as margarine and butter, and when they become pally-pally enough to work as hot dogs and buns. And the most interesting one-when they are neither. When they give an elasticity-cold shoulder to each other, that matches that of a handbag to a car tire.

The way the Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving makes us view 5G through a curious lens. These two technologies have their spawning grounds, graphs, and challenges. However, the way they correspond in some use cases makes one think: are they the tea and milk of the technology market, or as far apart as milk and oil? And in either case, which one is the milk?

5G EMERGES AS IOT'S NATURAL PROPELLER

Before we delve into that question, let us take a brief walk on a farm in Telangana, where Wells Fargo has been working with its technology team to enhance the lives of farmers. These tech-volunteers are contributing to solutions that equip farmers with actionable insights for better decision-making, covering weather forecasts, crop management advice, fertiliser application and spraying techniques, as well as real-time market prices and updates on government schemes.

“5G is more than just a faster network—it is a foundational shift, and operations that fail to utilise it will be at a disadvantage to its competition.” MARCO CONTENTO VP Product Management, Telit Cinterion