One piece at a time

5G is becoming an incredibly hot topic, not just in the pages of industry magazines such as Land Mobile, but also, increasingly, here in the UK. (For proof of this – and for an in-depth look at the contribution the country’s universities are making to the global 5G reseach effort – check out page 12 of the magazine you currently hold in your hands).

There are myriad reasons for this, not least smart device users’ ever-more voracious appetite for data which, if and when it’s rolled out, 5G will undoubtedly deliver. There are also other, far more glamorous, use-cases as well, however, the most obvious (at this point, you might even say hackneyed) of which is ‘driverless’ cars.

For the few who don’t know, the expectation in relation to this strand of automation is that 5G’s anticipated massively high bandwidth, coupled with infinitesimally small levels of latency, will essentially allow vehicles to be operated remotely. This might be by humans, or – getting well and truly ahead of ourselves – artificial intelligence, which as it becomes more sophisticated could eventually be in a position to make critical driving decisions for itself in real time.