While a new generation of wireless connectivity hits the market every couple of years, experts claim the move to the 5G network will be unlike any speed and performance the world has ever seen. The fifth-generation cellular system will nearly eliminate lag times to make real-time functionality and seamless connectivity a reality.
To align with the government’s prospect to fully adopt 5G by the year 2023, several businesses and corporations have already been looking into 5G since 2017, with companies already looking into collaborations with one another to set up 5G.
Despite how our Malaysian Government has been publicising on the benefits of 5G roll-out in Malaysia on economy, infrastructure and community as a whole, the effectiveness of 5G is still being questioned by the general public which begs the question: How will 5G technology make a difference in our community, and do have the substantial resources in order to utilise 5G to its full potential?
As one of the leading Chinese smartphone manufacturers in the world, vivo has started its 5G technology research and development hub in Beijing since 2016. With years of research and development on 5G infrastructure and system, vivo has always strive to fulfil its commitment to serve the Malaysian community at its best, in terms of its products and services. Mr Mike Xu, Chief Executive Officer of vivo Malaysia said that 5G network can be tapped to its full potential and be embedded seamlessly with vivo’s technology when proper research and development is partaken.
“Vivo has always been a technology-driven company by product innovation with a focus on smart devices and services. We are far advancing compared to others by introducing the strategy to expand 5G end-points to include AR glasses, smart watches, smart headphones and more, while using 5G-enabled smartphones as a core feature,” shared Mike on vivo’s prospect in propelling Malaysia towards the digital age.
On top of vivo’s perspectives, there are four crucial improvements on how the roll-out of 5G infrastructure can boost the community in terms of effectiveness and productivity.
1. Speed Enhancement
With the enhancement of 5G’s transmission performance, it multiplies by 5-10 times as compared to 4G networks, which increases the network speed for general users. As the 5G base station supports Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) features, a wireless network that allows transmitting and receiving of more than one data signal simultaneously over the same radio channel. That said, such an increase in speed will transform the quality and forms of content we consume on smartphones and ultimately influence all industries.
2. Connection Enhancement
The huge increased capacity brought by 5G networks make room for a million devices per square kilometer, while 4G supports only up to 100,000 devices per square kilometer. These devices are not limited to smartphones, but include smart home gadgets, monitoring equipment, IoT devices etc. This will accelerate the adoption pace of “Internet of Things”, “smart home”, “smart community”, “smart factories” and even “smart cities”. Vivo sees smartphones as a channel that connects human beings and the universe. Once 5G network is widely applied to our daily lives, the capacity of this “channel” will increase significantly.
3. Data Enhancement
Telecom tariffs could be greatly reduced when 5G becomes mature. As a result, various services that were not accessible previously due to high tariff charges will soon be more readily available. For instance, in the early 4G era, short-form video applications were not available. However, these applications have widely popularised after the huge reduction of 4G tariff cost. In the future, with the same amount of communication cost, we could get 10 or 20 times more or unlimited high-speed internet data – transforming our way to better utilise the Internet.
4. Latency Enhancement
Having the ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) of 5G network, signals that previously require a specialised channel to transmit can now be supported by 5G to offer a faster, more reliable, longer-distance and lower-latency transmission, in which every 10 seconds of latency reduction will make a huge improvement in the application experience. With this feature, we will be able to remotely control our appliances and cloud computing by using 5G network.
