Recently, I joined Verizon's 5G Innovations Session at the award-winning State Farm Arena. The event was attended by a wide range of non-telecom folks—executives from the Atlanta Hawks, Verizon Business customers and other companies leading in their industries but not so familiar with 5G. Through a host of interactive experiences, customers got to engage actively with 5G, learning new ways to streamline, secure and further connect their businesses. The excitement at the event was palpable. Attendees who began as skeptics realized that 5G is not pie-in-the-sky future technology. It's here, now, and it’s ready to help enterprises of all sizes, in every industry, digitally transform and take their business to the next level.
Why 5G? Because you want to achieve more, faster, all the time
I'd venture to say that every business, including small and medium ones, is somewhere on the path to digitalization. You're intent on increasing productivity. You're deploying such innovations as the Internet of Things (IoT) and leveraging data to gather actionable insights about your customers and your workflows so you can make more informed decisions and reach more favorable outcomes. All this requires robust, secure and reliable connectivity.
5G Fixed Wireless as a supplement to fixed broadband
Even if you’re early in your digital transformation journey, there are major benefits to including 5G in your plans. For example 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) can be a more efficient and scalable alternative to fixed (wired) access. 5G FWA can serve as a backup in case of service interruption on the fixed network. It’s also a viable alternative for new locations or pop-up situations such as construction sites, 5G Fixed Wireless is a far faster-to-deploy and can be more economical than, say, fiber in many deployment scenarios.
You’re probably familiar with the advantages of 5G: It's designed for high capacity, capable of handling as much as 1,000 times the connections and mobile data volumes as 4G. Throughput is fast, with data rates of up to 10Gbps or more. Lower latency makes it crucial for new use cases such as advanced IoT, smart connected factories and others in manufacturing, automotive, energy and utilities, healthcare and more. 5G is also highly reliable and secure.
Importantly, 5G is a global standard, with a growing global ecosystem and global scale that is driving down unit costs over time and enhancing interoperability. The upshot is that with 5G, you'll be delivering a better user experience with a robust and widely supported technology.
5G's synergies with emerging technologies
We're living in an era of innovation on so many fronts—Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine learning (ML), to name just a few that are especially relevant to many industries. Combining these with 5G creates remarkable synergies and opens up use cases that could never have existed otherwise. A use case that’s particularly relevant to enterprise is network slicing.
Network slicing enables new business model innovation across all industries. To create a sliced network, we transform it into a set of logical networks on top of a shared infrastructure. Each logical network serves a defined business purpose and comprises all the required network resources, configured and connected end to end. You get the best of both worlds: The experience of a dedicated private network, with all the benefits of service delivered over a wide-area public network. The network slice feels tailor-made for your business, backed by the capabilities and the ubiquitous coverage of a nation-wide public network like Verizon.
Learn more about network slicing for business here.
Case study: Delivering fast, mobile 5G connectivity for first responders
Here's a perfect example of 5G cellular stepping in if fixed broadband networks fail. Public safety professionals and service members face difficult terrain and out-of-service networks when they race to fight forest fires or respond to devastation from hurricanes, tornadoes or floods. Ericsson and Verizon Frontline partnered to create a unique solution for mission-critical first responders and the Department of Defense—the Tactical Humanitarian Operations Response (THOR) vehicle. Based on Ericsson mission-critical 5G deployable network solution, THOR is a first-of-its-kind mobile, private 5G Ultra Wideband (UWB) and MEC rapid-response command center vehicle that’s capable of deploying Verizon Frontline technology, including Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband, along with additional applications and advanced computing solutions. Potential users include first responders and the Department of Defense.
5G is the right bet for enterprise
THOR illustrates how 5G technology can be applied creatively to solve extreme challenges when the right partners put their heads and their resources together. But 5G’s real value is found in the day-to-day business applications that require 5G’s high capacity, high throughput, low latency, reliability and security.
Waves of new technologies are arriving simultaneously. Each one adds a new piece to our toolkit. As technologies like 5G and MEC mature, we’ll see the synergies between them multiply and expand in ways we can barely even foresee at the moment. At the 5G Innovations Sessions, for instance, we wowed attendees with demonstrations of an interactive cityscape, facial recognition, near-real-time crowd analytics, a holographic magician, autonomous shopping and 5G-accelerated Fixed Wireless Access—all of them real-world applications available today.
Ericsson and Verizon are working hard together to push these advances forward for our enterprise customers. Our customers in all industries, from entertainment to manufacturing to finance and commerce, will benefit from the potential of 5G connectivity, uncovering use cases and opening new ways to create, to connect, and to deliver a superior customer experience.
