At the second annual Technicity West event, Jason Falovo, vice president and general manager of cloud-managed wireless telecommunications equipment company Cradlepoint Canada, discussed the role of mobility and 5G in driving smart cities and eliminating the digital divide.
There are three spectrum layers of public 5G: low, medium and high, and Canada is currently at the low level, Falovo explained. Low, however, still means better than LTE speeds and good coverage. “We’re kind of in the early stages of the art of possible with 5G in Canada,” he said.
He argued that 5G will enable performance that LTE could not. “Think of when you’re at some type of sporting event and you’re noticing that your cell phone signal is not working as well as you’d like. Well, think of that when you’ve got hundreds of thousands of sensors and devices in smart cities. So 5G is going to enable that.”
5G will improve speed, lower latency, and provide the ability to manage multiple connections rapidly, particularly in the delivery of services by first responders or in situations of network outages.
Extending coverage in remote locations across Canada and bridging the digital divide is also a key goal in smart cities that will be bolstered with 5G, Falovo explained. “We’ve got somewhere where drones are delivering defibrillators, where they’re delivering medicine to areas where you can’t get it to, and 5G enables this more, because you’ve got real time visibility into this to make those decisions, and in some cases use artificial intelligence behind the scenes in some kind of a cloud architecture.”
Cradlepoint is currently also undertaking multiple proofs of concept for entities in the US, using 5G for video or data intensive applications, surrounding mass transit, for example.
“Why won’t you future proof your technology? I know we don’t have 5G coverage throughout Canada, but we certainly will across time here. And these 5G devices are available today.” concluded Falovo.
