News - 2016072702 - What 5G Promises to Bring for the Smart Home?

The roadmap to 5G mobile broadband is still far from reality, and yet, there are already ongoing research and developments undertaken by the sector's major industrials. According to reports, the first commercial version of 5G is supposed to come out by 2020, in time to replace the ageing 4G connectivity we have today.

So what would this mean to the smart home as a whole?

First and foremost, while the Internet of Things – of which it encompasses wearables, smart home appliances, and as such – is expected to grow exponentially over the next decade, it will need a network that can accommodate billions of connected devices. Put simply, 5G would be able to accommodate such purpose, capable of assigning bandwidth depending on the needs of the application and user.

Looking from another perspective, 5G could help put smart cities onto a bigger picture, a proponent which industry experts has been funneling for years, but these pilot programs never really picked up momentum as they were often quickly forgotten in a whiff of smoke.

But nevertheless, the potential is huge. The concept of facilitating smart home adoption through fast mobile network will no doubt be a welcoming feat, as an increasing number of the world’s online users are surfing the Internet using Wi-Fi hotspots rather than conventional fixed lines. The speed at which 5G promises to bring will be an even greater lure for them to move away from Wi-Fi to LTE.

Coined "Smart SIM," this new-fangled technology is currently an ongoing development which would greatly transform the future of mobile connectivity for the vast expansion of the IoT. Given that current IoT deployments are fundamentally different than roaming smartphones, existing SIMs and connectivity services are unfortunately not optimized for machine or IoT use cases. However, the up-and-coming Smart SIM technology and connectivity service will greatly help improve performance and reduce the cost of operating IoT applications.

But while there are still skeptics on the conceivable release of 5G mobility, most telecom vendors expect the new technology to offer: Data rates up to 10 Gbit/s over the air; Latency in the order of 1ms; and Enable Internet of Things (IoT) devices to run on battery for up to 10 years, respectively.