5G – The Fifth Generation Network

The telecommunication space is no more about connected devices or machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. People are now talking about Internet of Things (IoT). They are now talking about Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Autonomous Driving, Immersive or Tactile Internet. These technologies have a number of potential use cases in both entertainment (eg gaming) and also more practical scenarios such as manufacturing or medicine and could extend to wearable technologies. For example, an operation could be performed by a robot that is remotely controlled by a surgeon on the other side of the world. Or enabling vehicles to communicate with the outside world could result in considerably more efficient and safer use of existing road infrastructure. These types of applications would require both high bandwidth and low latency beyond the capabilities of LTE (the 4G network).