I am trying to keep close track of daily developments in global markets while my mind is set on the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
On the second day of the congress, we went through a “5G and Cloud Technologies” bombardment so to say. The fact that I consider myself a fine economist and thanks to my deep interest in using all kinds of technology, I was able to sum up what the speakers were trying to get across under a few main headings:
First of all, today’s networks that are managed through softwares and interfaces will be managed autonomously in the future. To figure out what it means, we should first take a closer look at the principles of human resources management discussed on Sunday meetings.
There won’t be centrally/hierarchal managed companies anymore. Accordingly, we might say that the networks we are using will similarly turn into autonomous mechanisms, platforms requiring no central hierarchy. That is to say, we will switch from systems despising us like “If you can’t use it that’s because you’re incompetent” to user-friendly networks. This doesn’t seem completely unrealistic to me considering approximately 100 billion things are expected to communicate with each other in the near future. “Internet of Things” or IoT for short will bring us to a whole new level.
While we were contemplating Huawei’s enormous and breath-taking stand, we were told by experts the story of the 5G which has initially emerged as a tool for providing communication mostly between things rather than humans. I’m so glad that I had the chance to have this experience during which we were ably guided by Walter Jennings, the leader of Huawei KOL “Key Opinion Leaders” program. He provided Key Opinion Leaders of different nationalities and cultures with information that would help them to be unbiased in their judgment.
So, it looks like humanity’s next journey will be towards Artificial Intelligence-Big Data-Cloud Technologies, ABC for short.
This is actually good news to me. The “content creation” issue, once everyone’s nightmare, will be solved automatically thanks to autonomous networks using ABC. You will be able to offer, commercial, social or academic, any type of freshly created content to recipients requesting content or help. Municipalities and Academic Institutions as well as companies will be able to benefit from this technology. And that’s not even the half of it:
Today’s network-centric, fragmented, reactive and skill-dependent business platforms will transform into user-centric, closed-loop, predicted) and AI-managed platforms very soon. In order to do that we will need to come up with solutions to problematic systems using different infrastructures and hardware even within their own operating systems. Finding solutions is way more important than designing hardware; because hardware is designed based on pre-generated solutions.
Fibre Optic, Wi-Fi or copper wire, no matter what infrastructure they use, almost every single participant emphasized that “building seamless networks that enables the automation of everything” is the most important thing. And then they started to reveal their own 5G experiences, saying, “That’s what we do anyway”.
Almost all speakers agreed that, with 5G, there’s no limit to beautiful, wonderful things that humanity can have access to, but underlining that the soon-to-be-built infrastructure should meet the following requirements:
- Intelligence
- Simplicity
- Ultra-broadband
- Openness and Security
“Is it possible to build low-cost, but fast and efficient networks?”
From Governments to Companies, Universities to Sports Clubs, Exporters to Industrial Firms, they all must set up and build networks meeting the above-mentioned requirements in order to have access to Big Data. I can almost hear you asking, “But, isn’t this high cost investing?”
Actually, it’s not that hard to estimate the cost of such infrastructure. But, it’s more difficult to estimate the things at stake in case people can’t be provided with this infrastructure. Failing to implement this technology will mean very bad news especially to those who will be caught unprepared the 5G era which will toughen up the Industry 4.0 challenge.
This question occurred to me while I was listening to speakers talk: “What If I will have to pay a Cloud fee for each and every thing I own, and then would not all my earnings be spent on this?” Huawei officials gave an immediate answer even before I was able to raise my hand and ask this question on my mind. We are supposed to pay Cloud services fee for 1 out of 3 devices we own, which could save you a considerable amount indeed.
In conclusion, it is now possible to build seamlessly operating systems even within communication infrastructures considered the worst and the most inadequate, and turn our network into a valuable asset by rendering it autonomously functional via the 5G.
We just need to understand that the old paradigm is dead and take a new step without being afraid of spending money or involving with necessary details.
Prof. Dr. Emre Alkin
