What 5G means for our cities

At a consumer level I can pretty much guarantee that if you ask most people what the difference is between 3G, 4G and 5G they are probably going to say something along the lines of speed or accessibility.

Whilst both these answers are true to a degree the capabilities that 5G has the potential to unlock are extremely underestimated and often unrealised.

We aren’t talking about your singular mobile phone, or even a whole companies operations - we are talking about whole entire cities being able to do things that were simply not possible before the 5G network.

What actually is 5G? To put it simply 5G is the next generation of cellular network - with processing powers of up to 100x times faster than what we have today - meaning it can power much more, much faster - it’s going to be huge.

What this means is that everything has the capability to be connected all the time.
Think of the principle of the smart home, but applied to a much larger canvas. While the smart home is all about multiple low-power digital devices connecting to and communicating with one another to create a more efficiently run home, the smart city is about various kinds of public amenities and infrastructure connecting and harmonising to the same end.
It has been estimated that by 2025, 41 Billion devices will be connected to mobile networks worldwide.

Smart cities are no longer the future. They are here and growing rapidly to keep pace with the expansion of mobile technology. Take a look at Shanghai, top smart city for 2022, who have been praised for their Citizen Cloud - a one stop data platform for over 1,200 resident services and now the preferred way to contact the Shanghai city government.