Is US interest in 5G really about 5G?

5G IS A victim of its own hype. Touted as the doorway to the digital kingdom, 5G opens up new opportunities to consumers and businesses by introducing scalability and reliability that previous generations just simply didn't have. With a higher efficiency air interface, more bands to play with, massive scalability for connecting things, and reliable low latency, 5G is better than 4G in every way. But it has that extra 'G'.

Where previous generations of mobile technology addressed the short to mid-term needs of users, 5G looks further ahead by examining the requirements of a yet unrealised digital economy with everything connected, everything sensing and everything intelligent. The result, 5G is a service-oriented mobile solution that will turbocharge not just consumer broadband but also vertical markets through application integration for intelligent bandwidth and compute power that dynamically changes with service requirements.

But service-centric or not, the beauty of the Internet lies in its abstraction layer between the underlying network infrastructure and the data and applications that we use. Specifically, the very purpose of Internet Protocol is to allow packetised data to be transmitted ubiquitously and reliably, with little concern to what lies beneath, even if what lies beneath includes 5G.