It’s been around for a few years already, but while 5G is in more phones, there’s still no major problem the technology solves. Is something coming?
More device makers are making 5G phones, and that’s good news if you’re after faster mobile speeds on the go. In 2021, pretty much every major phone brand available in Australia now offers a 5G phone, all you really need to do is look. You can find something from Apple, Oppo, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Realme, Nokia, Asus, Vivo — most manufacturers — essentially showing just how much choice there is.
And it’s growing: with 5G dropping in price beyond the high-end, there are plenty of options to let you see what high-speed mobile connections can do.
But there still might not be a problem that 5G solves, beyond the obvious one of “faster connections”. With mobile speeds able to hit as high as 2Gbps in most 5G mobiles, and more speed on offer from newer phones, 5G can deal with faster downloads pretty easily, provided your telco can accommodate. Qualcomm has even signalled 10Gbps is on the horizon, which is even faster again.
All three of Australia’s major telcos can handle 5G in select places across the country, meaning you can deal with the problem of slow connections provided you have both a 5G device and mobile reach.
Yet that still mightn’t solve the problem of what 5G can solve. More devices can connect at faster speeds, and that might be great for dealing with smarter devices overall talking to each other quickly, but what else?
“Looking ahead, as we see more 5G-enabled services come to market, new business models will emerge. In turn, we can expect to see more powerful features and complementary innovations bring the 5G experience to life,” said Dongli Zhu, Go-To-Market Manager for Vivo in Australia.
“The real challenge for handset manufacturers will be their ability to shape creativity in their engineering, in order to stretch the boundaries of what can be made possible,” he said.
Recently at Mobile World Congress 2021 in Shanghai, Vivo demonstrated that 5G could be used for 8K, a high-end solution for a high-end video format that consumes a lot of space.
The concept meant that an 8K TV was able to receive content made for its TV over a high-speed connection, going from a server to a phone, and then wirelessly sent to the TV. That’s a bit of a roundabout way to get 8K content running on a TV, and seems unlikely in Australia given how common broadband connections are locally, but it shows what 5G can be used for.
There are other uses, including delivering information about your health to experts in the field, all the while improving video communication across the board, but it may be dependent on industries to come up with the solutions that 5G solves.
