IoT, edge computing, machine to machine mode networking are some of the terms up and about nowadays. However, there is one term which, controversial as it may be, turns heads unlike any other. And that is 5G. The fifth generation of the long-range cellular communication technology is only a matter of time as research being committed by companies such as Huawei and 2020 seems to be the window where companies will either make themselves or see themselves break off in pursuit of this very credulous, very talked about technology stack.

With 5G and the development powered towards IoT and its integration with 5G, we can see a completely new era of technology and technology based service delivery ushering on. This is because 5G aims to provide uber fast connection speeds due to the hardware being employed. This entails communication over radio waves and frequencies previously thought uneconomical since commercial production and use was deemed just too expensive.

However, with advancements in technology, just as before with 3G as well as 4G, devices are being redesigned with more powerful material. To understand this, just think about how a decade ago, cell phone charges were bulky. A decade after, now we have charges which weigh less than a pack of chips. This happened because the coiling mechanism inside the chargers, a coil and a step up generator, were redesigned to produce more or less the same effect without as many moving parts, or parts altogether. Similarly, devices are now being constructed for the same use as other wireless communication technologies, with the hardware and sometimes the software being redesigned to implement different techniques of achieving the same results.

With the IoT enabled devices, the idea was to allow devices to communicate either with each other, or with centralized servers enabling a massive network of devices which could be programmed to avoid human interaction and thus reduce the time a device needed to perform an action or even take a decision. With powerful server setups backing up these device and network models, and algorithms enabling phenomenon such as artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, natural language processing and even real time predictive analysis of Big Data, decision making is just another feature of software packages and not something limited to human beings.

All in all, there is no doubt that within the next few years, IoT and the advent of 5G coming together are going to boost technological implementations. This can further be backed up by the fact that Gartner’s research states that with the interactivity offered by mobile devices, the PC market will fall by 3.9% almost every year, a huge hit to the PC market where as 5G-enable cell phone market is expected to see an increase in the 10% rise in 2020, to a 56% rise in 2056. This roughly translates to a foreseeable demand of 48.6 million devices with an installation base of 324.1 million devices by mid of the century.