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Why is 5G important?

23/09/19

There is no denying that cellular telephony has led one of the biggest economic and cultural transformations in the world in the last 30 years.
Reading time: 4 minutes

What started as the portability of telephony became, over time, something much more significant. Cell phones evolved to the point where they are now considered almost inseparable parts of the modern man and woman. Its role as a platform for information, commerce, payment and communications was achieved in a solid and unquestionable way - and this evolution process occurred from two different but related paths: networks (and their respective technologies) and mobile devices, which have increasingly greater processing capacity and new features.

At first, in the era of analog signals and AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System) technology, manufacturers such as Motorola (anyone remember the Startac, object of desire in the 90s?) were market leaders. Then, with the arrival of 2G and the digitization of signals, the Europeans -Nokia and Ericsson- emerged with the boost of the enormous market strength represented by the GSM system, which imposed itself on standards such as CDMA and TDMA.

That leadership was maintained with the emergence of 3G, in which data communication via cellular networks began to gain real commercial relevance. At that time, the first smartphone models were launched (anyone remember the Nokia 9000 Communicator?), but it was still too fast for the concept to really take off, especially due to the limitations of available bandwidth and the huge shortage of applications available on closed platforms offered by operators in partnership with manufacturers (the Walled Garden concept, dominant at the time). The first discussions about operating systems (Symbian, Windows CE and PalmOS) also date from that time, many of them created for the popular PDAs, which still didn't integrate voice communication functions and were developments that ran in parallel to cell phones.

And so we arrived at that crucial moment: June 29, 2007. From that day on, a product would forever change the way we live: the iPhone was born. The materialization of the smartphone concept would come to shake the market like an avalanche and completely change -and forever- the competitive scenario. The platforms, open to independent developers, would allow the available applications to multiply with enormous speed, especially after the commercial launch, just over a year later, of the 4G system, which finally enabled the use of fully integrated data and video, music and voice applications. This defined a new paradigm. New players, such as Samsung, at the forefront of mobile devices, and Google, with Android, on the operating system side, would be Apple's main rivals from then on. The world would never be the same again.

And now comes 5G. But what does this new generation of wireless technology really mean? The reality is that when we talk about digital transformation and try to understand the conceptual components that underlie it, topics such as Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud Computing come up.

What we sometimes forget is the fundamental role of connectivity in all of this. We are talking about gigantic volumes of data, collected in a spatially distributed way, and systems that need to analyze this same data to aid in decision making, often in critical environments, in real time.

5G es la tecnología de comunicaciones que permitirá exactamente ese tipo de propuesta de valor. Según muchos analistas, es la «espina dorsal de la transformación digital». Para las operadoras de telecomunicaciones, representa una enorme oportunidad y, también, un gran desafío.

The opportunity is associated with its ability to offer high value-added services for corporate customers (often at the forefront of IoT), public sector (Smart Cities) and also for their end consumers (wearable solutions, applications oriented to medicine and quality of life, home control, etc.).

The challenge is related to two aspects. The first refers to a radical change in network architecture: greater transmission capacity and lower latency mean licenses in new frequency bands and a much larger infrastructure, once the coverage area of the cells radically decreases. The second refers to the ability to design and build these same value-added services, which are somewhat distant from the core operations of these companies today.

Logicalis is at the heart of this revolution, helping operators in the transformation and preparation of their infrastructure and, at the same time, developing its performance together with the B2B areas of these companies, in alliances for the development of services and projects for several verticals that are already the object of our joint performance.

An exciting time in which Logicalis, with its commitment to customers, its capacity for innovation, execution and service delivery, has the perfect ground ahead of it to execute its vision of being the leading agent of digital transformation in Latin America. Welcome to a new adventure.

 

About Logicalis Latin America www.la.logicalis.com

Logicalis Latin America is a provider of information and communication technology services and solutions in Latin America with operations in Europe, North and South America, Asia Pacific and Africa, with an annual turnover of approximately US$ 1.5 billion. In Latin America it has a team of 1,500 highly qualified professionals, distributed in its operations in ten countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. With the mission of being a transforming agent of society, Logicalis works on the application of innovative technologies in order to accompany its more than 1,000 clients on the road to the digitalization of their businesses, always with solutions tailored to each need.

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