Discussion: So, you think you know what mobile feels like? Think again. Next generation 5G wireless network potentials are underway. Some things to expect:
- Performance: Everything on the network will be 25 times faster than it is now, so bandwidth-intensive activities will be better than you currently experience on wired systems. Life-like, fully-immersive, augmented reality coming to your glasses as you wander the city? No problem. You will almost certainly mothball your home and school networking systems (routers, etc) because the mobile network will make them redundant.
- Location: The network will be able to pinpoint your phone, and therefore you, to within a meter. This can offer enormous advantages, but also an overwhelming challenge to privacy rights.
- Transportation: The increased bandwidth and latency will be a transformative new infrastructure for drones, self-driving cars, and all forms of transportation, including for retail, food, etc.
- Smart Everything: The Internet of Things (IoT), combined with network-driven Artificial Intelligence, will begin to smarten-up every facet of our worldly experience, thereby changing it forever in thrilling, opportunistic, scary and even creepy ways. Just as nobody wants to remember what it was like when nobody had mobile phones, soon we won’t be able to remember what it was like when everything we encountered was ‘dumb’.
- Global Infowars: Hacking, cyber-terrorism and cyber-warfare potentials will probably make today’s skirmishes seem like child’s play. The economic and political prospects of 5G are already a battleground (notice all the noise about Huawei?) that is utterly global, and will change the world forever.
523 Inspiration: So, what happens to learning and teaching? It is, and increasingly will be, in your hands…
Perhaps this is not as exciting because it is a hidden underlying technology that is allowing us to unlock other technologies as tools. When reading the discussion examples given above, it becomes apparent what all the geopolitical hoopla in the news a few years around 5G was about. Even older millennials are old enough to remember what it was like to wait for webpages to slowly load home internet that was connected through the phone line. (Nobody use the phone – I’m on the computer!). If we had to go back to that old technology today and map on all of the current educational (and other) mobile digital tools we use, it would be impossible, just factoring in the lack of speed, leaving aside the non-mobile nature of the connection. Therefore I have to believe that the speed and lack of latency with 5G will be the foundation of even greater mobile technology enabled tools that we will take for granted in the future. Education, teaching/learning will certainly be part of that ecosystem.