On Saturday, 2 June 2018 21:20:20 AEST Scott Howard wrote: > 5G isn't about mobile devices. > > It's about self-driving cars. And TV broadcasting. And football stadiums. > And IoT. And countless other things that likely haven't been even dreamed of > yet... > > As an example, consider these guys - https://phantom.auto/ They provide a > solution to handle the corner cases where your self-driving car can't handle > whats in front of it (roadworks, weather, etc). They can take over the > driving of the car remotely for the short time it's needed. But to do that > they need high bandwidth, low latency communications. Whilst 4G might be > enough in some cases, in a more general sense it isn't.
I'll believe self-driving cars when I see the first models with no manual controls approved for normal use on Australian roads, or at least no requirement for monitoring by a "driver". However there's an important point here which isn't specific to that use case. If these vehicles rely on continuous 5G and GPS availability, especially if it involves communication with nearby vehicles (not all of which will be driverless) or some other entity, then the level of total system complexity will be very high. And that makes it vulnerable. Remember the chaos on Sydney roads when an over-height truck gets stuck in a tunnel? And that's a simple example where both the cause & solution are physically obvious. There's a relationship between complexity and vulnerability, though it has to be said measures of system complexity are not simple. > Or TV Broadcasting. I'm sure you've seen the trucks pull up with the > satellite dish on it and take 30 mins to get setup. No longer needed - just > use 5G. But that's not even the tiniest component of a cost justification. > Or football stadiums. 4G simply doesn't work well when 40,000 people are all > trying to tweet and live-stream the try that just happened. (OK, so maybe 5G > is a bit about mobile devices) Neither is that IMO. Why don't they watch the replay on the big screen? It will be showing exactly the same images they might see on their mobiles. > I was at the GITEX expo in Dubai a few months back where they were demoing 5G > technology. One of the demos was using 5G for remote robotic surgery. This > ins't exactly new, and can be done today without 5G, but the lower latency of > 5G apparently improves things dramatically. I'd like to see the cost-benefit of remote robotic surgery of any sort; the patient had better hope there's no network outage! As I remarked above, greater complexity leads to greater vulnerability. In fact there seems to be no medical consensus that robotic surgery is generally better than hands-on surgery anyway, and it's very expensive. DavidL _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
