Think 5G Is All About Faster Speeds? Think Again

Ask most people what they think of when they hear the term 5G, and they’ll likely say high-speed cellular networks. And they’re right, of course. 5G networks are indeed faster — and will be dramatically faster in coming years, once carriers dedicate more bandwidth and implement more 5G features.

But for industries like healthcare, much of 5G’s game-changing potential comes not so much from its high speed, but from a raft of other capabilities, like low latency and seemingly endless capacity.

What is latency? It’s basically the time it takes to fulfill a request. So bandwidth plays a role, of course. But if, for example, setup takes too long, then the network just isn’t suited for many real-time duties. No matter how fast it is.

To illustrate, let’s say you asked Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest sprinter, to run and close the gate before the dog gets out of the yard. He agrees. But before taking off running, he sits down to put on his shoes. So while Bolt’s speed would have been helpful, his latency made him useless for the task at hand.

Low latency, then, is Usain Bolt at the ready, shoes laced and ready to run. Which is great for the escaping dog application. But in order for medical practitioners to rely on 5G for life-and-death situations, response to requests must be free of delay, no matter the conditions.

That’s where 5G’s seemingly boundless capacity comes in. 5G can manage traffic and deliver data instantaneously to orders of magnitude more devices than LTE. So a clinician can view a patient’s vital signs in real time, regardless of whether the doctor is stationed in her office, lounging by her backyard pool or cheering from a stadium suite at a sold-out NFL game.

The myriad possibilities in digital health from 5G’s near-instant communications between billions of devices are only now just coming into view. Imagine, for example:

• Home health monitors that deliver streams of vital signs to clinicians as if patients were hooked up in a room across from the nurses’ station. With access to such secure, real-time connections, physicians could shorten hospital stays by sending some patients home for observation. As well, they’d more likely to catch emergencies sooner, which means better outcomes
• Renowned specialists in urban areas conducting virtual visits — even assisting distant procedures with connected lasers, scopes and other medical equipment — for patients in remote locations. Such technology could help more evenly spread critical expertise, skill and experience.
  
  A study published this summer drove home the urgent need for stretching skills beyond urban centers, where the sheer volume of patients affords clinicians more opportunities to identify patients in crisis and fine-tune their care. According to the publication, critically ill COVID-19 patients treated in large urban hospitals were far more likely to survive infection than those in smaller, more rural facilities.
  
  5G connectivity could even help bridge language hurdles by adding interpreters to the care team from yet another location.
• With instantaneous wireless connections, XR headsets can help extend the skills of specialists from the most vibrant health centers to every corner of the globe, with real-time tutelage and assistance. As well, latency-free imaging could even help prevent burnout by giving on-call physicians views into an ICU patient’s latest imaging results — without leaving the sidelines of her daughter’s soccer game.

Almost assuredly, the most exciting applications that 5G enables will surprise us all when they sprout up. Just as no one could have foreseen mobile services like Uber or Waze at the dawn of LTE, the biggest blockbuster applications that will reshape our health and wellbeing in the 5G era are still but a gleam in the eyes of some visionary entrepreneurs.

Those possibilities are what drive engineers at companies across the wireless ecosystem to design and build future networks — even though they could not possibly foresee what they’ll eventually enable. At the start of the 4G decade, for example, they understood that LTE must bring dramatic improvements in bandwidth and traffic management. Of course, no LTE framer — let alone anyone at Netflix — understood at the time that in just a few years, more subscribers would be streaming Orange is the New Black to their phones than on their living room TVs.

Today, the imperative for 5G is to ensure capacity for orders of magnitude more devices that must be able to communicate with each other instantaneously. And in just a few years, we’ll begin to get a glimpse at what life-changing new applications that will enable.

Indeed, the future, you might say, is almost here.