Cities Not Waiting for 5G for Tech Upgrades, Conference Hears

Smart cities aren’t waiting for 5G, said John Wilson, Hitachi director-America business development, on a panel at a wireless conference. “We have several thousand IoT solutions that are to market, that are being sold, that are implemented in 70 cities across the country,” he said. “How much bandwidth do you need for certain applications?” Applications like sensors on the roads that detect potholes will never need 5G, Wilson said. Fifth-generation wireless is for applications that need very high throughput and very low latency “and you don’t need that for everything IoT,” he said. Elizabeth Rojas Levi, Nokia director-public affairs, said if autonomous vehicles take off, all cities will need 5G. “We’re going to need high-, mid- and low-band spectrum for that,” she said. “The same for remote surgery.” For those types of applications, “we’re going to need more small cells, we’re going to need better connectivity,” she said. Some view these new technologies as something out of the The Jetsons, she said. “Not really. This stuff is already happening. It’s just that it hasn’t scaled yet and it hasn’t scaled globally.”