A report from Ross Edwards, Immersive Technologies Director, IORMA
On the ‘Engineering the future of communications’ lunch held at the IET, London. 27th November 2018
Professor Will Stewart,
Chair of the IET Communications Policy Panel
Introduction
The talks looked look at three key aspects:
1. What ‘Quality’ services will look like in the future – not just bandwidth/speed
2. Looking at the impact on society and the challenges ahead
3. Consider the ways smart cities will evolve around us
Gavin Young – Head of Fixed Access Centre of Excellence,
Vodafone
Gavin pointed out some of the challenges ahead, that we are now in the era of Gigabit broadband, gigabit speeds are now available on several fibre networks and will be joined by higher mobile speed with 5G deployment.
Along with the amount of data being used for machine to machine communication, reliability, low latency [delay] and consistency become very important elements rather then just speed which it has been generally judged on. This will also lead to being more cost effective.
Sylvia Lu, 5G Tech Lead, u-box
Sylvia started by saying ‘Success of 5G will be determined by its impact on society’ then mentioned pushing for a more ‘human centric design approach that will create a more sustainable future.
Smart cities can now be built on complex ecosystems of technologies, Data, devices and intelligent software systems. cities will need to collect, transmit and analyse enormous amounts of data in or close to real time. This can truly release the potential of AI to fully realise the potential of Smart cities. As before this depends on the quality of data transmission and not just speed.
Larissa Suzuki, Senior Product Manager, Automatic Machine Learning, ORACLE
As cities evolved through many eras of technologies, often separately, this lack of connectivity can make city utilities and services operate sub-optimally.