The era of weak signals is drawing to a close. Full 5G connectivity is about to change your world of work forever.
Flashback to 1973 when New York Motorola Engineer Martin Cooper made the first mobile phone call. A giant leap for mankind. Fast forward to today, and the handsets you hold are a thousand times more powerful than the total sum of Nasa’s computing capability 40 years ago.
Despite this tour de force of innovation, it wasn’t until the rollout of 3G and 4G wireless broadband and cloud computing that the nature of work fundamentally changed. Now, departments and individuals can collaborate in meaningful ways, in real time, and from anywhere in the world. Remote workers are becoming more engaged and productive. Home-work lives are becoming more balanced.
5G is nearing
The impact on business brought by 5G connectivity will be even more profound. Fifth generation connectivity is expected in the UK by 2020. Industry experts claim speeds could be 100 times faster than current UK 4G networks – reaching peaks of 1GB per second. Perhaps even more importantly, the coverage will span the whole of the UK, including remote areas.
All businesses – whether digital in roots or not – will be affected by total connectivity. Imagine the paramedic operating on a patient on a mountainside while a hospital-based surgeon issues instructions. Or the personal trainer giving his client a workout from 200 miles away.
The always-on connections afforded by 5G will begin to make our environments truly smart as the Internet of Things phenomenon develops. Apple announced in June its plan for iPhones to become control hubs for the home – allowing us to interact with devices using a network of sensors. Similarly, sensors on machines and in the environment will increasingly transmit information directly into business apps.
Fulfilling potential
Business meetings as we know them could even lose their meaning as barriers to collaboration fall away. Picking up a phone could become a thing of the past as always-open communication routes are accessed by voice commands or gestures. Brainstorms from teams spread across the world could become so frequent that they are used to augment every-day thought processes.
Business decisions will be made with far greater speed, accuracy and efficiency as constant access to real-time information from colleagues, machines and processes is granted. The pace of commerce will quicken. Productivity will rise. Businesses and the economy will grow.
With total connectivity and social collaborative software, technical limitations will have far less of a restrictive influence on the quality of human interactions.
Mobile collaboration
The era of true mobile working is just beginning. The collaborative work that can be facilitated by technology, irrespective of geographic limitations, will change the lives of every worker and drive the profits of every business.
Learn how to navigate in a world of full connectivity where people are enabled to work on their own terms while becoming more productive.
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