5G: from lab to launch pad

With 4G still rolling out in many countries, 5G plans are already heating up. CIOs should prepare now for the next wave of bill shock.

What a difference a few months can make. Last year analysts were asking if 5G was just a laboratory project, bolstering the innovation creds of Samsung and Huawei but years away from commercial rollout. We didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

AT&T and Verizon have recently announced testing to see whether prototype 5G circuitry can work indoors. South Korea plans to have its 5G network up and running when it hosts the Winter Olympics in 2018; while Japan plans the same for the 2020 summer games. At Mobile World Congress 2015 and 2016, 5G was top of the agenda.

So the push is officially on. 5G is essential to the growth of the internet of things, the integration of fixed and wireless broadband, and the adoption of wearable tech. With Samsung recently announcing a lab-based 5G technology that delivers transfer speeds of 1Gbps, mobility managers need to be thinking now about how that much mobile data bandwidth in the palm of your hand will impact end user behaviour.

Thanks to ever faster and more powerful handsets and tablets that make video streaming both easy and enjoyable, monthly bill shock from cellular data overuse is already the reality for many organisations,. Video costs dearly. At current cellular data speeds, even viewing for just ten minutes a day can consume 1GB in a month. Video calls meanwhile can use between 5mb and 30mb for a 5-minute session.

It’s not hard to imagine how gaming on mobile devices might explode with reliable access to 5G connections. Massively multiplayer mobile games can require data rates of up to 17mb for every 10 minutes of play. Each new generation of games also improves on the previous version’s graphics and these — especially 3D — mean large file sizes, some within the 200mb range.

Add to that the constant back and forth communication between connected home devices and smart phones once IoT really takes hold.

With a 5G data connection powering demand, the rise in data consumption — and cost — on your company plan could certainly be ‘exponential’.

So how should mobility managers respond? By adding mobile device management (MDM) or a mobile gateway to IT infrastructure. In combination they allow you to switch on controls that minimise how much data employees can consume, while maintaining enough flexibility to allow reasonable access to popular apps and data types. You can also separate expensive data traffic from other acceptable data and/or usage types, and even see how much data an individual company user is consuming — and on what.

These solutions work by raising granular visibility at the user level of the data types and apps that are pushing up costs. You can then use data compression to tackle video and other fat data and file types, or potentially cap users at an allocated personal data limit. Whether it’s 5G, 4G or 3G, mobile data consumption — and costs — are already on the rise.