5G Tech in Post-COVID Canada
A conversation with Geoff Sullivan, Automation Lead at MOBIA Technology Innovations
Recently, ICTC’s Ryan McLaughlin and Rosina Hamoni spoke with Geoff Sullivan of MOBIA Technology Innovations about 5G mobile technology in Canada. Geoff is an Automation Lead at MOBIA, with over 5 years of experience in the tech sector.
This interview is part of ICTC’s ongoing discussions with technology experts on 5G technology and its anticipated impacts on Canada. ICTC’s forthcoming report, 5G: Canada’s Next Big Vessel for FDI Attraction, provides updates on Canada’s 5G timeline and analyses Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) implications related to 5G.
Ryan: Thank you for joining us, Geoff. Can you give us a quick introduction to MOBIA?
Geoff: Sure. MOBIA is a systems integrator and consultancy with a number of business units. One of these units is broadband and wireless, where we work very closely with Canadian telecommunications companies. A second pillar is cybersecurity, and another is software development and infrastructure services. We have a little over 400 employees in a variety of roles. We are over 30 years old, headquartered in Halifax. We just opened our Vancouver office a couple months ago. We also have offices in Quebec, Manitoba, and Ontario.
Rosina: Thanks for the overview! For those who may not be familiar, what would you say are MOBIA’s business objectives with respect to 5G?
Geoff: From a 5G perspective, I think we’re at an interesting spot in the market. We work with large telecommunications companies in Canada, preparing their networks through infrastructure build-out for what’s to come with 5G and edge computing. We also do a lot of work in enterprise and in the healthcare sector as well. In essence, we’re working with the companies that are building the 5G networks as well as the organizations that will be using those networks.
Rosina: What type of work do you do with the organizations that are building out the 5G networks — the telcos?
We work with the major telecom companies primarily to bring fiber into neighborhoods and help the them — the telcos — manage large capital projects. We do everything from GIS work, to physical site engineering. Specifically, on the 5G side, we’re looking to take the approach that we used with LTE networks, including prefabricating equipment before sending them to site, and seeing how we can reapply it to 5G. From an architecture perspective, 5G is very much software based. It provides a great opportunity for us to combine our practice areas and business units within MOBIA in order to deliver similar services to the next generation.
Ryan: You mentioned that you also do a lot of work in healthcare. How do you see 5G impacting this sector?
Geoff: To give you a bit of background on us in the healthcare space, we started out building wireless networks for hospitals about 15 years ago. As time went on, more and more clinical devices became IP based and network connected, and our business has grown as a result of this trend. We’ve now moved to working more with medical information systems. One product we’ve built is used in emergency rooms to help reduce wait times. It measures load, and balances patients across multiple emergency rooms. This need is further driven by the COVID pandemic we are currently facing.
Ryan: Speaking of the COVID pandemic, do you think 5G can play a role in advancing telemedicine?
Yes, I think telemedicine is going to benefit a lot from a technology like 5G. If you imagine all the constraints on our healthcare system over the past few months, it seems that we must find a way to do remote medicine in a more effective way. When I think of things like augmented or virtual reality, I think that’s really the low-hanging fruit. Through telemedicine, 5G has the ability to enable our healthcare system to provide a level of care that is better and more efficient.
Rosina: That’s really interesting. My educational background is in healthcare, so innovations in this sector especially intrigue me. You mentioned AR/VR: Many are saying that AR/VR is a good 5G use case — that it has really big benefits because it is mobile, low-latency, and high-bandwidth simultaneously. But what factors are preventing us from having this technology — even if not perfect — in some form, already? Does AR/VR equipment like the Oculus need to be improved somehow, or does it need 5G just to operate at basic levels?
Geoff: I think that it’s a combination of all those things — there are many pieces that need to align. Think of the end users as developers who are going to build latency-sensitive applications. They are limited in what they can do if there is no infrastructure to test their uses cases on. So, it is a bit of a “chicken-and-egg” problem: the telecoms have to design and deploy 5G based on business cases, but to date, they have had to make guesses and assumptions about the things that 5G is going to enable. We’ve heard AR/VR, but a developer of an AR/VR application is currently really limited in testing these technologies on 5G. I think we are at this critical point now where the technology is getting there on the telecommunications side, and we are starting to see movement in edge computing and latency-sensitive applications emerge. I think that the more devices we have and the more data we have, the more 5G will make sense.
Ryan: What are your thoughts on where Canada is relative to other countries on 5G? As we sometimes see in studies from organizations like the OECD, Internet and mobile data is expensive in Canada compared to other countries. As a result, we don’t have very high penetration of these services compared to other countries. Why is that, in your view?
Geoff: Based on my experience, Canada is rolling out 5G at the same pace that it usually rolls out new technology: typically, that is the wait-and-see approach. Or, “Let’s see what AT&T and Verizon do. Let them make those initial mistakes as they have the deep pockets, and then we can learn from that.” The technical telecommunications industry globally is getting a lot better at sharing best practices, and there is a lot more open-source and collaboration going on, but 5G adoption in Canada is going to take place at a pace that is probably a few years behind the US.
In terms of expensive internet, I tend to think it is a “scale thing.” It is about how Canada’s population is distributed across its geography. We have vast infrastructure requirements, which creates economic challenges.
Rosina: Since many new functions are moving online, we’ve seen that the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating concerns about cybersecurity. Do you think that 5G has implications for cybersecurity?
Geoff: 5G is architected a bit differently than prior generations — it is very much software based. This generation of technology is very disaggregated from its hardware layer. That is going to be a challenge from an operations perspective and, as a result, could also be a challenge from a security perspective. You can imagine that there are a lot of people within the telecom world that may need to retool and relearn how these things run. Software has always had vulnerabilities, so it is just a matter of when it’s caught and by whom. You could make the argument that since it is much more of a disaggregated architecture, potentially there is more opportunity for human error or missed bugs during quality assurance.
Ryan: Interesting. In your view, how will 5G impact the digital divide? While I understand that it will be rolled out in cities first, when will 5G reach rural or remote communities?
Geoff: That is certainly up for debate right now. We are doing some work in the Northwest Territories, helping a telecom company build out their fiber program to get more households connected. There is a debate on whether fiber or 5G is cheaper and better. We are even starting to get enterprise customers asking us about private 5G networks, but unfortunately there are many unknowns at this time about how rural broadband infrastructure will be built out.
Rosina: Yeah, it seems like that is also a bit of a “wait-and-see” game. To close on a big question, how to you think 5G will impact Canadian society as a whole? What does 5G look like in a post-COVID-19 world?
Geoff: That’s a tough question, for sure. We’ve been talking with customers about digital transformation for many years now, and I think companies that don’t accelerate digitization — taking on a digital-first attitude — are going to be bypassing many of the opportunities of the future economy. I’ve seen COVID-19 make our customers think differently, pay more attention to digitization. Customers are now more open to making bolder technology decisions, and the innovative things that used to be a couple years down the road now seem possible. The whole world has been put into shock, and perspectives are changing. We’ve gone from none of our customers asking about private 5G networks to three inquiring about them in the past couple of weeks. I think 5G will definitely be a candidate for accelerating the transformation of the economy, including what I think will be a more permanent switch to remote work.
