The latest in phone technology, 5G, has been causing controversy since its announcement last year. Some believe that its fast speeds of 10 Gbps will revolutionise the future of mobile tech, whilst others fear for the impact it will have on bandwidth and general signaling issues.
However, whatever the opinion, experts predict that 5G will be a part of our lives whether we want it to be or not. This will be through the way that smart cities will combine the fifth generation of mobile networks with cloud computing to create a data and storage system that is hoped to benefit the lives of residents and industries.
John Buni, CEO & co-founder of CleanCloud says, “[With] the sheer amount of data generated and collected by smart cities (and six billion are predicted to live in smart cities by 2045), it will be vitally important to have adequate computing capacity.”
Trusting smart cities
However, Buni goes on to say that predictions of smart cities are often too pessimistic and that more trust needs to be put into them. He added that using cloud computing within smart cities will promise “flexibility and a safety net for data”.
He continues to speak of what using the cloud will mean to smart cities, saying: “Each city will have a cloud, and that cloud will store and analyse all the data used in that city, whether it relates to autonomous vehicles or vertical farms.”
Extra benefits of using cloud computing
The CleanCloud CEO added that if a device is lost—say, a laptop or a phone—its details will be recoverable from the cloud, creating an extra level of storage and security for citizens.
In fact, he argues, cloud use may become so prevalent that we will ‘be able to drop descriptors like “as-a-service”‘, which indicate that something—software, for instance—sits in the cloud. We currently use terms like SaaS, along with infrastructure-as-service and platform-as-a-service, to differentiate these models from their more-traditional counterparts. When cloud services are the norm, in other words, ‘”software-as-a-service” would simply be called “software”,’ he says. ‘The cloud element will be taken for granted.’
It’s thought that the business sector will also gain from this setup. “Indeed, some have speculated that the cloud will become so fundamental to software that we’ll be able to drop descriptors like ‘as-a-service’: software-as-a-service will just become software; the cloud element will be taken for granted.” Says Buni.
5G has been launched by telecom companies globally this summer and is available in 6 cities across the UK.
