Let's look at some of the familiar examples of applications and use cases we see all around us today. Once again reminder, that the fundamental question we are trying to ask and answer is do we truly need something beyond 4G or is 4G going to be sufficient? So what are some of the modern-day use cases? As we know, multimedia or entertainment have been digitized and are available on the go for pretty much everybody. People expect to be able to stream videos and audio songs no matter where they are. They may be at a train station, they may be in a shopping mall or they may be waiting for their dentist appointment. But they expect rich multimedia to be available to them seamlessly, no matter where they are. Not only that, which is, by the way, the downlink aspect of the things. Not only that users by themselves are creating more and more content, and that content is getting richer with every passing day. Imagine what kind of pictures you would upload years ago and compare that with the high definition pictures and other multimedia content that you regularly upload your social media or even for your work purposes. So the user generated content is not only growing in volume and variety, but it is also getting richer and richer, thus demanding not just downlink throughput, but significantly higher uplink throughput as well. We are at a point where people expect to be able to use their phones and devices in congested environments as well environments such as football stadiums, concert venues, enterprises, buildings where there may be not just one or two, but hundreds or even thousands of users trying to use their phones and devices at the same time. And that puts an unprecedentedly high load on cellular networks, something that we need to seriously ask whether legacy technologies can help support. Given that work is becoming mobile and truly remote and people expect to be able to work from anywhere, no matter where they are. It is natural of some of them to expect to be able to work even when they are on for example, high speed train, even if they are moving at 100 or 200 miles an hour, they will expect for high speed broadband like connectivity to be available on their mobile devices, even though they are moving at high speed on themselves, and that puts yet another dimension of pressure on existing ecosystems. The flip side of remote or ubiquitous work is that people will expect to have access to cloud computing no matter where they are. Maybe they are waiting for their flight at an airport, or maybe they are sitting in the lobby of their office building. But as more and more work is moving to the cloud, you need a reliable and high speed, high bandwidth, low latency conduit between your device and the cloud infrastructure, on which your device stores and retrieves all the data from. So the expectation that people will be able to work from anywhere is underscored in the fact that connected cloud computing is taking up more and more amount of wireless resources these days. Not to mention that immersive rich experiences like virtual reality or augmented reality requires significant data rates themselves. But not only that, along with the data rate, they also need extremely low latency and extremely high reliability because even one or two data packets in the virtual reality stream getting lost could be the difference between superb user experience and mediocre user experience. And finally, we all see the advent of connected vehicles all around us. Vehicles are significantly smarter and more autonomous today than they were just ten years ago, let alone 15 or 20 years ago. And not only does the connected vehicle entail that you will be able to stream a movie for entertainment purposes, but it also entails that the vehicle, which is getting more and more software oriented, will be able to download software updates on the go map updates, for example, for navigation purposes. But not only that, more importantly, as vehicles become more autonomous, they will be able to communicate with other vehicles in their vicinity. And that communication, because it is so time critical, will require the underlying networks to provide a communication on a millisecond or even a microsecond basis. And the question that we need to ask ourselves is; given that all these up and coming applications impose some of the strictest requirements on the underlying networks, how can we summarize those into a few points of a mission statement, so to speak, that will be applicable for the next technology should we determine it is indeed necessary? So some of the requirements could be distilled into these points here in that the up and coming applications of today and tomorrow require ultra high speeds and ultra high network capacity. Not only that, many of them will absolutely require low lag or low time delay so that they can offer real-time and interactive experience to their users, like VR or augmented reality. Furthermore, it wouldn't be very difficult, for example, to invent a different technology and build different networks for each of these individualized purposes. But the true power of this or any other technology would be to be able to serve all of these use cases and applications under the umbrella of just one common network or one common framework. And the broader mission statement for any technology of the future would be to not just connect individual people, but connect everyone and everything, i.e. not just connect all the people to each other, but connect all their devices that they use to other devices as well. And as it turns out, none of the legacy technologies, be it LTE or be it Wi-Fi, were designed to keep all these stringent requirements in mind. They weren't designed to meet the stringent requirements of these up and coming use cases. And that tells us that in order to not just meet, but significantly exceed the expectations of these cutting edge up and coming applications of today, tomorrow and beyond, we need a technology that goes beyond 4G or Wi-Fi. And that is the advent and justification for the next generation of cellular technology that is 5G, which is the technology that is going to be truly essential for next generation mobile experiences. And now that we have seen why we need a new technology beyond 4G. Let's look at some of the high level technological promises that this new technology 5G makes as far as meeting the requirements of tomorrow is concerned.
