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Research Outline

Prepared for Jennifer G. | Delivered December 17, 2019

Impacts 5G on Cloud Services Adoption

Goals

To determine how 5G technology will impact the worldwide adoption of cloud services.

Early Findings

  • Ericsson Mobility recently predicted that there will be 1 billion 5G subscriptions by 2023. This will account for almost 20% of the entire global mobile data traffic.
  • For a network to be classified as 5G, it has to provide a minimum of 20 Gbps per second for downloads and 10 Gbps for uploads. The first iteration of 4G technology had a minimum download and upload speed of 150 megabits and 15 megabits.
  • Besides the massive increase in speed provided by 5G technology, it also comes with a remarkable decrease in latency. While 3G networks had a latency of nearly 100 milliseconds, that of 4G is about 30 milliseconds, and the latency for "5G will be as low as 1 millisecond, which is for all intents and purposes instantaneous."
  • In the past, a worker would have to upload a large file in the cloud while a coworker will wait to download the same file before viewing it. However, with 5G technology people may become reluctant to go through all that stress since their device can connect with their "colleague’s device with only a millisecond of latency and a minimum connection speed of 20 Gbps down and 10 Gbps up".
  • According to Marty Puranik, while the cloud may still have significant use cases after 5G is fully rolled out — especially if cloud providers are willing to adapt — there is a possibility that the cloud might become a thing of the past.
  • Contrary to Puranik's prediction, an article by Compare the Cloud suggests that using the cloud with 5G connections will improve the performance of current innovations. Compare the Cloud expects that cloud-based services and products will become more reliable, more efficient, and faster.
  • Just like Puranik, InformationWeek also envisages a worst-case scenario where 5G technology eliminates the need for cloud services due to the incredible speed and reduced latency it offers.