War without Guns

Visitors to SK Telecom's booth at the World IT Show in October of this year experience 5G simulation experiences.
Visitors to SK Telecom's booth at the World IT Show in October of this year experience 5G simulation experiences.

 

Global mobile carriers, including those in the United States, Japan, Korea, China, and Europe, are striving to develop 5G mobile communications technology and dominate the market in advance. Local mobile communications companies such as SK Telecom and LG U+ are also banking on the development of 5G technologies and first occupation of the market.

The hallmark of this new technology is real-time everything. It is 1,000 times faster than 4G and 10,000 times faster than 3G. Thirty-three HD movie files will be able to be downloaded in just a second. Another point is machine-to-machine communications. Time-consuming work, information security activities, and many other things will be able to be handled not by people but by machines.

5G is the key to unmanned vehicles to be put to commercial use soon, too. Self-driving vehicles will be able to collect a huge amount of data in real time so that the systems can be run by computers. Speedy data transmission based on 5G will become indispensable.

These days, countries around the world are having difficulties beating the trend of low growth. Under the circumstances, 5G is expected to be a boon to their efforts for tiding over the economic recession as an innovative technological tool.

No technical standards have been set in this field, and thus technology developed ahead of others is what matters the most. China is already working on 5G on a national level, and Japan is planning to demonstrate the technology at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

SK Telecom and Samsung Electronics recently set out to cooperate with each other as well. Although Korea has some competitive edge in the industry, the stable commercialization of the technology is the most important goal, in order to avoid WiBro's fate.

Copyright © BusinessKorea. Prohibited from unauthorized reproduction and redistribution