UK Chancellor Philip Hammond gears up to splurge over £1.1 billion on fibre broadband and 5G technologies.
£400 million called the Digital Infrastructure Investment Fund to be given to fibre broadband providers to expand networks.
£740 million committed to developing 5G and on rolling out fibre.
Where can we expect the to see the greatest impact?
5G could help generate €113.1 billion a year Europe wide by 2025 said a European Commission-supported study with trickle-down impact of €141 billion.
As infrastructure investments go, the networks themselves will be pretty much invisible so where will business and the public see the benefits:
1. Video streaming
Video streaming is not a new technology, but it will soon take centre stage in internet usage. According to Cisco, global IP video traffic will grow threefold from 2015 to 2020, a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent while internet video traffic will grow fourfold in the same period.
Currently use of video is often limited by available internet speeds in the case of home broadband connections and by data constraints when using cellular.
The faster and higher capacity networks will sate the growing appetite for high quality video streaming services, especially as more and more video content moves online through services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix.
2. Connected cars
Network companies and automakers are already working on the connectivity solutions that will power connected and driverless cars.
For example, in the UK, Vodafone has been testing vehicle-to-vehicle communications using the LTE-V2X protocol.
Stakeholders in both the telecoms and automotive industry have been collaborating to determine standards and solutions for 5G use in road vehicles. The 5G Automotive Association, for example, formed recently, will include Audi, BMW Group, Daimler AG, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm.
In fact, the EU study found that the automotive industry would be the biggest beneficiary of 5G, with strategic benefits of €13.8 billion.
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