This is the third installment in our series Not Just Another G, which provides insight into 5G and what it means to the service provider industry so they can help the end users achieve what they want. Missed the first two posts? Catch up here.

User experiences and workloads are driving the next generation of mobile computing. They have a direct impact on the evolution of wireless architecture and compute infrastructure to best meet the connectivity, latency and compute processing needs. 5G is a direct manifestation of what users want and Dell Technologies is helping service providers build their network to achieve this end goal.

Users want on-the-go access to their data and applications. They want access to work, family, social connections, entertainment, sports, communities, health data…literally everything and they want to access it right away from anywhere. To deliver optimal user experiences, some application use cases need higher throughput (e.g. content delivery), while others need lower and predictable latency (e.g. AR/VR, gaming, telehealth). Users want access to new applications and increasing amounts of data, while keeping the costs roughly the same as they are used to paying today.

This requires telecommunication companies and other connectivity providers to look at innovative ways to meet these demands. Modernization of their network infrastructure is key, as is finding ways to monetize the user behavior and bits. New, vertical-focused applications are emerging to make use of the higher-performance 5G networks. Many of these use cases are mission critical (e.g. healthcare, finance, Intelligent connected vehicles, industrial IoT).

This emerging connected world thrives on an ever-increasing need for speed of access (low-latency), and ever-increasing access bandwidth (throughput). Capacity revolutions in silicon transistors, magnetic and now silicon-based media, and the available radio spectrum that began in the second half of the last century, have continued unabated in the 21st century and show no signs of slowing down. Like a universe that is expanding and accelerating at the same time, both the network access latency and throughput are improving at the same time!

5G mobile access technology is the latest manifestation of this trend. 5G promises to deliver download speeds of 10Gbps—1000x faster than 4G, enabling an entire HD film to be downloaded in under 10 seconds. 5G also promises to deliver latency less than 1ms–50x better than 4G latency of 50 milliseconds. But let’s be clear, these super-fast speeds go well beyond faster internet. It’s truly Not Just Another G.

As network speeds increase, the amount of data that is produced and needs to be processed is also increasing. 5G is enabling this massive amount of data  produced by devices and sensors to be delivered to the edge locations or edge clouds where it can be analyzed. Similarly, 5G enables an increasing amount of media and gaming content to be delivered to users wirelessly.

Dell Technologies excels at bringing to market infrastructure hardware and software on which many of these services will be hosted and optimized. Critical technologies such as software-driven network optimization and scaling, novel memory and storage technologies such as persistent memory, and lightweight container software that has the security characteristics of the virtual machine are being created by our global engineering labs. We can’t wait to share this exciting future with you!

Thanks for tuning in to our Not Just Another G blog series. Stay tuned for a variety of 5G use cases highlighting the lifesaving capabilities as well as an exploration of our technology solutions from the edge to the core to the cloud. The possibilities are endless!