Why 2020 is the Year for 5G and IoT

The year 2020 begins a new decade, and in many sense, a new technology era as we bear witness to the continued development of 5^th generation mobile technology (5G), Internet of Things (IoT) and other parallel developments in the areas of advanced analytics, cloud and cybersecurity.
 
Many technology firms have been looking at their respective visions for 2020 from several years ago. This year, with 5G and IoT blossoming further and maturing into a full ecosystem, their visions start to become a reality. Various use cases enabled by marrying 5G and IoT will now become possible, ushering in a generation where there is even more data and transactions than ever before. This will also require more capable storage, processing and analytics to gather intelligence and insights, and correspondingly generate answers to businesses’ most pressing questions.
 
In several countries that have already launched 5G, there has been remarkable growth in mobile data traffic, particularly driven by Ultra High Definition (UHD), Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) content. This is because of 5G’s inherent capability to deliver much faster data rates, lower latency, and cheaper cost per bit. 5G also enables mission-critical communications that can and will transform remote control of businesses and industries which require ultra-high availability and ultra-low latency. Combining this with further development of IoT device capability, there will be lots of new use cases that will be either created or enabled that were never practical or possible before. 5G will connect massive amounts of embedded sensors in almost everything, while supporting extremely low power consumption devices that can take many years before recharging or battery replacement is necessary. There will be “smart” anything, like Smart Cities, Smart Cars, Smart Factories, Smart Health, Smart Agriculture, etc.
 
From a personal subscriber perspective, people will start using multiple devices in their daily lives. In addition to one or two mobile phones, a person will also have a tablet, a smart watch and other devices that all link to one another. This means that the number of transactions and interactions done by an individual at any given day is multiplied several folds. Terabytes of transactional data per person will now require petabytes, or even exabytes of storage capability for a million subscribers. To simplify, a terabyte contains one trillion bytes, while an exabyte contains 1 million terabytes. For a telco service provider, this becomes both a challenge and opportunity for them as they will need to anticipate this massive growth requirement and invest on storage, processing and analytics accordingly. It will also require telcos to undergo business or outcome-driven digital transformation in order to perform pervasive data intelligence.

Imagine if you could bring together all your data – historical or real time data from customer transactions, network statistics, and social media – for a complete 360 degree view of the customer. What if you had access to the most sophisticated tools and analytics, supporting multiple algorithms and techniques that you could apply on this centralized, comprehensive view of the customer, to gain deep insights. And what if you had the ability to take all these insights quickly, and use it to inform customer decisions in real time, across multiple channels, to deliver personalized, relevant experiences.
 
An outcome-led digital Telco is able to evolve from having a descriptive capability which describes what happened, to understanding why it happened (diagnostic), to being able to predict what will happen (predictive), and, from the several scenarios predicted, can make the best recommendations (prescriptive). The fundamental architectural foundation remains the same – from the edge layer, to network, towards big data at the core, and then the applications and decisions on top of that. E2E security ensures that information and processes remain secured at every level. Imagine that every subscriber’s information, transaction history, buying pattern, browsing pattern, mobility pattern, and bank and credit card information are either stored or processed through Telco. This is the reason why all of the subscriber info, when correlated with network info (cell ID, signal strength, etc) and external market and social data, become a powerful superset of information that when structured, organized and analyzed become the foundation for making business decisions and achieving desired outcomes. This single source of truth becomes a “goldmine” and benefits various departments of the Telco organization internally, and can also be repackaged and enriched differently for other vertical industry offerings in travel, supply chain & logistics, banking, oil & gas, manufacturing, retail, energy & utilities, healthcare, etc.


Business outcomes from properly leveraging unified data and analytics include improving profitability, customer experience and brand loyalty; while reducing cost of ownership and operation, risk & fraud, as well as time to profit (from service launch to gaining revenue and profit). The transactions and interactions form the raw material of the operations of the Telco. By taking different elements of those and aggregating them in various ways, we can meet the functional requirements of many different operational streams or domains within the Telco. Data mining and analytics for offering to external industry partners and customers open up new monetization opportunities, creates brand stickiness to the Telco and improves total value of the Telco to the ecosystem. Furthermore, unified and structured data is the foundation for artificial intelligence, which augments human capability for decision-making in automated processes.
 
Teradata helps telcos get business answers from 100% of their data (subscriber info, network stats, social data) through pervasive data intelligence. With 5G and IoT blooming in 2020, it becomes an even more compelling topic.