Aside from the tourism sector, most countries in the Caribbean rely on agriculture, fisheries and mining natural resources such as oil, gas and minerals. All of these areas can be further developed and improved with the help of 5G. Currently, Caribbean countries need to concentrate on building fiscal and financial resilience, and investing in preparedness, in order to reduce the large human and economic costs caused by climate change and tourism market fluctuations due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

5G in healthcare

On top of introducing travellers to immersive experiences with the help of fast uplink/downlink speeds and ultra-low latency, 5G can influence eHealth and improve the response speed to natural disasters, such as hurricanes.

5G can facilitate eHealth by extending medical support to remote areas, transporting patients more efficiently and filling gaps created by a lack of skilled medical personnel. While 4G enables remote diagnostics within a hospital or venue, and the care and tracking for senior citizens, 5G will make ambulance remote diagnostics and telemedicine possible, alongside improved remote patient monitoring and high-value asset tracking, by providing rapid transmission and processing of medical data, along with reliability and extremely low latency in critical patient applications and more.

5G in agriculture

Being the major land-use activity in the Caribbean, agriculture contributes to the domestic food supply and provides employment. However, it is an industry with a high level of exposure to climate change and natural disasters. 5G equipped sensors, combined with artificial intelligence, can create predictive models that dramatically reduce risk and increase efficiency for farms of all sizes. Smart farming can potentially improve yield by using appropriate sensors and selecting and applying pesticides to plants with disease at an earlier stage. Systems that monitor crops and soil conditions would provide farmers with real-time data to quickly adjust their operations, better deploy resources, and even run farming tasks remotely.

But even though 4G offers high data speed and good connectivity, interconnecting a large number of devices plays a key role in smart farming in remote places, with low installation and maintenance costs. 5G allows connection of over 1,000 more devices per meter than can be supported by 4G. In this way, smart agriculture could potentially address food security, climate change, water shortages and resource utilisation through a communication network. 

5G and the blue economy

The Caribbean’s sustainable use of ocean resources, known as the “blue economy,” offers potential for economic diversification, while preserving the region’s environment, as well as further development of other sectors with potential for growth. Establishing a 5G network and connecting smart devices can help monitor the sea water from above and below, as well as tracking marine creatures with the help of drones.

For example, researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Southampton in the United Kingdom have developed jellyfish and squid inspired robots that mimic the quick and efficient movements of these ocean habitants. The device is ideal for probing sensitive ocean environments, including coral reefs. Created using 3D printing, they are made of soft, flexible rubber material and use small powerful propellers to move with the propulsive efficiency of a jellyfish.

In the UK, Vodafone is installing a 5G mobile private network (MPN) in Plymouth Sound, which will be the world’s first 5G ocean-based marine testbed. Business and academics will be able to use this network to test, research and innovate new possibilities such as driverless boats, smart shipping as well as environmental monitoring. 5G will significantly increase the data that can be collected by connected buoys that measure, observe and record a wide range of sea water parameters helping to increase our understanding of how oceans are changing.

5G in disaster response

Furthermore, using 5G could lead to improving response times in hurricane season by providing first responder teams with real-time data from drones and connected IoT sensors over 5G networks. For example, FirstNet, a public safety network created for first responders in the United States announced that first responders in parts of 38 cities and more than 20 venues would gain access to AT&T’s mmWave (5G+) spectrum. The collaboration with AT&T resulted in upgrading the dedicated FirstNet network core to enable reliable 5G connectivity, which is ideal for IoT and video intelligence solutions.

The knock-on effect of 5G efficiencies

5G also allows operators to manage energy consumption more effectively. According to Huawei, 4G base stations consume 80% of total network energy used, with nearly half of the electricity consumed in cooling transmission equipment. However, 4G networks consume more energy than 5G networks, thus 5G in the Caribbean could reduce consumption of vital electricity. 5G towers have fewer heat-generating electronic components, decreasing the difficulty of cooling them down. Compared to 4G towers, the recently developed liquid-cooling and solar power technologies to optimise cooling, reduce CO₂ emissions by up to 80% and reduce operating expenses by nearly a third.

Moreover, 5G technologies can significantly optimise energy waste through smart heating and air conditioning control. Connected sensors can be deployed to monitor and adjust temperature and air units automatically depending on the presence of people in a building or a room. In their Smart 5G Factory launched in 2021, Ericsson observed that uses such as energy monitoring and management save around 5 per cent of the energy bill, whilst environmental monitoring can lead to a 5 per cent reduction in waste. Altogether the Factory is 24 per cent more energy-efficient than baseline.

The deployment of 5G climate change technologies could improve water management through the infrastructure for mass IoT (Internet of Things) sensor deployments, which allows low-cost sensors to detect harmful chemicals in the water supply and alert the public of possible health risks. These sensors can manage leaks in waterlines, provide early flood warnings, and transform the agriculture industry.

5G networks open up so many opportunities to benefit the social and economic welfare of countries – beyond the well documented high speed and low latency network performance.  Werry Consulting recommends that governments and mobile network operators look at specific country / regional use cases and consider how these could bring a wealth of benefits and opportunities for countries in these difficult times.

Image credits: Christoph Scholz (flickr); Gerd Altmann (Pixabay); Pxfuel; pxhere

The industry press is full of promises of what 5G will deliver and the difference that it will make to our daily lives. Suggested use cases include assisted and autonomous vehicles, smart stadium, and immersive experiences (Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR)). However, for many of us, it is difficult to see how we, or even the society that we live in, will make use of some of the ‘use cases’ proposed by vendors.

The result of this uncertainty is the potential that consumers may not directly benefit from the positive contributions 5G technology can make.  Some of us may have already upgraded to 5G-capable handsets: are still using our devices as we did before, but with the option of consuming more data, more quickly.

Being an engineer, I cannot avoid questioning the introduction of 5G, and looking at this from the point of view of: what problem or gap is 5G trying to fill? Ultimately many of the services promised by 5G, are currently delivered, or could be delivered, by variants of 4G.  So, what is different about 5G and how can society benefit from it?

Putting it simply, there are three major differences to 5G, these can easily be described as:

• Very low latency;
• High upload speeds, and
• Densification of devices (simultaneous users)

5G to benefit society

When discussing 5G with governments or regulatory clients who are either confused by what 5G is, or are being ‘drawn in’ by the hype, I challenge them to look at societal and welfare issues in their specific economy and consider how 5G could provide a benefit.

Whilst consumers could benefit from real-time VR gaming, or from major stadium VR events, it might be the case that the specific national economy is just not supporting those activities now and so would not have any real economic benefit from their usage. 

On the other hand, being able to carry out pioneering surgery remotely by a surgeon located halfway around the world, instead of having to medivac the patient to another country, saves on costs and provides substantial benefits to the patients and family.  This is one of the real-world benefits that very low latency and high upload speeds on 5G can deliver.

So much of the history of the evolution of mobile networks has been driven by the network and handset vendors, and their efforts to attract governments and consumers with faster, access everywhere broadband.  In my opinion, 5G should be looked at from the point of view of local benefit cases where governments consider the benefits of using 5G to tackle local issues with:

• Smart energy management;
• Pollution and environmental controls;
• Management of scarce resources;
• Health care, and
• Transportation

Do not adopt a ‘me-too’ strategy

Governments have historically gleaned significant income from the sale of spectrum, often by auctioning to the highest bidder. Governments would be better to look at 5G and ask questions around what welfare benefits it could deliver and therefore overall, what savings it could make? How could it better control/manage scarce resources and how could it improve the welfare of the citizens? 

So, before setting off on a ‘me-too’ strategy and trying to emulate what is being delivered in often bigger and richer economies, governments should firstly question what can 5G deliver to improve the situation across the board in their own jurisdictions.

This article is the first of a mini-series in which Werry Consulting will explore issues being faced by governments, networks and regulators, and challenge some of the current thinking on 5G.  Looking past some of the hype, we see innovative services being tested and trialled, for example in the United Kingdom.  We also see regulators taking different approaches to how 5G networks are being licensed, for example with over 80 local networks (campus networks) licensed in Germany, or in novel approaches to spectrum allocation, for example in Japan.

Over the series of articles, we will explore our concern that if governments and regulators behave as they have done for previous generations of mobile technology it will just result in more of the same, thereby fundamentally losing out on some potentially significant benefits.  We are not out to state that 5G is a bad thing, far from it.  What we are saying is that from the start there needs to be a clear idea of how benefits can be delivered for the economy.  In the majority of cases, services will adequately be supported by variants of 4G. So let the breakthroughs of 5G be targeted on providing services that only 5G can deliver.

Kevin Werry is Director of Werry Consulting and is a telecoms engineer with over 30 years’ experience in the telecoms industry and has worked with governments, regulators and operators across the world on implementing regulatory, wholesale and access frameworks.  Kevin has also worked within regulatory authorities as well as through consultancy engagements.

Werry Consulting are independent telecommunications consultants providing operational, regulatory, and technical consultancy to the telecoms and media sector.  Werry Consulting delivers experience-based advice to operators and regulators seeking to implement remedies to regulatory issues.  In addition, Werry Consulting provides strategy and due diligence reviews on behalf of investors, operators and regulators and builds on its wide industry experience in order to provide credible, experience-based, expert witness support for litigation and arbitration.

Kevin can be contacted at kevin@werryconsulting.com.  More information on Werry Consulting Services can be found at www.werryconsulting.com.

Image credit: Christoph Scholz (flickr)