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Road to 5G: What it Means

November 26, 2019 3 min read
With Huawei going to lengths to make sure it's not left out of Germany's conversation: What does 5G actually mean for customers and eCommerce Businesses? Find out right here.
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Huawei made the headlines recently with its decision to take out a full-page advert in the Handelsblatt newspaper to mark the beginning of the German Party Congress.

In the advert, it put forward its case for why it shouldn’t be excluded from Germany’s drive to implementing 5G.

But for those standing on the periphery of technology, 5G would seem like a pretty abstract innovation. Even so, we’re well on our way to seeing it come into use sooner than you think.

So what exactly is 5G? And what does its introduction mean for us as eCommerce businesses and consumers? Let’s take a look.

What is 5G?

The name itself is actually shorthand for the ‘5th Generation’ of mobile internet, and what it promises is startling, to say the least.

While figures range on its performance; compared to its earlier counterparts – 3 and 4G – 5G provides 5 times the bandwidth (1 gigabyte per second) compared to earlier iterations (4G = 200 megabytes per second).

Along with better bandwidth, it offers a massive increase to speed (2-400Mbps compared to 4G’s 25) while having dramatically low latency.

What this all means is that data congestion will cease to be an issue for those using 5G; allowing users to stream large quantities of data quickly and on a large scale.

As a result, countries across the world are in a race to get set up with 5G:

“Mass market adoption is generally expected around 2022 – with those pushing hardest being South Korea, China, Japan, and the US, but most developed countries will be close behind.” According to Professor William Webb, Weightless SIG’s CEO.

So, with this in mind, what does it all mean for businesses and their customers?

eCommerce Like Never Before With 5G

With 5G being such a big step up in performance, it doesn’t take much theorizing to see just how it would impact on the eCommerce world.

5G’s wider accessibility would allow users to get plugged into the online marketplace easily. Which is made even more exciting given the rapid desire by governments in S.Korea, China and the United States to put it to use.

Better performance means that there are plenty of innovative tools that businesses can put to work in selling their products online.

Innovations for online retail like Augmented and Virtual Reality can become more readily accessible for eCommerce businesses.

Greater access to 5G would mean that solutions like VR/AR could be more readily implemented by eCommerce businesses, which would solve other issues that persist with online retail, like finding correct sizes in clothing and fashion.

To take a more long-term look at the potential for 5G, it allows for broader concepts like smart cities, the Internet of Things (IoT) a closer proposition for everyday users.

Specifically, this means eCommerce has the potential of filtering into far more of our daily lives than just on desktop and mobile, which is where it’s relegated to for right now.

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