The next era of 5G: Austin
Source: Axios
On Tuesday, May 10th, Axios hosted an Expert Voices roundtable discussion in Austin, featuring leaders in local business, technology, education and government who examined the next era of 5G, from developments in the innovation pipeline to applications across industries. Axios’ business reporter Hope King and technology reporter Margaret McGill led the conversation.
Chelsea Collier, founder of Digi.City, spoke to the important role 5G will play in addressing the digital divide. “The digital divide of course is an urgent issue…I think again if we communicate effectively the role of 5G, what it can deliver, that it can help to increase computing at the edge and what that means for the average citizen while also addressing the case of connectivity issues, I think we’ll get closer, but it’s still this very tough issue.”
Thomas Alomes, director of Sports Innovation Texas, explained how 5G technology is bringing innovation to the operations of the sports industry. “We now have the technology through things like 5G and now we have the desire as an industry to implement these things like digital ticketing, cashless, advanced applications of augmented reality…so that’s where 5G is really exciting for what it unlocks.”
smartDigs Austin principal Sharad Mudhol expressed excitement about the potential for 5G to integrate technologies like augmented reality into home and building construction job sites. “Imagining the house in 3D on the job side, that’s going to be so revolutionary… there’s a lot of things that are hyped, but this one is actually going to help us, and then now imagine just not in a single family residential home, imagine a 50-story high rise that we’re building in Austin and getting everything lined up in the AR and VR, it’s going to be so transformative when we get there.”
Robert Spalding, CEO of SEMPRE, maintained that the connection between 5G and national security is largely an issue of economic opportunity and investing in our national infrastructure. “Unfortunately, we tend to think about what China is doing, not what we should be doing. All of these applications are wonderful, but ultimately they need infrastructure to enable them. And today when infrastructure is built it’s single tenant single use, and that’s a problem…so what 5G enables is this ability to have multi-tenant multi-use in infrastructure that gets built.”