At the beginning of the month, I had the opportunity to be at Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen seeing, among others, the progress the company has made in terms of 5G and why today it is said that its technology is about 2 years ahead of its main competitors.

It may interest you: 10 things you did not know about Huawei

The appeal of 5G lies in 2 fundamental factors: the exponential increase in data transmission speed and the low latency offered by the service.

Watch speed full demo video at kissanime

In the UK, where the 3 large mobile operators have already launched their 5G networks (all use Huawei technology), users are reporting speeds close to 1000 Mbps (the average mobile connection in Colombia is 4 Mbps, for you to compare ), although once its use is maximized, this value is expected to drop to less than half. In any case, the jump is quantum and the change in speed is immense.

With today’s 4G networks, the average latency is 50 milliseconds. In the 5G networks that Huawei has already implemented in China this time drops to 1 millisecond. One! Compare that to the time it takes for the human brain to process an image that the eye catches: 10 milliseconds. It is one tenth.

The autonomous cars

And this is the reason why 5G networks are vital for the massification of autonomous vehicles (I say vehicles because not just cars). Once the 5G data transmission infrastructure is built, much of the load that today must be done on site and that leads to each vehicle requiring super-powerful computers, can be transferred to the cloud. To a specialized data center. Remember that an autonomous car is not a robot per se. All the autonomous cars of a brand share the knowledge that one of them obtains through its sensors.

Think about this scenario. On the same road, there are 3 autonomous cars of the same brand, connected to the central server of the company. The first one records an accident and slows down to avoid colliding with the vehicles involved. He braked because the sensor, which caught the vehicles stopping in front of him, sent the instruction to the brakes and notified his server of the news. The server, in less than 2 milliseconds, has received the information and has informed the other 2 cars that are going further back, alerting them to the situation, slowing them down little by little so that they do not collide ”. It is the same case of online gaming platforms, such as Stadia, which will allow any device (computer, tablet, smartphone, or smart TV) to be used to play the most demanding games because the information is processed directly in the data center of Google.

In the case of autonomous cars, 5G technology will reduce the local processing load and pass it to the central servers of the companies, digitally interconnecting what happens on the roads with cars, lowering costs, reducing the weight and size of vehicles. local computers and taking full advantage of the capabilities of data centers and the speed of telecommunications to create a digital highway that runs on the physical highway.