5G Whizz - BBC Click

[Music] this week it's five gee whiz with superfast connections connected cows and also the end of the world [Music] whenever you're out and about your mobile phone communicates with the rest of the world through these calls messages and data is sent from masks like this to hundreds of phones within a few kilometers and each of those phones send calls and data back again it's a lot of work for one mass to do and it kind of explains why if there are too many phones in any one area things start to slow down but it won't always be like this our next mobile network will be the fifth generation called 5g and it will be very different to what's come before 1g was about the analog phone allowing us to make calls to one another 2g allowed us to do things like send SMS text messages and do voice recording 3G was about the promise of the smartphone allowing us to access digital broadband services and 4G which is what we've had since 2009 allowed us to do all of those first three things but just faster 5g is like going from Earth to Mars it's not a faster world it's a different world it's going to be a world that's going to be connected in which machines will be talking to each other and talking to you [Music] and to achieve that we're gonna have lots and lots of antennae everywhere lampposts buildings you name it it's gonna have an antenna on it and that's because there are billions and billions of new devices waiting to be connected that will communicate with each other work with each other and make our lives easier in ways that we can't yet imagine TV off lights off TV off lights off it will allow you to control your energy consumption in your smart home it will allow your fridge to decide when to order groceries for you and have them delivered by a self-driving truck it will allow your dishwasher to decide when it needs to wash dishes your laundry machine when it decides to wash clothes so right now we have to instruct our machines but in a 5g world our machines might decide to communicate directly to us or with each other [Music] the machines will start communicating simply to regulate the flow of human activity your car is going to be connecting and thinking and interacting and communicating with every other sensor that happens as its walking down the street that passes a building as it passes somebody on a bicycle information from a traffic light three blocks down and you can't even see yet it's going to be completely seamless 5g will enable all these devices to have superfast data connections but we also need them to be stable connections as one device hops rapidly between all of these antennae how rapidly one maybe this row this is how well 5g antenna can follow improving targets there's an antenna but I'm the target I'm making a live video call to the computer track site which is actually really hard to do when you're moving at speed at a hundred and forty miles an hour each antenna can only send stuff to my special 5g hot spot in the car for about four seconds and so here each one has to form a beam which targets the car exactly and then hands over the service seamlessly to the next antenna all without interrupting the video stream the kind of technology that blue wireless is testing here will eventually enable high-speed trains to stay connected to the 5g network and provides superfast internet to their passengers to cover just this small area they're using 11 and 10 I here so if you want to blanket the whole UK with 5g you are gonna need a huge number of the things I mean this is a massive infrastructure rollout and the scale of all this is something being grappled with around the world in the u.s. Verizon has stepped up its trials in US cities albeit only over small areas speeds when it works are impressive although the trials are said to have had some teething problems cities in South Korea and China could well get the first meaningful services but what about if you're not in a city well back in the UK Jen copes take has been looking at what 5g might mean for rural areas in this idyllic patch of British countryside the birds are cheerfully singing and the cows are peacefully grazing but look closer and you will see there is something very different about these cows linking them to a unique experiment this dairy farm in Somerset is one of the first test beds for five G in the UK the cows are wearing sensors and all the data is being sent to the cloud and then back to the farmer who can make decisions based on this data almost every task on this farm can be automated these cows are queuing up patiently to be robotically milked this system allows the cow to choose how many times a day and at what time it wants to be milked the robot picks up on how much milk is coming from each of the cows udders and can control the sensitivity of the milking as well the cows here come and go as they please with little human interaction in their movements so one of these cows is just taking itself for a massage the feeding system is also done by machine and that's not all there's even a robot that scrapes up excrement putting it into these channels so it can quietly operate around the cows so it's not to disturb them Duncan Forbes runs the farm he's been working with Cisco on this project which is part of the UK's 5g rural first strategy the farm is chosen to demonstrate how 5g would help bring together the many different points of data across a herd of cows low latency and the ability to cover large distances with 5g means the cows can be monitored in real-time even if they are grazing in the field what sensors is she went can we see any of them they're on on the on the collar there's a little black square so that's one of the sensors and it's an activity monitor like a wearable that you'd wear like a what but the sort of thing it does is tells you when the cow is eating because it's got an intimate er so when our heads down it says okay she's got the green one transponder underneath her chin yeah and that's the one that controls the gates and so on in inside the building it's the electronic identity the third one is just inside her ear this little white button on the top of your ears holding the sensor so these guys have got more senses than you would necessarily have on an ordinary head because because we're trying them out we're testing them and we're checking out their connectivity here we're on a dairy farm and we're using the technology to help us with our animals but we're also going to have sensors around the fields telling us what the soil moisture is what the temperature of the soil is measuring the grass growth using satellites or hyperspectral imaging to measure how much grass we've got but also saying well maybe we don't need to use quite so much fertilizer 5g could revolutionize the farming industry connecting not just the UK farms but farms around the world so best practices can be compared and new techniques developed imagine if you will be able to cross-correlate data not only about how a cow is you know if it's well it's doing well if it's saved within the farm but across multiple farms across multiple areas imagine the efficiency that you could get if you were able also to be able to to manage the robots based on the best possible efficient way of doing it instead of just within a farm one of the biggest challenges for farming worldwide is the expected increase in world population where we're going to need to produce 70% more food than we were producing in 2009 by 2050 that's a massive increase and we've got to produce that food without additional impact on the environment preferably less a byproduct of bringing the 5g network outside of cities could be a revolution in connection speeds for the countryside a recent National Farmers Union survey showed only 17 percent of respondents reporting a reliable outdoor mobile signal and only 16 percent saying they had access to superfast broadband the farmers here hope to make a strong economic case for bringing connectivity to all parts of the country no matter how remote [Music] hello welcome to the week in tech a Drona's for the first time delivered a human organ surgeons in Maryland received a kidney to transplant from about three miles away and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new measures to improve users privacy as he laughed off his company's recent failures the strongest reputation on privacy right now updates include a friend's feed free of adverts and an encrypted messenger service meanwhile the UK government is preparing to plan new laws that all mean that all Internet connected devices need to have cyber security features built-in it proposes all devices sold in the UK come with unique passwords state how long they will receive security updates for and provide contact details to report funner abilities we may have seen AI generated faces before but how about entire AI generated people will meet this lot these photorealistic images by Japanese company datagrid come complete with faces hair and even outfits and finally if you haven't worked up an appetite for love grown meat then how about a spot of lab-grown Singapore startup she'll meet won't be scrimping on the shrimps after raising 4.6 million dollars to keep working on their cell face delights but are you ready to dive in to build a 5g Network you need a new type of telecoms gear you need many more base stations and they need to be smarter it is the Chinese tech company Huawei which makes the most advanced 5g gear this has been making Western governments nerve so I've come to find out who our quality it may look like Paris but this is Huawei's brand new campus in Shenzhen China a huge site where employees take a train between office buildings each of which is modeled on a different European city few journalists have visited this Disney World like projects very much the brainchild of run Jim Fay the company's founder he's been compared to the likes of Steve Jobs growing his company from a small workshop to a global tech giant now employing a hundred and eighty thousand people huge spending on research means while we claim there now around eighteen months ahead of any other 5g manufacturer and that includes not just getting faster and faster data speeds but also dealing with the problems that come from higher performance since this is so far with 5g wireless base stations tsunami you found genes Aparri surrounds one southern schwartz and how much bigger is that than a 4G base station I think in 4G base station normally it's an average of power it's a 300 watt 300 yes so it's three times larger so this chain is three times much power yeah so it gets water yeah it's much harder it's a common problem in technology as things get faster and they can see more power they get hotter and new cooling techniques need to be developed this is a lucrative cooling cycle in boiling in there it's bubble so if that is boiling and then coming here here they're learning how different designs and materials can change the speed and direction that heated air flows away from the components and here's an experiment to try and keep everything at a stable temperature by either applying heat or cold on-demand yeah that's hot Huawei is currently enjoying huge success with revenues last year in excess of a hundred billion dollars but this is also a company facing some serious issues the biggest is that the u.s. is coming for Hawaii in a big way look we have met the enemy and it is Huawei and it is China make no doubt about that you know right now loo Huawei through access to unlimited capital from the Chinese government the communist government all of this technology guess what its built-in for cyber spying for cyber espionage because that's what the Chinese do the problem is mr. Rijn was once a member of China's People's Liberation Army and that's raised suspicions about his links to the Chinese state and whether it and Huawei may have each other's backs America is adamant that Huawei is a pawn of the Chinese authorities in 2017 China passed the National Intelligence law which says that they've asked all Chinese companies and citizens must help the government to assist national intelligence efforts China claims this is part of an effort to safeguard its security but the fear is that if Huawei supplies any countries 5g network the Chinese could exploit it to help the government decide whether who are we should be in the UK's 5g Network the British security services have a special unit devoted to looking at the potential risks posed by Huawei it's overseen by dr. Ian Levy his job is to defend the UK against digital attacks he rarely gives interviews does while we pose more of a security risk than the other companies that supply the network infrastructure so I think what we're talking about is assuming the Chinese state wants to attack the UK telecoms networks our job is to try and make them work just as hard regardless about whether we use I've used while we kill not many people think the Chinese state would love to eavesdrop on other countries so if we let Huawei into 5g is that a real danger it's no more likely to have spying on communications in 5g than it is in 4G and anything that's critical whether it's government business even personal communications should be encrypted so you know all of the communications with your bank from your smartphone they're all encrypted because you don't want to trust the Wi-Fi and them and the telecoms network so if someone's listening on the line they'll just get a gobble they ain't got a gig yep and it's the same four critical stuff in business in government in control systems so according to GCHQ the threat of spying that we've heard so much about recently is overblown but there is another threat that they take very seriously in a future where our entire infrastructure our economy and our lives are run by computers talking to each other over a 5g network what would happen if someone shot if you think about it the future of warfare is not necessarily going to be using traditional armies in the way that we think of like with the Second World War the future of warfare is most likely going to be cyber so without firing a shot you could take a country out it's feared that the Chinese state could order Huawei to build secret backdoors in a 5g network these would leave the country vulnerable to a nationwide cyber attack and that could be catastrophic what we're about to show you is what experts have told us could happen if the UK's 5g network was attacked in the not-too-distant future the station's been shut for nearly an hour there's no information now there are there are no buses it's a nightmare [Music] that's how we were the trouble is Emma Levin's completely stops m1 and then for both backing up traffic police [Music] [Applause] sound so bad [Music] london's ground to a halt I've got police and ambulances stuck everywhere National Grid ago shutting down it's a total mess within the last hour BBC News has received hundreds of reports of widespread destruction little services called the cocktail just flashing I don't know what's going on to us it's just not driving many roads are blocked after a variety of self-driving systems deactivated the government is advising only to travel if absolutely necessary many shops have had to close due to being unable to take payments after the pay network went down the ultimate cause of the disruption has yet to be confirmed what's going on with the feed can we get them back up again can we get the feeds back on line we're also hearing that the smart grid has been overloaded and power supplies are being hit nationwide late everyone is to study all their appliances on and off randomly guys this is up National Grid are going to shut down Midlands and the north okay that's going a straightaway [Music] be on TV on this is a worst-case scenario but it is possible so would Huawei deliberately exposed their foreign customers to a Beijing back to tack the Chinese government explicit requires all Chinese companies to strictly follow local laws in every country they operate in the Chinese government has never and will never ask any Chinese enterprise to install backdoors I can say with certainty the quoi way has never installed backdoors in its equipment in the past and neither will we do such a thing in the future but the latest GCHQ backs report published in March found that there are security holes in highways equipment what was the overall result of your report into well we the security engineering at hawawa is unlike anything else it's engineering like is back in the year 2000 it's very very shoddy and leads to cyber security issues that we then need to manage long term do you have any evidence that the vulnerabilities that are in highways products will put there deliberately we do specifically say in there that we don't believe the things we're reporting on are the evidence of in Chinese state malfeasance so it's just bad engineers poor engineering poor engineering and bad software practices come in many guises including incorporating other companies code which itself isn't safe the reason you have to be so sure of what's in a build of software if it's called what all the components that go into the software it's precisely because these days a lot of that software is from third party so you need to be sure that when you buy your bit of equipment is running a bit of software that the person that's built that software for you has done their due diligence and they know precisely what they've put in and check that it is secure and the problem is however these vulnerabilities get into a network whether deliberately or because of bad engineering practices they can still be used to attack it why wait don't deny that there are problems with their security and they've told us that they'll release more detailed plans on how they'll address them early in the summer you don't need to spend a lot of time in China to see that the power is definitely shifting just a few decades ago Shenzhen was a fishing village today it's a megalopolis of around 13 million people home to China's tech revolution and transformed by China's ability to push things through without consultation with its citizens or its companies within the last year every single taxi and bus in this enormous city has gone electric this just one result of China's ability to push things through while the UK has been anguishing over hs2 thousands of miles of high-speed rail have been built linking shenzhen with other cities across the country so it's clear that Chinese are making massive strides in high-tech we're being told that in 10 years time we might regret letting Huawei in but conversely in 10 years time might we regret not riding the wave with them after all I think it's fair to say that China's time has come [Music] [Music]

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 110,523

Rating: 3.8700564 out of 5

Keywords: click;, bbc, huawei, 5g, Technology, Farming, Cows

Id: yCzNHi9TBCQ

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2019