What will the future of 5G bring? - BBC Click

[Music] this week we're talking 5g the latest mobile network tech starring robot hands robot feet and a robo worm [Music] welcome to Bournemouth on the south coast of the United Kingdom famous for sandy beaches seaside amusements and having the worst 4g mobile reception in the UK well there's some good news 5g the next generation of mobile network is coming but it's not just about your phone 5g promises to enable self-driving cars smart cities and the whole Internet of Things as every machine starts talking to every other machine this week the first stage of bidding to become a 5g operator in the UK ended with EE 302 and Vodafone splashing out more than 1.3 billion pounds for the privilege now to date no standards have been agreed but we do have a rough idea of what 5g should look like so let's get you 5g ready five things you need to know about 5g one yes 5g will be much much faster than 4G HD movies can be downloaded in seconds rather than minutes with speeds 10 to a hundred times faster than 4G to unlike 4G masts which broadcast in all directions 5g antennas will send concentrated beams directly to your device three 5g is all about super quick response times and that's crucial for things like self-driving cars which will use the tech to communicate with each other at high speeds for its a new wave 5g will use a part of the radio frequency spectrum that's never been used before meaning it will broadcast on shorter millimeter waves that means more data for all those devices but there is a problem these waves can't travel through buildings or even rain five the solution is new masts and lots of them but the good news is that they only need to be tiny these mini masts will need to be much closer together and they'll act like a relay team transmitting signals around buildings 5g projects are still being trialed and the kinks and the technology are still being worked out but Laura Ludington has been to see what is claimed to be the world's first public 5g testbed the trial taking place here in Bristol's Millenium Square aims to give the public an idea of what 5g could make possible this communal virtual reality experience shows streaming of high bandwidth content on many devices all at once all on one network with no time lag or dropout dancing in unison we played a game involving chasing moving stars these demos couldn't be in full 5g because current smartphones can't oblige but every other element is there with these 5g new radios throughout the area transmitting signal the team here anticipate 5g to be a network of networks combining the best elements of connectivity we have now with millimetre or extremely high frequency waves plus the potential to tap into Wi-Fi networks and life.i connections particularly when we're on the move imagine for instance that you are having Wi-Fi network or you are having empty network 4G network into your phone you are traveling on the train you go on to the tunnel nothing of this world and then in the tunnel restore life a network that we are demonstrating as future of connectivity here then actually your connection automatically without you realizing in a seamless way is going to switch from your 4G network on your 5g network to this lifeline network we've talked a lot on this program about the possibilities for smart homes connected transport and of course smart cities and 5g could provide the catalyst for more of them to actually come into play this prototype aims to display one way that 5g could be used within a smart city now what you can see on top of this cycle helmet is a 360 camera a Raspberry Pi which is doing the work and a battery pack right here the idea is someone's cycling throughout the city would be constantly picking up pictures and they would be fed through a 5g network so if there was any problem that could be found immediately and dealt with without delay and if we can rely on that low latency then it game-changing when it comes to robotic surgery a split second could mean the difference between life and death or it could be used to create realities that seem almost impossible like anyone being able to shoot a goal like Messi via 5g connected robot leg of course using 5g ultra-low latency technology I'm able to transmit action and reaction I'm able to transmit touch so for the first time we will be able to transmit engineering skills musical skills football skills medical skills and suddenly we will build an internet which will allow us to democratize labor the very same way as the internet has democratized knowledge and information for most of us though we just want better connection and the networks seem keen to manage our expectations beyond birth the average person on the street will see 5g as a way to to give them a much better smartphone experience it'll give them faster data connections lower latency but it's important to remember that we'll right at the start of the 5g journey and we need to look ahead over the next decade to understand what new applications beyond smartphones will start to appear as the technology matures and becomes more widespread South Korea the u.s. the UAE and China seem to be leading the way with commercial launches expected later this year but in the meantime smartphone manufacturers will be working on bringing us the 5g compatible devices that we need for whenever the time comes that was Lara in Bristol while here in Bournemouth 4G is somewhat underwhelming to say the least so we've been asking people what they think of the arrival of 5g apps there we don't know about in which case I say bring it on bring it to vomit first it doesn't light any fires for me I can see it being useful for me in about 10 years when I catch up with the rest of society I'm still I'm still still thinking about it 3G preaching so a bit of a mixed reception for 5 G's so far here nevertheless the local authority is aiming to make Bournemouth one of the first places globally to deploy 5g and become the first smart city technically smart town in the UK heading up the implementation of 5g is Ruth Spencer who took me on a tour to show me some of the new cabling and potential and 10i sites that will underpin what will be a radical new infrastructure for GE to fight she's gonna be a massive step change in infrastructure so for example in 4G what you would have had before is big mass that's quite a long distance apart covering a large area large area where is with 5g particularly in urban areas like this you'll need lots of small cells very close together that's a massive infrastructure challenge isn't it if you need lots and lots of mass to cover a city and I think what we're trying to do at the moment is understand how cost-effective it is going to be to deploy at this this kind of level it just sounds like a mercy if asked is it realistic it is a big undertaking but the potential that 5g is going to unlock is going to be completely transformative now the problem is the 5g signal is very fragile easily blocked by trees and buildings and that means that Ruth's team has had to produce really detailed surveys of where the end tonight need to be whenever you put a new building up it interferes with the 5g array of of signals that you've got so that's a problem yeah it's a challenge that definitely needs to be looked at so with the mapping and planning software that we've been developing we need to start considering how do we update those tools and how do we update the maps that we're looking at in order to plan those Network but it's the potential that may make the investment worth it as 5g will be the backbone of all those futuristic technologies that we've been long promised so 5g isn't necessarily about getting a better signal on your phone or faster data speeds on your phone it's about machine-to-machine communication in machines in advanced manufacturing in robotics so it becomes much more about the opportunity 5g will bring around productivity as well as the ability to deliver services for 5g to work serious investment and new infrastructure is needed so could it be that some cities will be flush with transformative technology while other places will be left behind I get the sense we might be about to see the beginnings of a new digital divide where some areas have 5g and some areas don't for example rural areas where you know there's a small population so it just might not be worth it but does that mean they miss out whilst five years likely to be rolled out a millimeter wave level in cities there's still the opportunity for rural areas to really benefit from 5g in other areas like farming connected autonomous tractors for example and you would need some 5g infrastructure to support that and but you would need something different in the inner city it's about understanding what's needed for users in which locations and what's needed for infrastructure in which locations we're talking about autonomous vehicles being able to take you anywhere yeah but if it turns out they need a 5g network and you roll into a city which doesn't have a 5g network what that mean for autonomous vehicle will it not be able to operate in that city so one of the areas that connects autonomous vehicles are looking at is where they will be deployed and what their use will be so for example in the early stages maybe you'd be looking at connected or Thomas vehicles for and across motorways for example for covering long distances with Freight or that that sort of thing and then that it would have whole hello and welcome to the week in tech it was the week that the Facebook scandal rumbled on the beleaguered social network has said that the data of up to eighty seven million people may have been improperly shared many more than previously disclosed it also revealed that most of Facebook's two billion users may have had their data scraped from profiles using now disabled malicious search techniques a gun attack on YouTube's headquarters in California left three people wounded reports in US media say that the female suspect was motivated by anger at her belief YouTube was filtering her videos and reducing the money she could make researchers at MIT have developed the new technology that allows people to use speech recognition without actually needing to speak it uses electrodes that scan the jaw and face the signals produced when the wearer thinks about verbalizing words so now you can look a bit daft in public instead of just sounding it an advert for the HTC u 11 smartphone featuring diver Tom Daley has caused a splash with authorities in the UK the ad in which the Olympian was shown taking selfies in a swimming pool has been banned after the advertising watchdog said that if customers used the phone in a similar fashion that likely damage it and finally in Russia the inaugural test flight of a postal delivery drone was more oMG than UPS after it was destroyed shortly after takeoff the $20,000 hexacopter which was adorned with Russia Post branding smashed unceremoniously into a wall in front of on Lucas over the last few weeks we've been looking a lot at how we might be working in the future on building sites in factories even in the doctor's surgery you know the story robots jobs us on the scrapheap repeat in the retail space Amazon is driving a lot of the changes and for them automating the picking process is as critical as automating the delivery process now every year they hold the Amazon robotics challenge and this year is won by a team from Brisbane in Australia so Nick quick went to meet the brains behind the box 16 teams from around the globe went bot - bot in Japan the goal to build a custom droid that can identify common objects pick them up and sort them out in record time scooping the 80 thousand dollar grand prize were these guys from the Australian Centre for robotic vision of Queensland University of Technology and when I got an invite for a private tour of their lab I expected the customary conservative welcome from the usual studious scholars okay let's go and feed after you high befitting that is an award-winning robot should have his own Bob Butler all of these robots require some degree of specialist knowledge so if a particular specialist isn't there on the day it's really hard to actually get the robot to operate where is pepper anyone can pull pepper out and then start running the robot if you want to see them in action select an item on my screen let's go for the marbles hey Hartman please fetch the marbles a robot is telling another robot how to be a robot Cartman has three axes of movement and works like an arcade kraid claw but he's got two hands a pincer and the suction grip he chooses which one to use depending on what item he needs to pick there's a lot of different ideas that we brainstormed and that we prototyped and re-engineered and finally this is what we came up with and this is the one that actually won the challenge huh and not very compact is it Cartman sees what he's doing via a debt sensing camera which helps them visualize 3d models of objects so you can see that the sponges are sticking out further than the marbles for example look that information the robot then decides what is the object that I want to pick and where do I pick that object he's able to identify laird products add new ones to his Dussehra day.i is critical actually in the Amazon case he got so many new objects every day that he actually cannot have just a library of all possible objects ever so your vendor puts a new sticker on on an object or the box is changed shape and so it becomes a new object and you need to train a system to understand this is a new object and this is how I would pick it up the team now are looking beyond warehouse walls it's not about picking items from a shelf but from a branch q Harvey the pepper pecking harvest are we grow a lot of catechins in Queensland we grow over 80 percent of Australia's catechins and we export a lot of that as well in Australia we have a big agricultural industry and one of the things that we're trying to improve is automating that technology improving the performance and efficiencies he's also got two arms and one and a special camera to see what's in front of him he knows when a fruit is ripe and uses an electric saw to cut the peppers stem or as its lured to all the people in this room it's peduncle they're also uses a state-of-the-art deep learning system to detect what's called a peduncle is particularly hard because it's green on green through the deep learning system there's a background neural network a deep neural network and what you get out of that is a is activations and we can visualize this using a heat map and what that gives us an area of interest where it thinks the peduncle is once you spotted the pepper law getting around it's obstructing leaves can be a fiddly business so this is a new camera system it actually comprises of nine different camera lenses at different depths to give the impression of a human looking around leaves is powered by nine individual raspberry PI's and is 3d printed so it's fairly cheap to prototype right now Harvey's disapprove of concept the team haven't analyzed how commercially viable a pot like him could be in the wild but his designers say he could reduce crop waste by helping farmers harvest more at peak times he's able to maneuver between crop rows and work for eight hours straight without tea breaks the other value we see in in Harvey is actually not just harvesting the fruit but being a full crop management system so what this allows it to do is detect fruit detect the grade of the fruit and also inform the growler how do I what what's on his plant right at at real-time this can then tell the grower where to send it actually make contracts and sell sell these fruit before it's even harvested thanks very much pepper I have to say it's been a lovely tour but I think it's time for me to go so we should say goodbye here namaste brilliant that was Nick in Brisbane now one of the big questions that comes out of more and more automation of jobs is of course what it means for us will we all be out of work or will a new raft of jobs be created well here's what our panel of academic experts predicts [Music] so I don't see anything to suggest that there's going to be mass unemployment over the fourth coming decades due to technology there's no reason to believe that the quantity of jobs is going to be the problem what is a big problem I believe is some workers are going to suffer from downgrading as they lose their jobs and we need to find solutions for that firstly people are going to have the need to retrain we traditionally have this idea that you go to university maybe three years and by your mid-20s you're sorted and you do some sort of job for the rest of your life I think we're going to be continually we skilling retraining so we're going to need to be prepared for that so universities are gonna have to play a role in training not just the kids 18 to 22 but I think throughout your career as we grow older we're going to be working for much longer what does that mean for education and training across sectors from schools to workplace training and are our systems really preparing people for a workplace where there will be automation and there will be artificially intelligent systems and do we understand how to improve ourselves as learners these are going to be vital skills in the workplace of the future so let's use AI to help us be smarter ourselves and I certainly think that's much preferable to worrying about whether artificial intelligence is going to replace us I mean who wants to be stuck in the same job for the rest of their life I think that's something that we should really embrace the chance to do new things [Music] we need to move away from a system that relies on students memorizing information because that's what we have computers to do very very effectively but what we need to move more towards is a curriculum that encourages activities such as collaborative problem-solving [Music] but we need to realize that re-skilling is not going to be the solution to everything the best solution I know goes to wage insurance and that is being implied the United States for workers that lose out to import competition so if you can show that your job was lost due to globalization the government would give you assurance that you're not going to earn less than this amount if you find a new job we should apply that to technology as well you might say well should a I pay tax if it's working and taking somebody else's jobs I don't think the AI should be but I think we should perhaps put a tax on data because this is what is being exploited and what I don't think people realize is that they're giving up a huge amount of data just for free and ownership of that data is going to lead really to ownership of work and sometimes data is the new oil so you know who owns the oil rigs is going to have the power at this game and that does serve as a very effective mode for those companies against new entrants maybe this is something we want to think about as a society in our industrial policy maybe we want to think about ways that we can continue to support innovation even where so much of the value in an industry is trapped in data sets owned by the big tech players within European Research Council's there's quite an extensive discussion about trying to push for what they call Responsible innovation encourage engineers and scientists to think more responsibly about the processes of automation to sort of engage with us users not just as consumers but as workers a good future of work is one in which people and machines work together and that's it from us in Bournemouth don't forget that we live on Facebook and on Twitter as BBC click and this place might be the worst in the country for 4G but I have to say it's one of the best for fish and chips so that's where we're going now see ya [Music]

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 552,877

Rating: 4.1556082 out of 5

Keywords: click;, bbc, 5G, 4G, mobile phones, bournemouth, amazon, vegetables, technology

Id: 5hfZxsGcWB4

Length: 24min 28sec (1468 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 13 2018