Stuck in Concepts: 5G..

I keep seeing continued reports of autonomous driving and remote surgery as demos, proofs of concept, for the use and benefits of 5G across the telecoms space. While all well and good to show concepts, we’ve been seeing the same demos for decades now.

However, are telecoms just replicating what is jokingly called CES, the Concept Electronic Show?

It’s that all of these companies are bad at designing actual products. It is highly instructive that the one company best known for shipping genuinely exciting, groundbreaking products never shows concept designs

Source: DaringFireball

As 5G slowly rolls out, and we receive further promises of these proposed demonstrations, what is the endgame here? In many ways, should the telecoms providers even be involved in these demos?

As the companies on top of the Internet continue to demonstrate better versions of calling than what the telecoms providers themselves - see this fantastic system demonstrated (as a proof of concept - but actively being used by their staff internally, not just ‘made for a demo’) - perhaps the telecoms providers should spend their time on their skills: providing the network, and then focusing on what customers want from those networks (consistency, and that feeling of speed).

More from Daring Fireball:

Concepts allow designers to ignore real-world constraints: engineering, pricing, manufacturing, legal regulations, sometimes even physics. But dealing with real-world constraints is the hard work of true design.

Are these constraints truly understood within telecoms, such that an anutonomous car that depended on 5G mean (unless there’s blanket global coverage, does the car just grind to a halt when it loses the network?)

And if they were understood, would they spend their time focusing on innovating on what used to be their bread and butter to transition to voice communications, and not just telephony, instead of . Via Dean Bubley on LinkedIn:

Telcos consistently assume that "voice" means the same as "telephony", since they only do the latter. Telephony is just one voice application of hundreds - and a 140yr-old clunky and poorly-optimised one at that. This is why telcos don't have a foothold in voice assistants, critical comms, gaming voice, podcasts and so on - and get out-competed by cloud players for UCaaS and cPaaS.

The key piece I’m highlighting is: much time (and money) has been spent by Telecoms companies on getting into media, etc. How about if that budget was invested in their core competencies on the network and expanding on their telephony offerings? Perhaps that’s the future that brings growth that is craved in the industry instead of remote surgery. And speaking of which, this is the future of surgery with augmented reality.