IoT technologies will provide the insurance industry with new tools such continuous monitoring with sensors for sensitive food and drug shipments, wearables for machinery users and many other devices that monitor operations, prevent fraud prevention, and improve claims management and customer engagement. This can include “pay-as-you-go” or “pay-as-you-live” insurance products that are enabled by IoT.
Most of the recent hype about 5G has been about pure speed. The less obvious answer is that these higher speeds will enable completely new applications. 4G finally enabled the smartphone and true Internet access. The device was no longer a “phone” it morphed into a personal platform for connected applications. 5G makes the final step (at least so far …) – the devices are no longer phones – smart or otherwise. They may be tightly coupled to people, such as VR/AR glasses, connected pacemakers, or wearable sports trackers, but more often they are not, such as thermostats, refrigerators, coffee pots, drones, electric meters, autonomous cars, traffic lights, and robots. And being the Internet of Things all of these devices are incessantly chatting with each other.
Thanks to bigger roll-outs of 5G and the first edge compute use cases over the coming years, there will be an even bigger role for fiber going forward. According to Clearfield CEO Kevin Morgan. He says that the need for a quality fiber-optic connection can get overlooked in 5G discussions but looking at forecasts on the small cells that will enable 5G, an enormous amount of fiber will be required.
Healthcare IT networks designed today, which must be ready to integrate new applications in the future, can be based on a high-bandwidth digital IP backbone. When cabling a healthcare facility to comply with TIA-1179-A, a system designer has the option to use centralized optical fiber cabling as an alternative to cross connects in a telecom room. This method allows for the reduction of cables in the horizontal space.
Optoscribe and Sumitomo Electric Industries have partnered with the University of L’Aquila, Italy, to establish the first multi-core fiber (MCF) testbed for space-division multiplexed (SDM) communications in a real-world field environment. The collaborators expect the MCF testbed will host R&D activities related to SDM transmission over MCFs for optical communications. The testbed will see use for device testing, transmission experiments, and software-defined networking research. It also will be part of an ongoing 5G trial; L’Aquila is one of five Italian sites selected for trialing 5G technologies.
A growing number of broadband access network operators are moving to XGS-PON as they look to upgrade their GPON FTTP networks. Champion ONE now offers XGS-PON optical transceivers for optical line terminal (OLT) and optical network unit (ONU) applications for network operators moving to 10G PON in the fiber to the premises (FTTP) networks. The optical modules conform to ITU-T G.987.2 and G.9807.2 standards.
Record shipments of 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) router ports in the first quarter of this year drove service provider core router market growth of 7% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2019, says Dell’Oro Group. Network operators are benefiting from lower prices of 100GbE products to add capacity to their backbone and metro networks—the volume of 100GbE port shipments almost doubled year-over-year.
We know testing conditions are not always ideal, with many environments experiencing moisture, vibrations, or noise. All of these conditions can become a factor in your test results. The M12 connector is designed for rugged environments, and the new M12X version can support speeds up to 10 Gigabits per second (10GBASE-T). See how you can certify the performance of these connections and avoid downtime.
The building of the future is interconnected, communicates with the people inside of it and creates positive emotions. It’s safe and efficient and makes a contribution to environmental protection, for example by improving air quality. This environmental aspect harbors tremendous potential, especially in megacities. The building of the future is smart and capable of communicating with outside systems, including the power grid. And it accommodates the needs of its users. This happens automatically, to a certain extent, but users also have the option to adjust the settings to suit their own preferences.
Is 5G a requirement for a smart city? No. But will 5G serve as a major enabler for smart cities? Yes, particularly in terms of supporting up to a million connected devices per square kilometer, a major enhancement as compared to LTE. But this is somewhat paradoxical given the realities of what we’re seeing on the ground in terms of smart city investments. Limited pilot projects have proven very difficult to scale. So if there were hundreds of thousands of sensors blanketing an urban core in service of a smart city project, 5G would be the way to go, but, for the most part, that’s not the case anywhere.
