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.
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.
Cabling Installation & Maintenance has published a compilation of “must see” cabling disaster photos, culled from social media at Reddit’s sub-communities for ‘Cablefail’ and ‘Cablegore.’ At a certain degree of cabling disaster, some job sites can make even the heartiest techs literally cry out for help.
The June issue of the FOA’s newsletter is now available online.
OFS has introduced its Fortex 2DT loose tube fiber-optic cable. OFS claims that the Fortex 2DT cable “is the industry’s first totally gel-free loose tube cable to feature 200 micron optical fiber in a fully-rated Telcordia GR-20 design.” The smaller and lighter weight cables can help to reduce installation costs in a number of ways including: allowing longer and faster installation with greater distances between handholes (underground installations); providing lighter loads on poles (for aerial installations); and enabling more cable on a reel, which can help to reduce shipping costs and enable fewer splice points.
On Wednesday, MTA, a cooperatively owned telco with about 30,000 customers, announced the construction of a new 100-terabit-per-second fiber-optic line between North Pole, near Fairbanks, and Alcan Border, where it will connect with Canadian carriers, and ultimately the Lower 48. MTA CEO Michael Burke says construction has already begun and is expected to be complete next year.
Whether it’s a group of students studying remote control robotics or professors going out into the field with students to take millimeter wave measurements, dozens of academic institutions all over the world are making meaningful contributions to 5G and the future of wireless. FierceWirelessTech decided to take a close look at the top 5G academic institutions. The result is a list of five (or six) top institutions that we think are especially worth keeping an eye on in coming months and years.
