From left: Ministry of Information, Communications and Technology Cabinet Secretary Joe Mucheru, Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa and Communications Authority of Kenya acting Director-General Mercy Wanjau during Safaricom’s launch of 5G technology trials for its customers on Friday.
| Diana Ngila | Nation Media GroupTechnology
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Kenya now has 5G; this is what it can do for you
What you need to know:
- The age of Internet of Things is here, and work is going to change in ways that are unimaginable.
- Smart home appliances will change how people live and communicate, and spur innovations.
The super connectivity of 5G technology has finally graced Kenya’s mobile network through Safaricom and, though still in its infancy, its potential will be widely experienced in the next few years, when affordable 5G smartphones are expected to be readily available.
But now that it is here, just what can 5G do for Kenya, where 75 per cent of the population is aged 35 years and below, according to the 2019 national census?
For the millions of confirmed tech-savvy Kenyans who possess a Safaricom SIM card, huge expectations in seamless connectivity lie ahead, across different aspects of daily life.
And as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to catalyse digital transformation across the globe, 5G could be the anchor technology that powers a seismic drift towards a mass adoption of other frontier technologies across various professions.
Smart living
Right now the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) is still an unexplored field. But with 5G, in the next few years you will be able to convert your home into a smart living ecosystem where everything is automated and connected to the 5G internet and controlled from your smartphone.
From wall clocks, lights, fridges, cookers, hot water heaters, iron boxes, televisions, sub-woofers, cameras, windows, doors, chandeliers, and beds to your car and entry gate, all these can be managed from a mobile app.
It is not science fiction. All these devices can be programmed to communicate with each other and send you real-time notifications about what is happening to each of them, and follow your commands — only your commands as biometrics and facial recognition are already reshaping device security with 5G.
This home automation will be a reality, and Kenyans will get more innovative to save time, enhance home security, live healthier and create a virtual social order in their homes.
Cases of misplacing items in the house, devices malfunctioning without prior warning or disease-causing organisms entering your living room without your knowledge could soon be history.
A door app that monitors entry and exit of family members will provide key information if some items disappear from the house or when a visitor arrives, while mattresses will be automated to send notifications when another person apart from your spouse lies on it.
This is already happening, with smart devices taking the height and physical countenance of the visitor and sending it to house’s owner in developed countries. No more cheating? You can now say that.
Work
Employed Kenyans have now adapted to the new norm of working from home, and 5G’s fast connectivity will help employers make that permanent and save millions of cash in expenses used to finance the traditional style of working from the office. This will in turn help startups, SMEs and big corporates boost their profit margins as production speeds are reduced quality improved.
Work and employee monitoring, the extent to which deadlines and targets have been met will be much easier to report. Expect local developers to create apps and software to end the voluminous paperwork seen in professions such as law, insurance, banking, conveyancing, education and health.
With 5G, the detection of counterfeit goods becomes even more easier and less costly. This would boost the credibility of most manufacturing plants while helping the Kenya Bureau of Standards instill product discipline for processing companies.
A recent ABI Research study showed that 5G technology can decrease production times of emerging technologies 10 times more than 4G connections.
Many experts in the industry see 5G connectivity as the major pillar in the mass adoption of all other emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data analytics, blockchain, 3D printing, VR technology, IoT and threat intelligence in making businesses more profitable.
With 5G, businesses will be able to create multiple virtual networks with just one physical system, in what techies call network slicing, which provides an end-to-end virtual system encompassing not only networking but computing and storage functions as well.
This is the technology that could enable cashless payments for huge transactions, forever erasing the current three-day wait for cheque or salary processing. Going cashless would also mean reduced traffic and more order in Kenya's chaotic matatu industry.
Journalism
5G could give Kenyan TV news producers and editors in the newsroom faster access to live reporting from the field. Contrary to the current situation where verified breaking news takes about 10 minutes to appear on TV screens or news websites, 5G can enable a real-time reportage of current issues.
In such a case, using their smartphones, journalists can login to a 5G-enabled news management software and break the news on websites, TV and social media simultaneously. Where a 5G ultra wideband uplink exists, journalists can send extremely heavy video files and photos, usually of the 8K resolution, to news desks within seconds.
A more futuristic use of 5G in the newsroom could be the use of holograms and Augmented Reality in explaining complex segments of a news feature for TV audiences.
There is no doubt that 5G will make Virtual Reality gears more affordable and that could change news consumption as we know it, where Kenyans could purchase the devices to experience news delivery in an immersive environment that comes with higher comprehension of technical and highly analytical stories.
And 5G, through scanning of how different TV channels or news websites transmit news, will be a key tool in the fight against fake news emanating from fake videos, photos, articles and bylines.
Entertainment
5G comes with an extremely low latency. That means the delay in transmitting heavy files is minimal compared to 4G, and that will usher in a new era of mobile video consumption.
According to IHS Markit’s 5G Is Here: Early Insights From Our Experts report, video consumption in the world will hit an all time high of 70 per cent of all online content in 2022.
A lot of Kenyans are used to consuming movies, comedy, documentaries and local and international soaps on YouTube, Netflix and Showmax, and the quality of content is likely to improve. Expect new services such as group watching of a new movie in real time and screen-sharing.
Also, expect more local video content, and the creation of intelligent troubleshooting guides featuring video walk-throughs for technical problems in your home.
For those who love to download heavy movies to watch later, they will be able to do so faster, with Safaricom promising to offer a downlink speed of 1,000 Megabits per second (Mbps).
With more video content, cloud storage will be handy for entertainment lovers, and that is likely to make cloud computing services more affordable as different vendors compete to capture the market.
