Sustainability Boost from 5G Gives Businesses a Competitive Edge, Qualcomm Finds

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The many uses of 5G can be leveraged to improve businesses’ bottom lines as well as their ecological footprint, according to technology manufacturer Qualcomm.

5G is the newest mobile network, with speeds, connectivity, and reliability far exceeding that of previous generations.

It is expected to increase the competitiveness of businesses by increasing efficiency, productivity, and profit margins, up the quality of products or services offered, enhance reputation, and boost customer and partner satisfaction.

Discussing the specifics, Qualcomm cited:

• “Smart living” technology, which reduces the need to travel by allowing more to be done at home.
• Work-at-home arrangements, which save businesses money on office space.
• Telehealth appointments, which save both doctors and patients time and money.
• Smart transport such as bike and scooter sharing.
• Smart grids, which detect fluctuations in demand and signal power plants to ramp up or down accordingly to avoid blackouts during peak demand and energy waste during lulls.
• Automation of building lighting, heating, and cooling for energy and cost savings.
• Manufacturing responsiveness, accuracy and precision in automated movement for synchronization and control.

5G also makes data processing more efficient by:

• Leveraging simplification of signaling functions of wireless communications such as mobility, handover, and location management, to reduce overall traffic.
• Applying separate energy efficiency improvement mechanisms adapted to different traffic profiles, patterns, network and deployment scenarios.
• Enabling energy savings operations such as “switch off” or “sleep” mode of redundant network nodes with no or low data traffic load.
• Dynamic management of energy resources depending on types of traffic, network functions, components and user status.
• Synchronizing and coordinating the energy savings operations in different network nodes of 5G infrastructure (e.g., base stations, backhaul networks, core network, backbone).
• Beamforming, which effectively reduces interferences and focuses the energy on the direction the user is present.
• Device-to-device communication, which alleviates the necessity of involving base stations by offloading onto direct links.
• Mobile infrastructure sharing.

Qualcomm projected that 5G will create 300,000 green jobs by 2030, save 410 billion gallons of water per year, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 370 million tons by 2025 — equivalent to taking 81 million passenger vehicles off U.S. roads for one year.