5G is real. After turning on the new network on an experimental basis in Milan last December, Vodafone is launching the first commercial offer in five cities (in addition to the Lombard capital, Turin, Bologna, Rome and Naples): from next week (but already on presale today) customers will be able to buy 5G-enabled smartphones in stores and therefore choose to access the new services, with a faster and more secure network. “A revolution for citizens, institutions and businesses – he said the managing director of Vodafone Italia, Aldo Bisio, at a conference in Milan -. 5G will have a profound social and economic impact, enabling devices for the Internet of Things, robotics, the theme of smart cities, applications related to healthcare, sensors, which already in 2008 exceeded the world population and which according to estimates in 2025 will be more than 50 billion in the world, of which 600-700 million in Italy”.
The capacity of the network is practically infinite and waiting times are eliminated, from 30 milliseconds for 4G to 5 milliseconds. “By 2021 we will turn on the network in 100 cities”, Bisio adds. “5G is not only a useful infrastructure, I am thinking above all of companies and the new opportunities to reorganize and optimize the business and supply chains, but also essential to manage the increase in data traffic. From 2018 to 2019, traffic on the Vodafone network increased by 70%, and will triple between now and 2022. It would be impossible to manage this mass without 5G, which has spectrum five times more efficient than 4G”. There are three smartphones currently enabled with the Vodafone network and on sale in stores: XiaoMi Mix 3, LG V50 ThinQ and Samsung Galaxy S10 (the latter only available from the end of the month, with pre-order from June 10).
With 5G active in all respects, it opens up an era of new services, above all for institutions and businesses: smart cities, sensors for traffic control, electric and self-driving cars, smart homes (an already rapidly expanding phenomenon), wearable devices for health, increasingly connected robotics for the Industry 4.0, the so-called virtual, augmented or mixed realities that will revolutionize, for example, advertising and field operations, or rather the maintenance of large networks, whether they are the communication network itself but also electricity, gas and water ones. "It took time and we can't go faster than that - explains Bisio -, also because Italy has chosen to have limits on electromagnetic emissions that are 100 times more restrictive and safer than the European ones, i.e. 5.000 times lower than the thresholds of possible harmfulness . This means a more secure network but with longer installation times”.
For consumers, the novelty will not only be a faster and more capacious device: a season of novelties is also opening up on that front. One of these is that of gaming, online video games, which in Italy have 20 million practitioners (37% of the population) and increasingly via mobile (6 million), while 3 million people follow e-sports. A symbol of changing times, but also "a new frontier of entertainment, which 5G makes possible".
