What 5G Will Mean for Hotels and Events
Skift Take
Arriving soon: 5G mobile internet. But it will likely be years before it is deployed around the world in any significant ways. Travel companies, along with event professionals, should start planning now for a future defined by ubiquitous access to high-speed data.
Your smartphone is about to get a whole lot faster.
New 5G mobile technology, which is about 1,000 times faster than the current 4G LTE systems used by most phones, will help reinvent how we use smartphones and bring a new level of real-time connectedness to the various devices known as the internet of things. We will still be waiting, though, a long time for this new future to emerge as information infrastructure around the world is updated.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in early 2018, technology giants laid out their vision for bringing 5G to the masses. More powerful connections between devices and phones will lead to advances in artificial intelligence and other areas that have just begun to impact global businesses.
Ericsson, which is beginning to manufacture 5G modems for phones, predicts that only a handful of phones supporting 5G will enter the market in 2019, with 2020 becoming the core year for adoption. By 2025, however, the company forecasts that 1.5 billion 5G subscriptions will be active around the world (the total number of subscriptions to any mobile data plan is 8.9 billion).
Regardless of phones com
