Empowering the future with 5G
Jon Pearce, Regional Director Market Development Europe, explains why the arrival of 5G technology is such an exciting prospect for Zyxel, its partners, and for its customers 5G is really exciting and animating technology enthusiasts at the moment.
We are already seeing a massive amount of interest in 5G from our partners who are already looking for fast, reliable, and flexible solutions that can meet the data connectivity needs of their customers.
This is being driven by a number of factors. First of all, there is the potential to use 5G for mobile connectivity. For anyone who is in a remote or hard-to-reach location, where fixed line connectivity is not available or too expensive to install, 5G is the technology that could finally connect them at full speed to the Internet.
Also, it looks like more people will be working at home, or on the move, more often in the future. With 5G, you can work at full speed, communicating and collaborating as easily and effectively as you would in the office, wherever you can get a signal.
Staying connected
Another reason for the high levels of activity and interest is the potential to use 5G as a backup for broadband connections. All businesses rely heavily on their Internet connections today. Restaurants, bars, and cafes, for example, can’t take card payments if their main connection goes down, so having a 5G backup would be ideal.
This would also be important if you were running a remotely-monitored IP-based video surveillance system, for example. If the main connection were to go down, you would want to make sure the video was still being transmitted – and 5G will be able to provide enough bandwidth to do that. Indeed, wherever there is a need to keep a connection open in the event of a fixed line failure, 5G will be a highly effective ways of staying online.
There is also a concern in some organisations about increased regulation and governance, and how this might impact their plans for the future. If it turns out that they cannot use the products they originally planned to use, they will want to have access to different options and suppliers.
Meeting expectations
As a trusted supplier, our customers and partners would expect us to provide them with options for 5G connectivity. We have started to do that, launching our first 5G mobile hotspot, the NR2101. There is already a good level of interest in this product, which is designed to be used while you are out and about or working at home, or perhaps from a holiday home where there is no fixed line or WiFi.
We’ll soon be releasing a higher-powered indoor version, ideal for smaller businesses, and an outdoor version that can cope with all kinds of weather.
We see 5G as a really great opportunity for our partners and an enticing prospect for our customers, for whom the benefits could be huge. As the 5G roll-out continues and it becomes possible to use the technology in more areas, we expect demand to rise steeply.
5G is a technology that gives us all a lot more freedom and flexibility both at the consumer level and also with respect to systems integration and distributed working. It also has an important role to play in business contingency and within the infrastructure of many organisations. All that means that it is an exciting and potentially empowering opportunity for Zyxel, it’s partners and our customers.
