IoT Insider Podcast | Episode 2: Launching a 5G world first

Dan Cunliffe
So kicking off this podcast, we decided to dive straight in to a very interesting topic, which is 5G. You may or may not have seen that we are collaborating with a university in the UK called Kingston University on a 5G project. And I thought I’d just give you a little bit of an intro into kind of what that’s all about. So, you know, why did we decide to collaborate with Kingston? Well, actually, we were awarded a grant from the UK Government and part of Innovate UK and drive it between ourselves and Kingston University to attack and look at what we can do with 5G. And, of course, the Internet of Things market. Kingston University was a clear choice for collaboration, we’ve had a long standing relationship with the university and effectively we’ve recruited graduates from there before and sort of helped to, you know, nourish their careers in a fast growing and fast moving market. But being a local company, we can support some of the young people coming through the university. On top of this, we recognise that there are some incredible professors and knowledgeable people in the university like; Professor Christos Politis, as well as Dr. Nada Philip. So we thought that it would actually be a very strong collaboration between what we do in terms of taking IoT to various markets through our partner channels, and of course, what the university could bring from a knowledge perspective. Our focus is potentially on improving the way that video and certain data transmission goes over 5G networks, but also the potential for what you can do from a video compression capability. And, we focused a lot of what we wanted to do on the emergency services, you know, the 5G technology will speed up turnaround of enabling medics on hospital sites, to examine patients or maybe make informed decisions based on their condition and prepare treatment before they arrive at hospital. And a very clear place for this to fit is sort of in smart triage of ambulances. So the idea is that patient lives down to be potentially saved through the remote triage, and clinicians will see increased turnaround when dealing with the patients. Video over 5G will also grant areas like the NHS in the UK, access to a high quality footage over a resilient and reliable connection. But more importantly, being able to take this a step further by improving the way that this data is compressed, and then obviously decompressed to show the images quicker and more efficiently. And of course, not have to struggle if there are any bandwidth limitations, because one of the things that will happen with 5G as it did with 3G, is that once you started to move from 3G to 4G, basically, people just consumed more data and I kind of think that’s going to happen with 5G as well, you know, 4k becomes 8k becomes 16k when it comes to the video transmission, you want to view and so the higher quality you want. And I think that’s quite an important piece about when we looked at this project of where compression would make a massive difference. So just a bit of interest in sort of how we’re going to develop this project. So from our end, we’ll be recruiting a strong candidate or an associate to sort of become a mini Managing Director of this project and drive the project forward from our new Kingston office. The idea is to keep track and kind of progress between ourselves and Professor Politis and Dr. Philip. The idea is that this person, when we recruit them will almost act like a like a sort of mini Managing Director but kind of combine our commercial capability and our partners, I suppose, need to drive business with the immense talent at Kingston and their knowledge and I guess what’s going to be, you know, in our view, groundbreaking technology and bring these two things together. The programme will basically take about three years. It’s about a three journey. But obviously, if there’s more developments, we’ll keep you guys updated, we’ll tell you about it soon as it comes through, because it is quite a fascinating piece. There are a couple of challenges, though, you know, it’s not all wine and roses in this sort of game. So you know, being able to have access to some of the top people at a global scale is definitely going to help in terms of dealing with some of the difficulties that I know this will arise and will kind of bring to the table. However, you know, between the academics and sort of our commercial expertise, I really do feel that we’ve got a lot of the bases covered. But it is going to be interesting as we go along on this journey, and take it a step forward. As I mentioned before, you know, it is it is always a nice thing to be able to work with a local authority like Kingston University being able to help out to able to do something there. But I think it is a very much a two way street and a sort of knowledge transfer, where we take a lot of their skills capability, apply it to a very exciting market, which is going to be 5G, you know, the the immediate wins on 5G is lower latency, higher bandwidth, more devices connected, it’s almost perfect for IoT, if you think about where you want to go, however, I’m just confident that we’re gonna have challenges and very conscious that how do we overcome them is sometimes a difficult thing in terms of where you want to go. So that’s the kind of theme of this podcast just a bit of insight into what we’re working on really, really cool project. There’s a lot more information on our website that you can get on this particular 5G project. And you may have read it somewhere before but we’ve been fortunate to get published on this quite a few times, so hope you enjoy it. Thanks so much for listening to our podcast. This time. I’m actually doing it from Gatwick Airport this time, because I’m on my way to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, it’s going to be, as usual, a fascinating and interesting time. The theory behind this year or the kind of headline slogan is intelligent connectivity, which I think is a big play towards artificial intelligence, managed connectivities, strong ways in which you can control the way your data flows, both from a connectivity perspective, but also kind of further than that. It’s also been a really interesting week for the Six Nations. We had the big clash between England and Wales. And of course Wales come through and are now I think 12 unbeaten games, which is I believe a record for them. I think the English played really, really well. But maybe just didn’t get a foothold in the game at the time. But the Welsh overall sort of looked like they probably deserved the win. Fascinating couple of weeks up ahead. Welsh still have to play the Irish and England have got Scotland and Italy left. So looks like those two teams are the front runners. But let’s see, Ireland might have an outside chance now because of that defeat. Anyway we will speak to you again very soon. Please do leave us comments, please subscribe, and tell us what you think. We’re just going to try and get better and better and make this as interesting as possible. Alright. Have a good one.