Larry Paulson, Vice President and President, Qualcomm India and Jim Cathey, Senior Vice President & President, Asia Pacific & India, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc speak with Dilin Anand from EFY.
Q. What kind of an impact can 5G and automation systems deliver to cities?
A. Certain upgrades for smart cities have very important trickle effects that can scale up drastically. As a result, the mayors of these cities have an important opportunity to improve the lives of the people who they were elected by.
Q. Could you share an example of how this will play out on the ground?
A. An example is a simple process of putting in a 5G small cell in lamp posts. This is going to give an excellent coverage inside building and homes. They
may then add a high bandwidth backhaul and this is going to be similar to electricity, where everyone and every machine has a reliable access to the Internet.
Q. What about existing applications, can they be easily upgraded to leverage 5G or will it require building up from scratch?
A. Campuses, where there are existing networks set up, can use a mix of Bluetooth mesh for connections and use 5G as just the backhaul. This allows them to make the most of existing investments and just swap out the copper backhaul for a much higher bandwidth and lower latency 5G backhaul. Speaking of low latency, this little benefit that 5G enables will let services like fingerprinting in an Aadhar based PoS or other cases where you need to send data securely to a remote server to be done much quicker. Even something like swiping your card at the store is going to be made significantly faster over 5G.
Q. What’s the overall scene going to be like 10 years from now?
A. As a human in the future, you will have less low-level decisions to make. At the same time, you could also have a lot of data on tap that can be easily accessed through a potentially augmented reality interface. Overall, this means that you will have more times to dwell on the things that you want to work on while everything else can be automated.
Q. Autonomous vehicles. What’s your take on a realistic scenario where it can actually create significant impact?
A. If you really think about autonomous driving, what will make autonomous driving actually work is when you have a 100% autonomous driving system. If you take a New York, London, Tokyo or any other major city and ban driver occupied cars between 6 AM and 10 PM for instance, and then you smart grid the lighting system on the roads, the whole thing is going to work in an automated way, it is going to be an extremely efficient way.
