5G is coming – lead or leap, but you can’t lag!

To think, there used to be a day when companies made a conscious decision as to whether they wanted to be an emboldened technology leader or take a more passive “wait and see” approach.  

And there was validity to both mindsets. The first meant taking on sometimes significant risk but with a huge upside, the latter meant having access to the learnings, the successes, and failures of those that came before you.  

If we have learned nothing else from the last 18 months, those days of choice are gone: embracing technological innovation is no longer an option.  

To be competitive in the race, companies have no choice other than to strive to embrace technology advances and translate them into competitive advantage within their industries.  

5G will be a tectonic shift, and while most companies have the advantage that 5G is not right on top of them at this moment, when it does come, it will be fast and furious.  

Which presents an interesting dilemma for the modern enterprise – do they get on board early while there is still uncertainty around the timing of critical mass adoption (i.e., the point at which it will be integral to their business… or to their customers) or do they wait and see what it will mean for the business how they can best factor 5G into their business and consumer applications? 

Cigniti’s recent webinar “Staying Ahead of Your Customer Experience in the Age of 5G” just scratched the surface of these critical decision points – along with many others – that brought to light the many dimensions and considerations companies are going to face when (and I say when, not “if”) they define their strategy and approach for 5G.  

It was apparent after this roundtable discussion, that it would be prudent for every organization to at least dip their toe in the water and start to think about 5G and what it means to them – and if nothing else, start the dialog because more is going to change than just the ability to leverage high bandwidth, low latency networks.  

To further support this, I wanted to share some very intriguing talking points from this webinar: 

• The focus of mobile app personalization will expand to the network, which has traditionally been used as a delivery mechanism – essentially an application agnostic pipeline. However, with the introduction of 5G, the network will become “application aware” and this will be a radical change that organizations will need to address as the application and the network go hand-in-hand. 
• The changing nature of customer experience dimensions – what used to be a good experience now needs to transition into an incredible experience to meet the heightened expectations of a well-educated customer base. People are going to want more from their digital experience as the multi-media experience will truly be in their hands. 
• The ability to predict the customer experience before it is even in the hands of the customer will become a necessary element of Digital Assurance going forward for organizations. This will create a challenge for many organizations as they struggle to adapt processes and put the right platforms and tools in place to support this predictive, analytical capability.  

In this blog series, we will cover a succession of topics around 5G with a specific focus on what it will mean for the customer experience and how the current techniques and processes of assuring that customer experience are going to change, in some cases drastically.  

The upcoming series of 3 blogs would cover the following topics. 

• Quality of Experience – Measuring the new dimensions of the customer experience 
• 5G will drive the innovation loop at breakneck speeds 
• The New Imperative for Digital Assurance – Let’s welcome 5G to the dance 

Our intent is to bring to light many of the considerations that need to be factored in when considering your 5G strategy.  

Yes, your current app is most likely going to work just fine on 5G – most “over the top” 4G/LTE applications will.  

But as always, there are some that will either not work or will not work as intended.  

The more important consideration is, however, back to the theme of this blog: the leaders and the leapers are going to get ahead of the game by dipping their toes in the water early, evaluating the potential of 5G for their organization – everything from how it is architected, to how it is developed and tested, to how it is monitored when it is deployed en masse in the hands of the end user – we will begin to devise a strategy that evolves them to 5G.  

Others will wait, and wait, and wait…until they are behind the eight ball. (If this sounds familiar, you can think back to any seismic technology advancements over the last 30 years (the internet, the iPhone, cloud, etc.) and how many organizations either intentionally – through conscious decision – or unintentionally – through lack of action, totally missed the early adopter opportunities and have been trying to catch up ever since. 

We look forward to you joining us for this blog series, and hope we can engage you in provocative thought, maybe, just maybe, serve as a beacon of sorts to incite early action in the planning for 5G! 

Conclusion 

Customer expectations and demand for new digital services are already increasing at a rapid pace. With the adoption of 5G, these expectations are only going to be magnified further. In response as companies start to adopt 5G as part of their digital delivery backbone, they are going to be challenged in optimizing for the plethora of possibilities that 5G has to offer. So whether it be enhanced video, telehealth, adaptive manufacturing, AR/VR, gaming, consumer IoT services, connected vehicles, to name just a few, the pivot to the 5G paradigm will be significant as will the manner in which these new solutions are rolled out. 

While we’ve covered the introduction, stay tuned for the upcoming blog series that will explore the different facets of 5G. Get in touch with our 5G testing experts, they will help you provide a solution for your business and will demonstrate how to scale the quality of experience for 5G services.