5G Strategic for Health and Development

Michelangelo Suigo (Head of External Relations & Communication) believes that the COVID-19 pandemic has led us all to realize the strategic value of and need for fast, stable connections in our homes and everywhere else.

A newspaper article from 1977 was circulating recently, “Is Color TV Dangerous?”, reporting that a court magistrate from La Spezia sequestered 300 color TVs (the innovation of that time) to assess the danger they posed to human health. Today, the article makes us laugh. Luckily, it was an isolated incident and no other magistrate or study managed to relegate the world to black and white.

Now, 40 years later, history seems to be repeating itself with 5G, which some claim is dangerous based solely on something they’ve heard. And yet, an article in The Watcher Post states that the COVID-19 pandemic has led us all to realize the strategic value of and need for fast, stable connections in our homes and everywhere else. Some mayors, like Giorgio Gori, Mayor of Bergamo, have even said: “If we’d had 5G, we might have handled the early phases of the pandemic better, avoiding conditions that caused many people to lose their lives.” This is a striking point, especially as it comes from someone who had to deal first-hand with the violent COVID-19 outbreak and who knows full-well the risks that we run by missing the boat on digitalization. The European Commission’s DESI 2020 Index ranked Italy 25th out of 28 countries in Europe for digitalization. 

Operators can play a fundamental role in increasing our ranking by providing increasingly innovative services to individuals and companies. From this point of view, 5G is going to prove essential to numerous sectors: tourism, agriculture, health care, logistics, sports and culture, just to name a few.

The extraordinary potential of IoT, domotics, sensors, and virtual and augmented reality will exponentially enhance our user experience indoors and out, but innovative services and applications must have near-zero latency, which happens to be a feature of 5G.

Thus, to fully exploit 5G, mobile connections have to be reliable inside all buildings, as expounded by a recent study by AnalysysMason, which underlines the importance of guaranteeing capillary 5G coverage. According to the report, the quality of the 5G experience inside must be as efficient as the experience outside. 

People still have trouble grasping the benefits that 5G can bring to every aspect of our daily lives, just as they struggle to grasp the endless opportunities that 5G can usher in. It will be revolutionary, even more so than when we first turned on our TVs and discovered a world full of color.