“In 10 years' time, a chip in your body will tell what will happen the next day”

This headline on the back page of today’s Daily Telegraph Business Supplement (April 4^th 2016) caught my attention. The article by James Ashton was The Monday Interview and was with Hans Vesterberg, the head of Ericsson. Vesterberg’s view of the future is a world of micro-chipped medical implants, connected homes and remote-control working connected by lightning fast internet. There is great quote in the article which really sums up the situation – “We cannot even imagine how the world will be transformed with all this connectivity”.

In the UK, we know that we are behind other countries in implementing 4G and South Korea is already known to be at the forefront of the next revolution – expected to launch 5G services in 2018. 5G at 25gigabits/second is 2,500 times faster than the best possible on 4G. The article uses a great analogy to make readers’ understand the implications of this speed – “enough to enable 1,000 households to watch 4K high-definition TV at the same time without requiring a fibre connection”.

Vesterberg sees the industrial use of 5G “Society is going to be changed by using our technology. You can’t have more cars in London, if you don’t start to digitise the transport system.”  Ericsson are working with King’s College, London on developing a surgical glove for keyhole operations. The idea of implants, Vesterberg see will happen first in countries where there isn’t an existing good healthcare system so that a patient would happily take advice remotely. He predicts that a time will come when the Facebook generation will become more guarded about posting their innermost secrets – “This is my data, I want to give it to you because you can do something good for me and I don’t want to give it to you because you put advertising around it.”

So Vesterberg’s vision is that IoT is the way forward and that 5G will change our ways of working even more than the previous generations of mobile technology. His view about sharing data is also very perceptive of what is happening.