5G in China is now developed rapidly. And in some provinces, 5G has already become a civil communication way. The speed of 5G is hundreds or thousands of times faster than 4G, which provides the possibility of ‘everything connected’. If 5G networks were actually in use everywhere, then it would be really easy to monitor the situation of the following aspects of the city even the whole world.
- Weather: using the satellites to monitor the weather changing. If rains or snows came up, then send notes for the umbrella storage to people on their phone.
- Traffic: monitor the traffic to see if there is any traffic jam. The data could be accumulated so that people would know the most obstructed and the most unobstructed road when they choose the route. And it would be easy for the city planner to develop a new road to release the stress of some obstructed roads.
However, what’s impressive of 5G is not what it can monitor but what it could be used. And shared bicycles would be one of them.
As we know, the damage of shared bicycles has always been a problem. Users won’t ride a shared bicycle if it didn’t have a seat or had a flat tire. But some of the damages are unnoticeable, such as slightly bent wheel frame, rusted brake, loose screw and bells that don’t work. Users can find all these failures unless they actually ride on it. And according to the survey in 2018, over 90% of the users won’t change to a functional one because they think it’s too much trouble. Therefore, they stuck with the ‘slightly-damaged’ one. It is really dangerous for them to ride a shared bicycle like that. Then, the 5G comes up.
By adding a mode of a sensor next to the parking of shared bicycles, the backstage can easily monitor the conditions of all the shared bicycles. Whether if their tires need to be pumped, or too rusted to ride, even scan all the share bicycles to see if they are in proper shapes, these can all be fulfilled. If shared bicycles have those failures, then the backstage could lock the shared bicycles until maintenance workers repair them. Also, the shared bicycle itself could add a sensor to carry the 5G signal. It could report all the objects around this shared bicycle when someone is riding on it and make the warning in advance to prevent the bicycle from collision with anything. That could be a safety guard for all the shared bicycle users.
This is just my idea of how we are going to use 5G networks on shared bicycles. But besides those, 5G can be used in many scenarios:
- drone for all kinds of monitoring
- long-distance surgery
- artificial intelligence
- self-driving vehicles
- …
I think the use of 5G now is just a start. We can find more potential of 5G when it’s in global coverage.