FEATURE | NEXT GEN CARR I ERS
BREAKING LIMITATIONS Once you have new and faster internet, you can start looking at replacing other traditional methods of working, like virtual production and simulations, “If we’re doing anything near-set or on-set and we need to process that data and have access to it while we shoot in order to do quick VFX, colour renditions or bring in virtual cameras, this is all possible with 5G,” enthuses Mansouri. “We’re also interested in tapping into hundreds of cameras and, in the future, hundreds of thousands of cameras around the world and have access to them anytime we want. This is without running cabling through each camera to each device – we do this with edge computing connecting to the cameras and running our software for machine learning and AI, for instance.” This type of automation in real time will throw up a multitude of uses. One that Mansouri uses is the running of car rental offices. This will become an automated process, as cameras will know the car that is being returned, will see if there is any damage to the car, access estimate software that will produce a cost to replace and also apply any gold status perks to the driver. That all can be done in real time. As far as the entertainment industry is concerned, Mansouri thinks the process will be slower: “It takes a long time for this business model to grow. The industry wants innovation, but also wants to know ‘who’s paying for it?’, ‘how are we going to deploy this?’ and ‘where’s the business model?’ That’s why we’ve moved into different sectors where we can save big companies thousands, then bring those proven results into the entertainment business.” He adds: “We are just starting to understand the capabilities of what we can achieve working with 5G. The new 5G chipsets will be appearing at the end of next year, so still a little way away, even for the very early adopters. In the meantime,
we have options like private LTE and CBRS. The data for these isn’t going to be as wildly fast as 5G and won’t be hitting 1GB/s, but 5G will be based on the amount of users at one time, so a lot of their lab predictions are based on the perfect scenarios. The reality of a private LTE is that we’re able to get sustained speeds, because it’s ours. I become a carrier, so I would get a small edge computer, a network switch and an antenna. I then control who is on my network and I can design it as I
like. With 5G, you are sharing it with the rest of the nation. He admits: “Although, it will open up the bandwidth a lot, the entertainment industry is a hog. We want it to ourselves and don’t want to share it. I see much better use cases through private LTE and CBRS, which have been recently approved
around the world. With those, we’re getting very high speed and we control the bandwidth – and there are a lot more devices in that world.” We are just starting to understand the capabilities of what we can achieve working with 5G, but it’s still a little way away
56 DEF I N I T ION | DECEMBER 20 1 9
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