LG Uplus CEO Sangchul Lee has some pretty wild expectations about technological advancements over the next few years. Speaking at last week’s GSMA Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, Lee point to a vastly more connected future.
A big part of this will be, of course, the Internet of Things. Today, users typically go online via a small handful of devices – smartphones, tablets, and so on. But Lee believes that by 2020, billions of access points scattered through the world’s smart cities will see users connected in all kinds of ways.
He also took issue with the term ‘Internet of Things’, suggesting that the real defining phenomenon going forward will be the ‘Internet of Thinking Machines’ – smart devices that will increasingly replace human thinking. Lee suggested that this is a more accurate way of thinking about the bulk of the IoT going forward.
Perhaps the most reasonably of the CEO’s prognostications, however, was his assertion that “[v]ideo will replace voice” on 5G networks. Lee presumably meant that rather than using connected devices merely to talk with each other, users will actually switch entirely to video chat. While the technology for this is already widely available on PCs and smartphones, the low latency of 5G networks will make it much less expensive to use; and with the emergence of the smartwatch, users may find it all the more convenient to have face-to-watch-face chats.
While Lee’s comments are somewhat bombastic, they reflect the level of excitement there currently is about the IoT and the place of mobile devices within that ecosystem. And the overall thrust of his predictions – that we will be increasingly interconnected and transmit greater amounts of data to each other – is hard to argue with.
Source: Mobile World Live
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