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“If you’re asking me whether I have all the use-cases nailed down? The answer is no,” said Alexander Brock, SVP of technology strategy, innovation and partnerships at Rogers.

“What we do know is that 5G is going to change everything, in terms of how people live, how people work, how people play.”

Unlike the transition from 3G to 4G wireless networks, Brock said, the jump to 5G allows for dramatically faster data transfer speeds, but it also opens the door to other capabilities such as much lower latency — the amount of lag time it takes for the network to respond.

“Edge computing” will also become more commonplace in 5G, Brock said.

That means instead of using the wireless network to send data from a cellphone to a data centre where servers do all the heavy lifting, and then back again, for some applications it might be more efficient and speedy if tasks were handled by computers that are closer to you.

Technologists have ideas for how these new capabilities could be used, but it’s so new that Rogers research-and-development partners plan to tinker and see what they can do.

“You suddenly get with 5G, lots and lots of levers to pull and the ability to custom design applications and services that, frankly, hitherto were not possible to do in wireless,” Brock said.

The new capabilities are alluring for manufacturing, resource extraction, agriculture and other industries because the lower lag, higher data speeds, and wireless connectivity could enable new forms of automation.