CP Gurnani is CEO and managing director of Tech Mahindra. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

The countdown to the 5G revolution has begun, and the explosion of connected devices, such as mobile phones, televisions, security systems and speakers, among others, is only going to intensify.

As the next big thing in the journey of digital transformation, 5G will have an enormous impact on mankind. It will undoubtedly disrupt the way we live and work. It will go beyond mobile broadband and impact self-sustaining modern human establishments like smart cities, robotics and self-driving cars, and foster innovation in critical sectors such as health care, agriculture and education.

Wearable devices and connected health care, for instance, will help people monitor and manage their illnesses and allow medical professionals to efficiently screen and diagnose patients remotely. In fact, the 5G network has the potential to enable surgeons to robotically operate on patients from thousands of miles away.

This is possible because of the low-latency capabilities of 5G. With current networks, it takes approximately 100 milliseconds for information to travel across a network. This is incredibly fast, but there is still a lag that makes it impossible to communicate in real time.

With 5G, that latency is expected to be reduced to 1 millisecond. Once you have the ability to communicate over a network in near real time, proximity will no longer matter. However, there are a lot of obstacles we need to overcome before a doctor in Los Angeles performs surgery on a patient in Boston.

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