Scott and Julie Brusaw have launched an initiative that they call
solar roadways, a plan to refurbish American roads using bumpy,
hexagonal solar panels that light up and respond to what crosses them. Sam Cornett
Imagine a road that melts snow, has
movable markings, and its own renewable energy source. Then add one more
component—solar panels, the unsightly metallic paneling lofted on
rooftops and space stations alike.
An ambitious couple from rural Idaho want to put solar panels on roads.
Scott and Julie Brusaw have launched an initiative
that they call solar roadways, a plan to refurbish American roads using
bumpy, hexagonal solar panels that light up and respond to what crosses
them.
Traffic controllers can alter traffic patterns by
moving the lit-up lane markings, decreasing traffic jams and by
extension greenhouse gas emissions. Those lights are also designed to
improve late-night visibility on dark roads.
Panels are also equipped with heat sensors that can melt snow and ice, avoiding roadway collisions and potentially cutting the millions in taxes that the U.S. spends on snow removal and lost productivity every year.
The roads also include pressure sensors, designed to light up when heavy debris falls on them or animals cross them.
The roads also include pressure sensors, designed to light up when heavy debris falls on them or animals cross them.
Some panels include buried cables that could one day replace telephone poles.
The panels are attractive proposals, the stuff of
science fiction (the promotional video includes several references to
“Tron”—yikes), and solar roadways have already generated their fair
share of buzz.
Its YouTube video—catchily
(although rather aggressively) named solar FREAKIN’ roadways—went viral
last month and has now reached over 17 million views.
“Not just lifeless, boring solar panels,” the video
says when describing the product. “Smart microprocessing, interlocking,
hexagonal solar units. No more useless asphalt and concrete just
sitting there baking in the sun.”
The popularity of the video may have helped the
Brusaws generate funds for the project, which, although still in its
nascent stages, would be fiendishly expensive to carry out on a large
scale.
Solar roadways has generated $2 million in
donations from all 50 states and other areas of the world. The sum
exceeds any previous amount raised by the crowdsourcing website
Indiegogo, according to The Washington Post.
Despite the enthusiastic donations, widespread
solar roadway installations may be somewhat unattainable for the moment.
The cost of installing them nationwide would be astronomical. According
to Vox, it might total $56 trillion—around 20 times the annual federal budget.
As solar technology advances, however, costs may fall, making the prospect of solar roadways reachable.
Massachusetts, for example, which now ranks second on lists of the most solar conscious states, has offered generous subsidies for companies who cut costs to install solar panels. Even former mayor Tom Menino
has outfitted his abode with the green technology, a move that was
reported to cost only $500 for $8,000 in savings over the next 20 years.
For now, small projects are already underway. The
small town of Sandpoint, Idaho, intends to install the roadways on a
parking lot and sidewalks. And the Brusaws have already created a solar
parking lot outside their work studio perched in the rolling hills of
Idaho.
Since David Friedfeld took over ClearVision Optical
from his father in 1985, he’s seen most eyewear manufacturing move
overseas. The 120-employee company, based in Hauppauge, N.Y., is
bringing a small piece of it back. Last year, Friedfeld purchased an
entry-level 3D printer for just under $3,000. He still does the bulk of
his manufacturing abroad, but he can now print eyeglass prototypes
in-house.
The device “has taken three months off our production
cycle [and] allowed us to stay closer to the market,” he says. “We are
able to get far more creative.” He’s so bullish on 3D printing that he’s
planning a design-it-yourself website that will allow customers to
build their own frames, try them on with facial recognition software,
and then click to have ClearVision print and ship them a few trial
pairs.
That kind of enthusiasm seems contagious among small
business owners who are trying out 3D printing technology, says Daniel
Levine, a consumer trends expert and director of the Avant-Guide Institute.
He’s been following 3D printing closely for several years, though he
says the technology only jumped into mainstream consciousness about two
years ago, when the first affordable printers became available.
“The jury is still out as far as exactly how helpful it’s going to be
and in what ways,” Levine says. “Everybody who’s looking at it feels
pretty certain it’s going to have a large impact, but exactly what that
will be is still uncertain.”
For now, early-adopting small
business owners tend to use 3D printing for prototyping, creating
replacement and intricate parts, and for making customized gifts, he
says. The barrier to more widespread use of the printers is not
cost—Levine anticipates that the cheapest 3D printers will drop from
$1,000 to $100 within the next two years—but technical know-how.
“For
now, it’s engineers, jewelry makers, and architects” who are the
primary small business users, Levine says. That’s because they are
familiar with the computer design and scanning processes that 3D
printers use to churn out items.
The engineering staff at Grid Connect,
an 18-employee manufacturing company in suburban Chicago, is using its
3D printer to help develop a second version of its line of wireless home
sensors. Vice President Adam Justice says it has shortened production
times “in an industry that is moving very fast.”
Before the
company got the printer, his engineers sent specs for prototypes to a 3D
printing company that charged $600 to $700 per piece. When the pieces
arrived a week or two later, “the engineers would look at it for 10
minutes and find errors and have to send it back. We’d lose a month or
two finalizing a design,” Justice says. With the 3D printer he bought
last year, the team can turn around designs in three or four days, and
the savings has more than covered the $3,000 investment in the machine.
But most small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t have engineering teams. So why are pilot 3D printing programs being offered this year at office supply stores like Staples, the UPS Store, and PostNet?
Those companies are targeting self-employed inventors, designers, and
college students who need to build things but can’t afford to buy their
own printers, says Dave Thorsen, an architect who is piloting a 3D
printer at his PostNet franchise in Minneapolis. Thorsen brought the
idea for the pilot project to PostNet after he saw community college
students working with a 3D printer. He even purchased a franchise in
order to test the idea.
He is leasing a $22,000 3D printer for
$400 a month during the six-month trial that started in April, he says.
His first customer was a small, industrial designer making parts for
Herman Miller chairs. “He walked in at 3:30 on a Wednesday with a jump
drive and asked when he could have the part. I said, ‘I don’t think I
can have it done by the end of the day, but I’ll have it for you at 8
tomorrow morning,’” Thorsen says.
With the machine printing
overnight, the part was ready by 7:15 the next morning. The designer
rushed over, incredulous, to see it. “He said it was perfect. Normally
he had a two-week turnaround time sending out to a printing service in
Atlanta that threw him to the back of the line because it handled huge
automobile and aviation clients,” Thorsen says. “He came back the very
next week with six more designs.”
CDR-Data
Corporation Allied with Township of Franklin
CDR-Data
has partnered with Township of Franklin to help manage their Call Detail
records information as they collect data from Franklin’s powerful Cisco
telecommunications system.
Using
CDR-Data’s eCDRs® solution to review call data information Franklin can now
pull at hoc report of potential problems like personnel issues, fraud attack
and cost center dollars summaries.
Kevin
Young CEO of CDR-Data said “This adds another satisfied CDR-Data client that is
working in the Public Vector. We are working hard to provide products and
services to cities, counties and state organizations”. “We take our GMIS Diamond
award very seriously and we are always looking at enhancing our features for
the cities and counties arena.”
About Township of
Franklin NJ
Voted
number 5 as the best city to live in the USA by Money Market Magazine in 2008, Township
of Franklin has kept the quaint township but manage the new technology needed
to manage and provide the needed services for over 62,000 citizens and
including government employees.
Franklin
Township was very much a part of the Revolutionary War History and the scene of
many raiding parties along Route 27, then known as the King's Highway.
Washington's farewell address was delivered to his army in Little Rocky Hill in
1783.
One
of the most important developments for Franklin was the building of the
Delaware-Raritan Canal in 1834. Twenty-two miles of this continuous water route
from New York to Philadelphia runs through the Township. During the Civil
War, up to 200,000 tons of freight was hauled by mule and horse-drawn barges, a
great economic boon for the area. Today the canal is the source of drinking
water and provides recreation for area residents and visitors to the Delaware
and Raritan Canal State Park.
About CDR-Data
Corporation
CDR-Data Corporation, based in Pasadena CA, www.cdrdata.com, consists of a group of professionals with decades of experience in the
telemanagement, call accounting and IT industry. By using an ASP environment,
this team has consistently delivered proven products and services that provide
answers to management's questions of telecommunications usage and billing.
CDR-Data has gained its market share by consistently delivering high quality
and flexible solutions to each and every CDR-Data client.
On May 9, President Barack Obama signed into law the first
federal open data bill that requires all federal agencies to publish
expenditures publicly online and in a standardized machine-readable
format.
On May 9, President Barack Obama signed into law the first
federal open data bill that requires all federal agencies to publish
expenditures publicly online and in a standardized machine-readable
format.
His signature represents a historic milestone for the open data movement
and is a feat that’s required years of advocacy from bipartisan
proponents. Titled the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of
2014, the bill is the most aggressive open data legislation ever
enacted. Its wide scope and narrow guidelines will compel agencies to
report spending to USASpending.gov,
a federal open data portal, so expenditures can be compared across
jurisdictions — a service previously unheard of digitally or otherwise
at the federal level.
Implementation will be phased into a year-by-year approach. In the first
year, the White House Office of Management and Budget will draft
expenditure reporting guidelines while organizing a pilot program for
testing. Three years from the bill’s passage, all agencies must comply
with the new open data standards.
Advocates of the DATA Act, including Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Sen. Rob
Portman (R-Ohio) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) — who introduced the
initial version of the DATA Act in June 2011 — celebrated when the White
House confirmed the president would sign the bill at the end of April.
Hudson Hollister, the executive director at the Data Transparency
Coalition (DTC), was overjoyed with the passage, as it was one of his
coalition’s primary objectives since the coalition was founded in 2012.
“The DATA Act is the first open data act the country has ever seen —
which is awesome,” Hollister said. “It requires the government to
transform its spending from disconnected documents into open data.”
For transparency advocates, Hollister said he saw the president’s
signature as the most significant action taken since the Freedom of
Information Act was passed in 1966 — a law ensuring public access to all
government non-classified information.
“For the open data industry, which our coalition represents, and for
supporters of government transparency, President Obama’s signature is
going to be his enduring legacy,” Hollister said.
However, he noted that the bill's passage has not been equally endorsed
by all of the White House administration’s staff. The Office of
Management and Budget (OMB), tasked to oversee much of the bill’s
implementation, has been hesitant to embrace the bill since it was first
proposed, Hollister said. While the OMB sees value in the act,
reluctance formed when considering tasks related to implementation.
Hollister said he observed that the OMB’s reluctance stems from fears
the act will be either too complicated to execute or be too labor
intensive. Both concerns he empathized with, but dismissed them as
unwarranted in light of the gains that can be achieved and the fact that
processes will remain fairly unchanged.
“The DATA Act to many exterior observers might look like [it's too
complicated to institute]," Hollister said. "But I think it’s not that.
It doesn’t require new reporting requirements. Instead, it just requires
some kind of electronic structure for the reporting requirements that
already exist."
As the DATA Act goes forward, here are three takeaways about what the bill means for transparency, as well as an interactive timeline of the act's introduction through signing and beyond.
1. The DATA Act Requires Understandable, Comparable Budgets
Assuming all goes to plan, the most apparent benefit of the DATA Act
will be its requirement to funnel federal government spending reports
into a single repository, USASpending.gov,
and within a single reporting standard. Before, no entity in the
government had the authority to impose government-wide data standards.
Now, the Treasury Department and the White House Office of Management
and Budget have been tasked to do this at the national level. For
agencies, this may include quite a bit of work to start, but will allow
them to communicate financial data in an easy and interoperable way.
2. The DATA Act Cuts Waste, Fraud and Abuse
Tracking can be difficult when thousands of pieces of financial data
are moving in many different ways and formats. Proponents argue that
this complexity can lead to confusion, and confusion can breed
fraudulent or wasteful spending. With the DATA Act’s common data format,
automation and analytics can be used to quickly audit for accuracy,
waste, fraud and abuse.
3. The DATA Act Gives Public Access and Accountability
The DATA Act will clarify government spending with sharper details on
the following: congressional appropriations; to Treasury accounts,
where appropriations are held; and for actual expenditures the money
pays for. This information was previously obscured in summarized texts
or could be reached only by special request.
James Martin/CNET
Today,
there's the Samsung Gear Fit. But it seems that if you listened to
Samsung president Young Sohn, that's merely a temporary patch for what
the future of wearable health tech will really bring.
Samsung's
health event, called "Voice of the Body," happened today. And at it,
Sohn, discussed a three phase evolution of health tech, starting with
phones, then moving to wearable devices, and finally ending up at
wearable sensors. We're currently in the middle phase.
The next step, unveiled by VP Ram Fish, is Simband, another health
band, but not a smartwatch: its focus is entirely on health tracking,
collecting lots of data to share with medical researchers, doctors, and
for personal health use. Simband is designed to be open and modular, and
comes studded with a ton of medical sensors.
The Simband is designed to work with a variety of medical needs and with many sensor technologies, and to eventually work with SAMI, Samsung's cloud-based solution for collecting and analyzing sensor-based health data.
James Martin/CNET
Unlike something comparatively primitive like the current Samsung Gear 2 and Gear Fit
heart-rate watches, the Simband has multiple sensors. It uses optical,
electrical, and physical methods of collecting heart rate, blood flow,
temperature, CO2 and oxygen levels, and even simulated blood pressure,
all to display real-time electrocardiograph information of it all. Even
the optical sensors on the Simband seem improved, with multiple
wavelength LEDs at once. Samsung admits its measurement technology needs
to be more accurate. We at CNET agree.
The
design looks a bit like most recent Gear watches. There are
differences: the battery's hot-swappable for easy night charging while
wearing to enable 24/7 tracking. Inside, an ARM-based processor handles
processing of the various sensors. The Simband has both Wi-Fi and
Bluetooth, so it can share data to local devices or directly to
Samsung's cloud.
The goal of Simband is to offer open APIs for
medical use, and to test the Simband at hospitals and medical
institutions. The University of California, San Francisco is already
working with Samsung and the Simband. Right now, Simband is a concept
device, a reference for future wearable health sensor-laden tech, but it
could be a leaping-off point for future Samsung wearables, too.
James Martin/CNET
So
who is Simband for? You, the consumer, don't need to worry yet. The
Simband seems squarely focused on Big Health and medical institutions
for now, as new ways are discovered to make the best use of different
arrays of sensors. The idea seems to be to use it to help prevent
disease and deliver better health profiles: one app, called TicTrac and
demonstrated on-stage at Samsung's event, used the Simband's multiple
sensors to quickly gather a health rating.
Maybe the Simband could
help predict illnesses before they strike, or get people to fix their
bad habits early. That could be great for anyone. Of course,
preventative medical tech could save hospitals and health insurance
companies a ton of money, too.
The bigger question is how these
sensors will evolve, how Samsung's cloud will use the data, and how
other researchers and companies will be able to develop tools for
Simband. The medical industry is a large beast, and Samsung's desire to
create a new open platform is an ambitious one, to say the least. And,
odds are Samsung won't be the only company to try to lay claim to an open health platform.
Simband looks a first step toward acknowledging how big a hill wearable health tech still has left to climb.
If you want a glimpse into what the speed of your Internet
connection might look like under the newly proposed Open Internet rules,
take yourself back to the last uncomfortable hour of a long plane
flight. You know the feeling. You’re back in economy class wondering if
seats have actually gotten smaller these past few years (they probably
have), and amazed when you glance up front and see how appealing
business class has become. That’s what the Internet could look like
soon.
With all the talk about fast lanes and paid prioritization recently,
the Federal Communication Commission’s proposed rules could lead us down
a path where regular and premium service levels make Internet service
look a lot more like air travel. Some advocates are worried that a
section of the rules allowing carriers to negotiate individually with
content providers for service as long as it is “commercially reasonable”
could allow ISPs to charge different websites for faster or
higher-quality content delivery. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has said that this won’t lead to fast lanes and slow lanes
online, but it’s hard to see how the current proposal would adequately
protect against this type of behavior. So as the debate over the
potential impact of these rules continues for the next few months, it’s
helpful to consider how premium service can inherently lead to degraded
service for everyone else.
Just take a look at the airline industry: Tiered service has been
common in air travel for years, with airlines offering special amenities
and improved service for those who can afford to pay more, while
everyone else gets crammed into regular seats. Although almost everyone
would prefer to travel more comfortably and wait in faster
security and boarding lines, it’s often challenging for airlines to
convince people to pay the premium for first class: It can cost up to ten times more
to fly business instead of economy on a trans-Atlantic flight, and both
seats get you to the same destination. So while airlines try to make
first class more appealing with new amenities and personalized
attention, they simultaneously have an incentive against improving the quality of “regular” service as a way to protect their higher-end business.
And as airlines have struggled financially in recent years, it
appears they may even be actively degrading economy class options.
According to an October 2013 Wall Street Journal article, in a reversal of a half century trend of gradually improved seating, airlines have spent the last decade trimming
first legroom and now seat width in order to squeeze more seats into
economy class. This allows them to expand higher-fare
sections—particularly new mid-range options like economy plus which
offer added legroom for a fee—without reducing the number of ticketed
passengers on the plane.
What’s more, this tactic has the added benefit of increasing the
appeal of premium options while still maintaining the premium price. As
the article notes, “[p]ressure in economy cabins also lets airlines
upsell coach passengers.” This nuance is critical because it illustrates
the incentives for airlines not only to make more seats available by
reducing their size, but to increase the disparity between economy and
premium seats to make the premium seats even more attractive to flyers.
Now, do you see what would happen if we enter a world of “fast lanes”
and “slow lanes” on the Internet? Some argue that it’s not a big deal
for a big company to pay for a “fast lane,” but the precedent would open
the floodgates for many new types of discrimination online. And it will
make the remaining Internet capacity on the network worse for those who
cannot pay the fee.
Under the proposed FCC rules, Internet service providers would have
to carry all traffic at some minimum service level (we’ll call that
economy class). So to sell seats in the fast lane (first class), it must
be sufficiently attractive to content companies so that they would
actually be willing to pay more. This means faster speeds and better
quality of service, but it also requires making sure that the regular lanes don’t improve at a pace that would threaten the premium business.
In other words, there is a risk that ISPs, in an effort to either
make the fast lane more appealing, will be encouraged to unnecessarily
limit capacity for everyone except those in the fast lane. Or they might
squeeze additional customers into the regular lane to make more room
for premium customers – effectively degrading regular service during
peak congestion times. And, the more attractive the fast lane becomes,
the more an ISP can charge for carriage in that lane.
There’s an important distinction in this analogy as well. For
airlines, degrading service requires physically shrinking the size of
seats. On the Internet, since bandwidth consumption
is growing steadily, an ISP simply could choose not to improve the
capacity of the network and the quality of your Internet experience
would still gradually decline.
Which brings us back to the Commission’s proposed rules that were released for public comment earlier this month.
The new rules are based on a presumption that business arrangements
for prioritization of certain types of content would be valid, though,
as we’ve noted, there are mixed messages coming from the FCC about
whether fast lanes would actually be permitted. Unfortunately, the legal
theory on which the agency is relying to implement these rules necessitates discrimination, which is why the rules must permit some degree of individualized negotiation and bargaining.
Changing the rules themselves would require a different source of authority – what advocates refer to
as authority under “Title II” of the Telecommunications Act. Some also
argue that either way, the rules adequately protect against slow lanes
because of the “minimum level of service” requirement – a term of art
that will be defined precisely during the comment period on the proposed
rules. Leaving aside the challenge of actually determining what a
minimum level of service might look like, if the framework is based on a
presumption in favor of paid prioritization, it’s difficult to envision how it can actually protect against an Internet full of bandwidth haves and have-nots.
Whether we’re on track for fast lanes and slow lanes or merely fast
lanes and adequate lanes, Internet users should be concerned about
what’s in the proposal and should question whether they want a divided
Internet. This kind of Internet is not the type envisioned by advocates
of network neutrality, which is based on the fundamental principle of nondiscrimination and has been integral to creating the space for innovation, public debate, and free expression online that Americans enjoy today.
At this week’s Mobile World Congress
in Barcelona, one of the hottest topics of discussion was the future of
5G — a next-generation mobile communications network that would offer
exponential gains in both speed and capacity over existing 4G networks.
If 2G networks were for voice, 3G networks for voice and data, and 4G
networks for broadband Internet connectivity, what exactly do you get
when you deliver a 5G network?
So here are five examples of innovations that 5G might make possible.
1. The first-ever 5G Olympics
Now that the Olympic Flame in Sochi
has finally been extinguished, it’s interesting to consider the types
of innovations that might appear at future Olympics. Both Pyeongchang
(host of the 2018 Winter Olympics) and Tokyo (host of the 2020 Summer
Olympics) are in nations that are at the forefront of 5G innovation in
Asia, so it makes sense that they will attempt to showcase 5G innovation
throughout the Olympics. When Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics,
for example, the city became the first-ever to broadcast the Olympics overseas via satellite and in color.
For the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics,
here are just some of the ideas that might be made possible by 5G
networks: one-second downloads of massive Olympic video clips;
super-high-definition screens for broadcasting events; holograms of
Olympic athletes; and mobile 3D images of venues and competitors. There
are also hopes of creating “instant translation” glasses
that would enable visitors from all over the globe to read anything
written in Japanese within seconds. It might also be possible to offer “facial recognition” glasses
in which Olympic visitors could spot fellow countrymen in a crowd, and
instantly receive personal details about them to facilitate an
introduction. As anyone who has ever missed a connection knows, seconds matter. New high-speed 5G networks would give you back those seconds.
2. The Internet of Everything, finally
Okay, it seems like we hear about the Internet of Things every year at CES in Vegas, but nothing ever comes of it. But the logic behind the Internet of Things is inexorable – Cisco predicts that by 2018, worldwide mobile data traffic will have increased 11x from current levels,
with much of that traffic driven by billions of devices talking to
other devices wirelessly. To make that M2M (machine-to-machine)
communication possible you need fast, high-capacity networks. New 5G
networks promise speeds that are 100x faster than anything that exists
today.
At its most basic level, the “Internet of Everything”
means that any device can talk to any other device. This can either be a
relatively basic application – such as your refrigerator telling your
smartphone that you’re out of milk – or something much more
sophisticated. One big application that has been talked about (perhaps
too much) is the “Smart City,”
in which devices and sensors are installed on every element of a city’s
infrastructure and constantly monitor the city. A sensor on a bridge,
for example, might detect abnormal traffic patterns, and that
information could be used to create alternate transportation routes.
3. Connected car networks
The Google driverless car was just
the beginning. In order to support a large number of driverless vehicles
on highways, you need 5G networks and all the extra capacity they
deliver. And those 5G networks need to be qualitatively different from
4G networks, capable of handling and distinguishing between a variety of
different uses: infotainment, communication, traffic navigation and device syncing.
When your car is attempting to change lanes to avoid a collision, you
don’t want your network being used by a child in the backseat,
downloading a cartoon movie or making a hands-free mobile call.
Some mobile companies are even talking about a connected vehicle cloud – a
massive network of connected car data that makes all types of new
services available at faster speeds. In Barcelona, for example, Volvo unveiled the concept of a “Roam Delivery” network that
could deliver groceries or packages to consumers wherever their car
happens to be parked. A digital code would enable the delivery agent to
access your car’s trunk, and you’d never have to worry about missing the
UPS or FedEx delivery person again.
4. Next generation mobile healthcare devices
We’re now entering an age where
real-time health data from mobile devices is becoming the norm rather
than the exception. Building on the success of devices from FitBit and
Nike, it now seems like every new digital device — including smartphones
and smartwatches – will come embedded with some sort of health-tracking
service. In Barcelona, for example, Samsung unveiled its new Galaxy S5
with a built-in heart rate monitor to complement three upcoming fitness
devices.
One of the quirkier devices unveiled at the Mobile World Congress was the Tethercell,
a device that essentially transforms any battery-powered device into a
Bluetooth-enabled device. You take out one AA battery from your device,
and insert the Tethercell, which has room for a AAA battery and a
Bluetooth chip. Tetherboard,
which makes the Tethercell, calls it “the world’s first app-enabled
smart battery.” What that means is that you can control battery-powered
devices at will from a distance. One example is a parent shutting down a
child’s loud musical toy from the next room when it’s nap time. Another
example is getting an alert when a battery-powered device is about to
run out of juice.
That may not seem like much, but it
hints at a solution to a problem being created by the proliferation of
billions of mobile devices in society – the need for more spectrum, more
capacity and more power. So it makes sense that some of the most
interesting ideas about 5G concern ways to make our mobile devices more
efficient and effective. Concepts like “Green 5G Mobile Networks” acknowledge that spectrum is a limited resource, and that we need to think about smarter ways to power our mobile devices.
***
At the end of the day, the reason
why Europe and Asia are committing so much attention to 5G is because of
the potential to drive future economic growth. At a news conference in
Barcelona, Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Commission, even
talked about the ability to reduce rampant youth unemployment across Europe by deploying new 5G networks.
It’s not so much that 5G infrastructure build-out would create new jobs
— think of this as a type of New Deal for technologists — it’s that 5G
would create entirely new markets and economic opportunities driven by
mobile in industries ranging from healthcare to automotive to
infrastructure.
