5G - Unlocking the Next Generation of Digital Experience

As an e-commerce nerd, my LinkedIn news feeds is occupied with the usual buzz words around personalization, innovation, mobile, etc. All of this content is critically valuable to the work that we all do. However, sometimes I find myself blindsided by an external trend or event that has a dramatic impact on the e-commerce industry. 

Thanks to a recent post from Fadi Shuman, who just returned from the Mobile World Congress, my eyes were open to something that will completely disrupt our industry over the next few years. 

- 5G - 

We all know it's coming, but what exactly does it mean? First, I took a quick look back in time at 3G and 4G. When we moved from 3G to 4G, we saw speed increases of 10x. That speed improvement was the primary driver in unlocking the mobile revolution. Quite frankly, if we were still stuck in 3g, mobile shopping would be nowhere today. From a timing perspective, the roll-out from 3G to 4G happened fairly quickly. 4G first started to roll out in earnest in early 2010. In 2012, tech media outlets started to dub it the "year of 4G" and adoption started to gain momentum in all major cities across technologically advanced nations. By 2017, 4G availability rate had well exceeded 75% in most major countries and over 90% in five. 

Using history as a guide, we can reasonably expect significant adoption of 5G in early 2020. But just how good is 5G? The leap from 4G to 5G will be even more transformative than the previous generation. That's because 5G will be 100 times faster than 4G! And while the speed alone is amazing, it's not the only story, from Fadi's post,

"The real game changer however is the huge improvement in latency that 5G provides. Ahem - latency is the delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction for its transfer."

Here are a few of my views on what this will mean for e-commerce.

• With great speed comes great responsibility... Brands will feel tremendous pressure to create video-based, 3D, voice and interactive virtual experiences to stay competitive. 
• Conversational commerce platforms like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google will feel much more fluid and natural. And by the time 5G hits, consumer adoption of these technologies will continue to grow as machine learning makes the interactions more and more useful.  
• Slow moving API's will create even more angst for the consumer and more pressure on IT organizations to improve structures. 
• Image and page speed optimization will be a thing of the past, replaced with experience optimization of 3D and virtual worlds. 
• google glass 2.0? 
• With these new channels of experience, e-commerce platforms will need to decide if they are building these experiences, or just exposing API's. In the industry, we are seeing some traction from microservices e-commerce providers such as Elastic Path, Moltin, and Commerce Tools. It will be fun to see how this all shakes out. 

During a conversation with Sharon Gee & Olivia Yuan, they also brought up the positive impact that 5G will on IoT and digital in-store experiences. Please share your views on additional disruptions and opportunities as well! Also, if you're headed to Shoptalk, message me, we would love to meet up!