“Given its potential to herald a range of new products and services through improved speed and capacity, businesses should start preparing for 5G now," he continues. "Simply waiting for it to emerge and catching up later will be too late.

"In particular, many of the use cases that 5G will enable will involve connecting ecosystems and supply chains across borders. Therefore, businesses would do well to work with like-minded partners to ensure that there is no disparity between capabilities due to differing preparedness for 5G. However, companies hoping to leverage 5G need support from their governments, both central and local, to put the appropriate infrastructure in place to make the network a reality in the first place.”

Businesses should start preparing for 5G now. Simply waiting for it to emerge and catching up later will be too late

The impact on privacy

In a totally connected world, we are—of course—more susceptible to cyberattacks. Today, in our slower, less connected 4G world, hackers have still managed to breach US national water supplies, crash Internet-connected cars, hijack supply chains and stop homeware appliances from working. Identity theft and data breaches are an everyday occurrence, to the extent people in the US are now more afraid of cybercrime than they are of becoming a victim of violent crime.

And they are right to be worried. In a new 5G, ultra-connected world, our airplanes, electricity, defence, health and banking systems would all be linked up to the wireless world.

“As the number of internet-enabled devices increases exponentially, the attack surface for hackers increases in kind. 5G will only exacerbate this, connecting more devices to the internet," says Shaw. “As we have seen from the debate around Huawei, much of the scepticism around the 5G rollout has revolved around security. It will be crucial to define areas such as privacy policy so that businesses are able to legally access or monetise the data from 5G.”

Questions abound. One is for our health: 5G works by deploying millions of wireless relays, and some scientists are concerned about the untested impact this could have on the human body, particularly children and pregnant women. Recently, a group of scientists and doctors asked the EU to look into the low-level radiation caused by 5G but no results have been published. This year. Richard Blumenthal, an American senator, said it was dangerous to forge ahead with 5G without assessing its health risks, describing the nation as, "flying blind".

5G will be as revolutionary as electricity or the automobile

The other is for our personal autonomy. In an era where our privacy is already being systematically eroded by tech giants, we have further to fall than we realise. Telecom companies already sell our data, but 5G—which comes inbuilt with millions censors—offers an unprecedented opportunity for surveillance. 5G will allow the state and telecommunications companies to catalogue exactly where someone has come from, where they are going, and what they are doing. This can either be sold onto brands or law enforcement.

“To give one made-up example,” Steve Bellovin, a computer-science professor at Columbia University, told the Wall Street Journal, “might a pollution sensor detect cigarette smoke or vaping, while a Bluetooth receiver picks up the identities of nearby phones? Insurance companies might be interested.” Add facial recognition and AI to this potent mix, and the sensors and location capabilities of 5G means none of us will ever be anonymous again. 

Is that a price worth paying for an ultra connected world? One in which not just people but all things are connected: cars to the roads and doctors to the drips and medical devices of their patients, and so on. Only time will tell.