Looking ahead, the road to 5G and a pervasive IoT is open.
Anyway, this road starts today, where some known challenges are still to be overcome.

Issues like 4G coverage, heterogeneous service quality and data monetization are under discussion. And we need to solve them to pave the road for 5G.

Specially when key drivers for 5G are the enhanced network capacity and supporting a pervasive IoT, where the most prevalent endpoints will be machines. With data traffic that needs to be monetized, and with different requirements regarding bandwidth, latency and most important, reliability. Who wants to be in an autonomous car that suddenly looses communication with other cars and surrounding infrastructure? Also, improving the interoperability of multiple devices and players is a must-have pre-requisite.

On the business side, the role of telecom operators is yet to be defined. Some are trying to attract traffic by creating an IoT platform; others are more aggressive on the creation of end user applications. But even understanding that their future growth, and maybe even survival, will depend on the M2M traffic, they are all still searching for a ROI model for the 5G.

In the meantime, another game changer is also under discussion: have we started Skynet? Cognitive computing promises to open the Pandora´s box by giving a much higher decision capacity for the computing systems. From one side, wouldn’t it be great to support the oncologists analyzing MRIs to improve cancer diagnosis? Or the possibility to reduce traffic accidents, since over 80% are related to human errors? But what are the moral limits? According to the experts, cognitive systems are great, but they are decision supporting systems, and the moral limits are still imposed by the humans running them. Certainly a topic that will require deeper discussions.

But at the end, most speakers and specialists go back to the discussion about the Use Cases. And that is aligned with focus being changed to the end users. It goes from discussions about cognitive systems, agricultural business, IoT references and the Formula 1. Yes, technology industry is now using Formula 1 as a driver for the development of new capabilities. Just like the automobile industry has been doing for decades. It will be hard to separate technology and mobility from the other industries.

As a result of all of this, enabling the participation of different players on the multiple IoT ecosystems will allow us to see more and more applications and use cases. And it makes it very hard to predict the limit of what can be accomplish.