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Evolving Your Small Business: 5 Benefits Of 5G

T-Mobile for Business

5G isn’t just about a future with faster data speeds—it’s about faster business.

With the deployment of any new generation of wireless technology like 5G, the benefits will grow over time as networks expand availability and technology advances.

In order to stay ahead of the curve, businesses of all sizes—even small to medium-sized companies—need to understand the opportunities that 5G presents, especially as creative entrepreneurs begin developing innovative ways to use 5G for business and leverage its capabilities.

The very existence of 5G provides a huge opportunity for innovative ideas, new products, and services, and transformed business models. Here are just five of the ways that businesses can use 5G to improve how they do business and serve customers.

1. It can make your people more productive

5G not only has the potential to create whole new ways to work, but it may even make evolving your small business easier. With it, devices can gain powerful, low-latency connections to the cloud, so the devices themselves may not have to do as much computing. This would make it possible to use devices that are essentially a screen and a battery with a high-bandwidth connection to the cloud.

Your business could equip employees with low-power devices running powerful analytics to deliver premium services or use augmented reality to streamline warehouse management and operations.

With higher speeds and lower latency, spotty conference calls with flickering network connections will become a thing of the past. High-quality video calls, on the go, will be conducted easily. Impromptu conference calls and collaboration work can be done virtually anywhere. You and your employees can be more productive every minute of the workday.

2. It can make your sales channels more productive

Giving your salespeople a higher-bandwidth connection to the office and to customers will enhance their ability to sell. They might use augmented or virtual reality to provide more immersive experiences for customers.

On the employee training side, one benefit of 5G for business is that these new ways of communicating make it possible to train people in exciting new ways. Augmented reality, for example, enhances on-the-job training by providing the ongoing input employees need to do the job better as they start out in a new position.

Technicians can use the live feed that an augmented reality application provides to view contextual diagrams and other external assistance as they learn to work on new and different machinery.

The business cases for virtual and augmented reality continue to grow, but they will only be possible with a technology that can guarantee high-definition content, at a high frame rate, without perceptible delay. 5G will deliver that, and do it wirelessly, so even the most sophisticated virtual reality headsets will be truly mobile.

3. It can transform your customer experience

5G is designed to be dramatically faster than 4G. A video download that takes minutes with 4G would take just seconds with 5G. This kind of performance can be harnessed to transform the experience you provide to your customers.

That means media files will one day stream rapidly with virtually no lag time. In meetings, advanced capabilities such as virtual reality could become the norm for presentations. Immersive augmented and virtual reality experiences could show customers and others your new product, enabling them to view it virtually, from any angle. Or you might leverage your customers’ smart home environment to develop new services and applications that make full use of all the data that surrounds them.

Retailers could enhance their ability to let customers try on the latest styles, virtually. Customers could walk through your manufacturing processes without being on-site. Some of these things are being done already, but 5G for business will make them better and more available to any company with a creative, customer-focused idea—and might even make growing your small business easier.

4. It can connect everything

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables businesses to use new data and devices to accomplish more—whether it’s automating the alerts to HVAC technicians when systems need maintenance, or tracking every item shipped from a warehouse in real time.

5G was designed to one day support an IoT that isn’t just collecting data and sending alerts but automating actions in response to that data. An agricultural operation could, for instance, one day use low-power sensors to track the health of their crops and trigger automated actions—such as calibrating irrigation or fertilization—based on specific conditions.

From efficiently managing production remotely, monitoring warehouse inventories, and speeding deliveries to customers, 5G-powered IoT will one day help small businesses and large organizations solve problems.

5. It can create new business opportunities

New technology always drives new ideas. We are already seeing this happen in healthcare with connected physical monitors that can handle ever-increasing volumes of data and leverage artificial intelligence to identify the early stages of illness. Or the ability to add a sense of touch or feel to technology, which will one day enable remote surgery and other skilled remote work.

5G opens the door to new business models that you can create and new products and services you can offer. The ability to collect more data, more quickly, and put it to work for your business and your customers is one of benefits of 5G for businesses of every size—and may even be the genesis for a transformation of your business model.

T-Mobile provides businesses like yours with America’s largest 5G network offering more coverage than the other guys combined. We’re so confident you’ll love it, you can test drive our network free for 30 days with our No-Risk Network Trial.