In the early dial-up age of the Internet, we weren’t impatient for images to load instantly. Buffering videos was simply the price we paid for accessing anything from anywhere. We didn’t know any better. Broadband changed that: the web became rich, fast and visual and above else, we stopped going online – we were online.
3G was the starting point for accessing everything, anywhere. We were effortlessly sending images to each other for the first time and the entire world of selfies, microblogging and interconnectedness was made possible from rapid, constant data transfer. It is hard to see how we could once sleep without knowing what someone we didn’t even like was having for lunch halfway across the world. It was this environment built on top of the 3G infrastructure that made the existence possible of businesses such as Uber, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Then 4G came along. It made Snapchat Stories possible. It allows us to upload 100 hours’ worth of video each minute on YouTube and deliver 8 billion video views on Facebook per day, and lets our friends live stream away their privacy on Periscope. And around the corner, we are seeing the inroads to content that feels real, such as immersive 360 video and virtual reality. 4G also killed patience. Dating has become the act of a swipe, and accessing your bank account with a press of your thumb because we became too impatient to read profiles or type in passwords. 4G has enabled seamless, immediate and frictionless transactions, and interfaces and interactions that increasingly feel personal and rich.
The run-up to the next transformation enabled by 5G is already underway. All that will matter for organisations, entrepreneurs, innovators – you? – will be creating authentic, meaningful and better connections through innovation, creativity on as-yet unimagined platforms, devices and services. The number one aim will be ideation and problem solving in this new world where everyone and everything will be intimately connected, forever changing how we will relate to one another and how we work and ultimately shape the future of humanity.