If, 15 years ago, in 2005, someone said that in our country we could have the INTERNET on cell phones and communicate with voices and data while we were moving from one place to another, we would say right away that this person “didn't hit the sack”. I remember that at that time, we were getting used to mobile phones with agendas and the most modern we had were sms messages of no more than 5 lines... INTERNET was still in the second generation (2G) and was only accessible to desktop and laptop computers via cables.
Even about 10 years ago, we would hardly imagine that today we would download books of hundreds of pages, movies of hours, songs, etc., quickly and conveniently directly to our smartphones. Even more if this were added to the fact that, with the advances in cellular telephony covering almost all of the 164 municipal seats in the country, this would be possible from most of the national territory. Is that at that time we were in the phase of the third generation of the INTERNET (3G) and, despite the existence of wireless-fidelity (also known as wi-fi, access to the wireless INTERNET) was still very slow. And very expensive too, only accessible to a few, those who had more financial possibilities.
Today we are already in the fourth generation (4G). The INTERNET is much faster and access is much cheaper with the popularization of smart phones (smartphones). With social networks, communication was almost totally democratized among the literate population, which increased the level of civic awareness of citizens through unprecedented access to Information and Communication.
Our country has also “become a global village where people are separated by a click distance” as Canadian communicator Marshall MacLuhan said. People separated by hundreds and thousands of kilometers connect and communicate instantly through social networks and create databases in real time. This is the case of a project of “planting a million trees” by the scouts; created a database that is updated every time one of them plants a tree, with statistics available in real time. The cell phone has transformed from a person-to-person voice communication medium to a massive data and voice communication medium for an unlimited number of people. It made possible Covid's 19 universal prevention slogan: Stand back and connect…
People might be satisfied with that, but no; and this is where an advocacy process, led by telecommunications giant Huawei, comes in and creates in the mind the same doubts of 10 years ago in relation to today's technological advances: the fifth generation of the INTERNET, the 5G. or, as it is also known, “The Fifth Industrial Revolution”.
And what makes 5G different from 4G? INTERNET 5G promises to surpass its predecessors a lot. Its main proposal is linked to the internet of things, allowing cars, appliances and electronics to be connected to this new network and carry out their functions without human intervention. As the estimated speed of 5G is 10 to 20 times greater than that of 4G, it will be possible to interact with other objects in a house, for example. Anyway, a kind of ghost house. Doors that open and close by themselves. Machines that do all the work without anyone's intervention; they wash, lay out and iron clothes, wash and tidy the dishes, do all the cleaning, decide on the menu and prepare lunch...
Imagine an agricultural field where all operations are done by machines with no one inside. Or a helicopter going alone to repair a fault in a high-voltage cable or a damaged section of a road or railway. By the way, a skyscraper built entirely by machines, without any physical labor of any human being. That's 5G, that's the Fifth Industrial Revolution, and that's what Huawei, with a patience worthy of the Chinese, has been proposing to Angola and other developing countries.
In a predictable context of skepticism, it brings evidence. It has already built fully automatic airports, high-voltage cable fault repair systems that do not require human manual intervention in the entire process, farms where all production from land preparation to harvesting and storage is carried out from production centers. command served by a small number of operators, the same for mines, logging, etc. With the advantage that, being able to work uninterruptedly, production levels increase exponentially. In a country like ours, very vast, with little population and with a huge need to diversify the economy, achieve self-sufficiency in essential goods and reach the levels of development that the enormous natural resources allow you to dream of, the solution proposed by Huawei can to be the shortcut that the country needs to reach this goal faster and more sustainably.
Huawei sells the technology, gains as a company, some will say, and is therefore an interested party in the process. Well! In addition to “there is no free lunch”, this is clearly a win-win business. Huawei wins, of course, but the country wins the best profit it can aspire to: development.
Article written by Celso Malavoloneke , published in MenosFios with the authorization of its press office.
