In conjunction with MWC Barcelona 2022 which will be taking place from the 28th of February to the 3rd of March, Tara Neal, Executive Editor of The Fast Mode spoke to Minchul Ho, General Manager of America, Baicells on the company's plans and showcases for this year's event.
Tara: What do you think MWC 2022 will be all about? And what are your MWC 2022 plans?
Minchul: 5G is still going to be a big topic, but the focus isn’t going to be on the technology itself, but instead on the various use cases that each organization is enabling. Whether that’s showcasing autonomous vehicles, or how companies are going to use 5G to enable the metaverse. The applications for 5G are enormous and constantly expanding and I think those direct 5G applications are what we’re going to see the most.
We plan on exploring all of the inventive ways people are leveraging 5G and applying that knowledge to our upcoming small cells designs. For example, our small cells have started being used in cryptocurrency mining and we’re seeing huge potential in that market. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the various 5G use cases and how applicable they’ll be to our products.
Tara: How has the pandemic impacted the operational and business landscape of the tech segment you are operating in?
Minchul: The pandemic really highlighted the lack of internet infrastructure in some parts of the world, especially in rural America. When people started working from home, they needed to be able to have reliable, high-speed internet that allowed them to jump onto video calls and access all the information required to complete their jobs or participate in their schoolwork.
There were a lot of municipalities and school districts that couldn’t wait for private businesses to build the appropriate infrastructure, so these organizations started taking matters into their own hands. With the help of billions of dollars that the government was allocating to address the problem, we’ve been seeing a lot of tech integrators working closely with these organizations to provide them with internet solutions. Most of the time these integrators were looking at wireless technology because they needed to get networks up and running extremely quickly. Two examples of this happening over the past year includes the work we did with the city of Las Vegas, who set up a municipal network to begin providing internet services for those in need; and school districts in Utah who are spearheading buildouts of private LTE networks for their students. In both cases, private LTE networks have been successful in getting internet to the communities and are now also growing and being used in IoT applications
Tara: What emerging trends/technologies have you observed in your tech segment in recent months?
Minchul: Generally, we’ve been seeing a growing need for private LTE and local 5G for indoor networks, such as hospitals and school districts. Communications are becoming much more important for everyday use and there needs to be a level of security and reliability that isn’t attainable with Wi-Fi.
However, this growing need for communications has resulted in a huge push to provide wider connectivity for IoT devices and sensors. In turn, this has resulted in a wave of innovative businesses attempting to find new ways to grow network coverage and utilize a crowd-funded approach to accomplish this goal. There has been a trend towards building out decentralized wireless networks that anyone can be a part of and participate in building, and for the people that participate in building this network, they are rewarded with various cryptocurrencies.
Speaking generally, the first major cryptocurrencies were generated by converting power into currency via a GPU or some other method. What we’re seeing now with these decentralized networks is a shift from converting power into cryptocurrency to converting wireless network coverage into cryptocurrency through decentralized networks that use blockchain technologies. To build these decentralized, blockchain networks, there’s a large need for accessible small cells that can utilize the extra security we see in LTE or 5G technologies and it has been incredible to see how this is changing the wireless ecosystem. We’re seeing a much larger ratio of consumers compared to enterprises building out these networks than we’ve ever seen in the past, as a direct result of these decentralized networks and how they’re enabling consumers to mine cryptocurrencies.
Minchul Ho is the GM of Baicells Technologies North America, a leading manufacturer of plug-and-play fixed wireless LTE and 5G hardware solutions. He is responsible for the company’s day-to-day operations and with growing the market presence of the company within the exploding CBRS technological ecosystem within the United States.
