MDC Newsroom
Over the past five years, we have heard about the technologies that promise to capture most of the Internet traffic, and we all ask ourselves the same question. Will we be ready for when these trends take off?
We created a small list of trends complemented with some facts and figures from the region.
1. Internet of Things:
It is estimated that Mexico will go from two “things” connected per person in 2015 to seven in 2020 and an accelerator may be the arrival of Google Home in the country. As announced in the Google I / O 2018, the smart assistant speaker arrived in Mexico in June of this year.
Its arrival predicts a rebound of the IoT in the region, however until now the telecommunications networks in Mexico are in the process of transformation towards the fourth-generation LTE technology, which aims to activate around 500 million 5G subscriptions by the year 2022. Embracing 5G will be fundamental for a better performance of the Internet of Things (IoT) in Mexico.
With the adoption of technologies that facilitate the use of IoT, data centers will play a strategic role to achieve higher efficiency when using resources and energy.
2. Blockchain:
In Mexico, 2018 will be the year of the first steps for hundreds of companies that intend to replicate the blockchain model in their industries. In the country, BBVA Bancomer and Wave reduced the operating time from seven days to two and a half hours through the automation of smart contracts.
What are the blockchain’s challenges for its massive use? The digital nature of the distributed ledger means that transactions within a chain of blocks can be linked to computational logic and automatically programmed through the solving of mathematical puzzles, which demands a massive data and energy consumption. For example, a single bitcoin transaction (the first technology to use a blockchain for its operation) uses 200 kilowatts per hour.
Although we still don’t see the blockchain operating in specific industries, the technology is already present in sectors such as banking, insurance, medicine, among many others to make transactions faster and more transparent for the benefit of users.
3. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality:
Technologies that do not yet have an accelerated implementation in the business sectors -with the exception of the entertainment and advertising industry-, however, their use has been taken quite seriously in industries such as health, education, agriculture or logistics.
The market for virtual reality (VR) is growing; according to a report by Business Insider, it is expected that by 2022 more than 50 million devices associated with this technology will be sold, such as glasses and hearing aids, which must be connected with various devices to create immersive experiences.
For its part, augmented reality (AR) begins to materialize thanks to large operators such as Google and Facebook that have officially announced APIs, platforms, and tools for companies to make use of augmented reality for advertising purposes.
Read on: What do the latest Facebook and Google ads mean for network operators?
4. Edge computing:
With the aforementioned technologies we can say that Edge Computing closes our list of trends, as it is the technology that allows data produced by the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain transactions or advertising through AR to be processed geographically closer to where they are created, instead of sending them through long routes to data centers or clouds.
According to IDC Edge computing is “a mesh network of microdata centers that process or store critical data locally and push all received data to a central data center or cloud storage repository, on a surface of less than 100 square feet”.
Edge computing represents an exciting opportunity, especially for emerging markets such as Mexico, an area with a massive demand for content and connectivity. Edge computing reduces latency because data does not have to go through a network to a data center or the cloud for processing. This is ideal for latency-sensitive applications where each millisecond costs money.
You will be interested: Livin ‘on the Edge: Our role in the transformation of the Internet
All these trends are part of the same ecosystem, they need each other to be used, and although we see early growth, for now, it is essential to pay attention to the strategic movements of the market.
Marco Chapa, director of the Axtel Innovation program, commented that “the more than 500 acquisitions made by the 10 largest technology companies in the world – Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Intel, IBM, Cisco and Qualcomm – in the last five years are mostly aimed at startups dedicated to Artificial Intelligence (51%), mobility (47%) and big data (36%) “.
