Business Over Pleasure: Why 5G Will Mean More for Fish Farmers Than Video Streamers

Want to find the real market for 5G? Look past consumers streaming movies on their mobile phones, and towards Norwegian fish farmers, instead.

“A telecom operator can’t monetize speed to make a user happier and get more money from them. So to monetize speed for consumers is very difficult,” said Paul Scanlan, Chief Technology officer of Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecoms company arguably leading the world in 5G. “The real money and the real transformation for society, which is what 5G [is] about, is in the enterprise or B2B business.”

Speaking at the Fortune Global Tech Forum, in Guangzhou, China on Thursday, Scanlan said that for telecom operators, such as China’s Big Three—China Unicom, China Telecom and China Mobile, which all announced the rollout of 5G service plans last week—the focus is instead on businesses.

Superfast speed is certainly the aspect of 5G easiest for consumers to grasp. On smartphones, or even laptops, 5G means downloading movies in seconds or streaming games with zero lag in gameplay.

But in reality, 5G’s transformative powers lie in providing the speed and coverage that, combined with A.I., creates the infrastructure to completely transform industries, from manufacturing to, yes, Norwegian fish farming.

“In Norway we have a concept called ‘facial recognition of fish’,” Scanlan says, describing a Huawei partnership in the Scandinavian country where fish farmers are experimenting with deploying 5G to help monitor their fisheries.

Currently, Scanlan says, monitoring equipment deployed on the fisheries is connected to land via undersea fiber optic cable, which is difficult to maintain, and is managed by staff on boats.

“When we do 5G, we’re bringing in 5G from the coastline directly to this fish farm. So we save money because we don’t need people; we can run high-quality cameras, which is why we can recognize the parasites on this fish—and, yes, recognize the fish themselves,” he said. “This all increases productivity, which lowers costs, and the farmers make more money.”