British telecommunications giant Vodafone's 5G rollout in Spain in cooperation with Chinese telecom company Huawei gained support from experts and industry insiders, who said the technology will revolutionize the way we live.
Huawei is the principal provider in the rollout which saw 5G become a reality in 15 Spanish cities from Saturday, making Spain one of the first European countries to have the ultrafast mobile network in Europe.
"5G means immediacy, high speed and low latency (which is the time that passes between the sending and reception of information)," explained Fernando Tricas, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering at the University of Zaragoza, which is one of the cities where 5G is now available.
"5G and its immediacy will be vital, for example, for a doctor who is carrying out an operation at distance. It will be as if you were there and 'hands on,'" he added.
Luis Furnells, executive president of Spanish technology group 'Oesia,' said: "We are entering a new era in which everything -- people, contraptions and objects -- are going to be connected at any place and any moment."
"This new situation is going to see digital technology providers open new mobility services, which will mean a big change and an important advance in society," he said.
Alicia Asin, co-founder and chief executive of Libelium, a Spanish company which makes technology for smart cities, told Xinhua that 5G has three main advantages over 4G.
"It's faster; there is a greater network density to allow better connectivity in cities, where there will be more devices, and thirdly, the latency time is lower," she said.
Asin explained that the low latency times will make real-time operations possible, which will allow for distance operations and other virtual reality applications.
On Vodafone's cooperation with Huawei, Tricas said there are "very few network providers which are in the vanguard and Huawei is one of them."
The idea is shared by Daniel Sarasa, a Smart Cities Program manager with Zaragoza's local authority, who said Huawei has "an excellent position in the infrastructure market in Spain."
"There is a great deal of protectionism in the measures the United States are adopting against Huawei, because Huawei is treading on their heels," Sarasa said, adding that "many telecommunications operators are still working with Huawei and that says something."
With the launch of commercial 5G mobile services, Vodafone has become the first operator to make 5G services available to Spanish customers.
Tricas said he expected the technology to be "more available in around a year."
"At the moment there are only four or five companies -- all of which are high end -- which have 5G compatible smartphones on the market, and that means only a few people can buy them because they are expensive," he said.
In Zaragoza, said Sarasa, the first areas where 5G is available are streets in the business district "where we predict there will be intensive users or 'early adopters.'"
It is expected that more phones will be become available in the near future, as clients become aware of the quantum leap in technology which is now available to them, experts said.
