As the Internet of Things finds monetizable opportunities in the business world, pushing wireless connectivity beyond the limits of 4G is poised to be the next big step in accelerating device communication and overall functionality.

“5G is fundamentally different, because it brings together the computing and communication paradigms,” said Sandra Rivera (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of the Network Platforms Group at Intel.

Calling in from the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, Spain, to speak with John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, Rivera addressed the issues of deploying 5G infrastructure, the connected nature of future tech, network transformation and more. (*Disclosure below.)

As the work of circulating enormous amounts of data through the connections of tens of billions of things grows, the challenges of maintaining and improving IoT communications architectures are becoming more pronounced, while cloud, as both a technology and a business model, is asserting its own pressures on structuring, Rivera explained.

“Transformation of the underlying architecture … is really what we’re talking about when we talk about network transformation,” she said.

Revolution, not evolution

As 5G accelerates the countless endpoints within the Internet of Things, companies must balance existing technology with the potential of innovation, with efforts to “protect the software investment that the developers make,” Rivera noted.

At the same time, devising an effective and dynamic IT environment is key to enterprise operations. “All of that underlying hardware and silicon architecture … really needs to be served up … through a software [interface] that’s robust and comprehensive,” she said.

A useful guiding point for determined enterprises is to create “a network infrastructure that becomes a platform of innovation,” Rivera said, something that also supports Intel’s aims to innovate for existing markets and enabling new use-cases.

While many discussions of network transformation have commonly been “rooted in a desire to achieve a lower cost point,” as Rivera noted, the benefits of virtualization have extended beyond cost effectiveness. Listing a bevvy of real world examples where innovation was the driving force behind investments, from urban development to WiFi-enabled vehicles, Rivera shared her observation of a market shift that’s proven quite appealing to the CEOs and CFOs responsible for approving the investments necessary for further development. As such, executives are beginning to ask questions such as, “How do we really help to grow the top line, not just manage our cost?”

That aim of growing the top line revenue is driving enterprises and service providers involved in the network structuring to embrace a fundamentally different architectural model as “the wave of the future,” Rivera added.

“From a business perspective, [those] business services are clearly what the communications service providers are trying to deliver to the market and trying to do it in a way that embraces cloud with business models, but also working with all of the enterprises and the traditional businesses,” she said, even as those businesses are “disrupting themselves to embrace technology.”

In order to make these changes a reality, hesitation is not a tenable position. “5G starts today. … You really have to transform the network infrastructure today,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mobile World Congress 2017 Barcelona. (*Disclosure: Intel was the sponsor of this segment. Intel has no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE