Embrace it or disdain it, the 5G data revolution is coming either way. 5G's ultrafast speeds will soon land on new phones, starting at the high end. But we've already learned what these first-generation 5G phones will be like, and they shed light on some of the challenges that everyone might face in these early days of 5G. We've tested 5G speeds in multiple cities around the world, from Los Angeles to Seoul. We've been wowed. We've been frustrated. But each time, we learn something new about the 5G experience.
5G phones are in very few pockets today, but this next-generation wireless technology is widely accepted as the most significant advancement to come to phones in a decade. The new technology is characterized by ultrafast speeds that can download movies in seconds and enable huge chunks of data to transfer between the phone and the network with limited lag.
But 5G has also been the subject of intense focus by countries whose governments see the race to 5G as a proxy for their political and economic strength -- just look at how 5G is embroiled in the trade war between the US and China.
Here are our biggest takeaways about 5G data so far, based on the testing we've done over the last few months.
1. Consistency is more satisfying than speed
For some future uses of 5G, pushing down a lot of data really quickly will let you do cool, resource-intensive things on the fly, like play smooth, real-time games with high-res graphics and participate in lag-free video chats while walking down the street.
Carriers with faster 5G speeds theoretically have the advantage over those that don't in how quickly they can get you the data you need. And yet, the high-frequency spectrum that makes those skyrocketing speeds possible for 5G, called millimeter wave (mmWave), isn't good at traveling long distances, or getting through glass or walls the way that 4G can. That makes coverage limited.
Bouncing between 5G and 4G speeds has been frustrating in our real-world tests when, in one location, your entire Netflix series could download in 3 minutes, and in another, it takes over 10 minutes.
We had a better overall experience using Sprint because its 5G network covers a larger area, which kept the data flowing more predictably. Sprint uses a different layer of the spectrum, called sub-6Ghz, or sub-6. Those longer wavelengths don't bring quite as much speed, but they do travel farther, even through building and car windows.
The fastest-possible downloads are exhilarating, but in these early days, the rush doesn't last.
2. Gap between have and have-nots will widen
That rush you get when you download a whole season of a TV series in mere seconds isn't just exhilarating, it's addicting. The baseline changes. Even in my early tests, I caught myself feeling disappointed if I "only" recorded 400 megabits per second on the Speedtest.net app and not a gig.
With carriers, phone-makers and even presidents feeding the 5G hype machine, it's easy to see how a bias for ultrafast speeds could develop among everyday people. It's easy to see how people who don't live in the right metropolitan areas, or who live in rural surroundings, will trail behind in 5G adoption.
Some countries -- like the US, UK, Australia, South Korea, and Switzerland -- are ahead of the curve with 5G, while other world powers -- China, Japan, Russia, for example -- aim for a 2020 rollout.
As with the switchover from 3G to 4G, staggered adoption is to be expected. But when the gulf between 4G and 5G speeds -- and what you can do with them -- is so large, it's quite possible for that gap to widen even more.
We found two notable exceptions to this emerging sensibility. One is that 4G networks will get faster alongside 5G growth. The other is that in countries with exceptionally fast 4G service, like Australia, we won't see dramatic differences in real-world activities over 5G and 4G -- at least not at first.
3. 5G phones are expensive
Phone prices are already spiking year over year, far outstripping the cost of inflation. 5G raises those costs.
5G phones have to have a compatible chip to connect to 5G networks, which means mobile chipmakers can charge more. So far, most 5G phones we've used so far have been premium devices, which means you're also tacking on extra for fancier cameras and other specs.
4. But we don't want to pay more for 5G
The cost of the phone doesn't even consider the cost of service. Carriers have spent billions of dollars building out 5G networks. In the US, at least, the plan is to recoup some of that expense by charging you more per month to use 5G data (perhaps a lot more of it, too).
But we don't think today's spotty 5G service is worth paying more for, not right now. Verizon has temporarily waived its $10 per month 5G surcharge. In Europe, the trend is to bundle extra services into your unlimited data plan -- without charging exorbitant fees. Vodafone will charge for unlimited 5G based on the speed bracket you want. For example, you'll pay less if you don't mind slower 5G speeds, and more if you want to stream video.
We think European carriers are on the right track. More people will upgrade from 4G to 5G if they sweeten the deal, not if they sour it with charge upon charge.
Here's how to pick the best 5G network when the time is right.
5. You may also pay a price with battery life
You could pay more than just cash for 5G speeds. CNET's global testers noticed that using 5G on phones seemed to tap their battery reserves faster than 4G networks.
After at least four hours apiece of relentless 5G testing, the batteries on our test phones drained significantly. In the case of some phones, four hours of testing completely zapped the Mod attachment, which cut off 5G capability.
6. The weather could get in your way
Scientists worry that 5G radio signals could throw weather forecasting out of whack, but it's the weather itself that buyers should also consider.
Soaring July temperatures brought the point to bear during two of our tests. Some phones use the high-frequency mWave spectrum, which puts the devices at greater risk of overheating, especially when completing resource-heavy tasks like streaming video or creating advanced photography effects.
About us:
TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/
Technology is growing at an unimaginable speed and the impact it has on every sector is unfathomable. A report by Global market insights pegs the growth of the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market to reach $5bn by 2024. According to this report, the healthcare segment specifically is expected to be one of the fastest-growing sectors over this forecast period.
Healthcare organizations are increasingly becoming conscious about improving costs as well as the quality of service to consumers. In India, a key challenge organizations face is managing and processing the information they currently possess as physical documents or paper trails. This includes information from internal and external sources, billings, claims management, patient enrollment, reports, etc. Integration of this data can help healthcare organizations identify existing gaps across all processes and automate mundane, repetitive tasks as well.
Currently, several leading healthcare organizations globally are piloting RPA initiatives while working on integrating RPA tools within their existing IT environments. Primary RPA use cases in healthcare are centred on improving throughput, reducing manual effort and efficacy of standardized, large-scale processes. For example, speeding up claims data processing and claims management for insurers, lowering FWA (fraud, waste and abuse) in claims management and sharing information with patients, setting appointments and improving patient engagement using chatbots. RPA, along with cognitive automation can help accelerate patient support in various channels to speed up clinical support, monitoring medical lapses, and feeding information the patients are looking for.
A leading U.S. revenue cycle management (RCM) service provider leveraged an RPA solution that fully automated the service provider’s complete eligibility and benefits confirmation process. The system, running 22 hours a day, five days a week had 23 software bots automatically extract patient appointment lists from each healthcare provider’s practice portal across all provider locations, prioritize the appointments for further processing and extract appointment details by accessing different applications and screens. This further led to consolidated output reports to confirm whether patients are eligible for benefits and validate and update eligibility and benefits details in each portal.
In another deployment, a hospital in Texas was challenged with the anticipated need to increase staffing from 350 professionals to more than 1,100 in less than a year. They streamlined processing of their monthly data load that was error-prone, tim e-consuming and costly, all with the use of RPA. The deployment also enabled them to validate payment accuracy on test claims, manage and monitor day-to-day activity and process the low-to-medium complexity work, that signifies majority of claims collected and tuned it to process many common controls.
Another successful utilization of RPA was used for direct data capture deployment to connect disparate data systems. The solution automates the extraction of all provider information from the customer’s system into a unified spreadsheet for easy lookup. A software bot was deployed to update new provider information daily. All information was uploaded into a single view within the interface, that resulted in simplified data storage and retrieval, reduced workforce demand and flexible, scalable bot deployment.
A downside of leveraging RPA in healthcare is that it can only process structured data and work with a rule-based approach. However, with the help of cognitive technologies and machine learning in healthcare, RPA can process unstructured data and make informed decisions.
The future of healthcare could look very different when technologies like RPA come into play. Automating routine tasks could reduce task time and eliminate manual errors while improving the patient experience. As organizations progress from depending on manual tasks to applying RPA and cognitive computing, the workforce also shifts from being “doers” to “reviewers.” Health IT leaders and providers should focus on developing proactive, winning strategies to attain long-term financial sustainability and improved patient experience.
As RPA is emerging as the most affordable and flexible option, India is poised to appear as a front-runner in its establishment and benefit significantly from this opportunity.
About us:
TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/
Processing and collecting data is daily routine of well-versed accounting and finance departments; yet repetitive manual work, large volumes of data can pose a challenge for enterprises.
All industries are widely embrace automation. An increase in the use of software robots in organisations means they are realizing benefits such as the optimization of logistics, particularly in managing inventory and finance functions.
From a recent report done by Ernst and Young, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is estimated to reduce business costs 50 to 70 percent. Finance processes is rapidly transformed by automation. Credit limit request underwriting, optimising end-of-month accounting and streamlining accounts payable are just a few of the benefits RPA offers.
A new beginning for end-of-month accounting
Accounts departments often suffer from a crippling end-of-month run of transactions, with many manhours being swallowed up by increasing average transaction handling times. Because of some departments requiring multiple applications for different parts, lengthy rules-based processes can consume a great amount of time.
Businesses can use RPA to automate these lengthy processes and eliminate process errors and drastically reduce processing time, removing significant pressure from accounting teams. This will lead to an increase in energy and empowerment, allowing staff to focus on more strategic and engaging tasks. Businesses are quickly experiencing return on investment due to this increased productivity within their accounting departments, with employee engagement rising through a reduction in hours spent on repetitive tasks.
Automated accounts payable
One of the biggest productivity killers for accounts teams is arguably processing invoices. A solution featuring intelligent Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is offered by RPA, which creates a fully automated process. Data can be autonomously extracted from invoices via email and validate information by OCR, for example the cost per item or number of items, against the purchase order and goods received.
Streamlining accounts payable with automation allows businesses to shift the operational focus of accounts to processes of higher importance. Autonomously processing invoices allows more manpower to be dedicated to improving the customer and the supplier experience and leaves more time to work on other accounting tasks and new initiatives.
Automatically underwriting
Despite credit limit request underwriting being a key process for several organisations, it is also an expensive and highly repetitive process. Time and cost can be dramatically reduced by RPA because of collecting, assembling and presenting data automatically on a dashboard, ready for underwriters to assess.
On occasion, RPA can process the data for credit limit requests within just an hour of receipt. The time saved allows underwriters to focus on higher value customer interactions, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.
Transforming global finance delivery
Global finance delivery processes often include several sub-processes such as foot, cross-footing, checking for internal consistency, recalculating balance time sheets and PY tie outs. The completion of reports can require complex and time-consuming solutions but is largely repetitive.
Using an RPA solution that includes natural language processing (NLP), businesses can analyse textual contexts, extract tables in PDFs, and validate primary balance sheets and other financial data.
Only efficiency in RPA
Because of significant gains provided by RPA, including increased productivity, precision and speed, the speculation over robots ‘stealing jobs' is lessening as it is more widely implemented. However, it is not just immense cost savings that RPA provides. More importantly it relieves staff of monotonous activities involved with collating and exchanging data between systems. With RPA, staff can focus more on valuable, strategic and interesting work, which will inspire energy and empowerment in the workplace.
By introducing an RPA system that integrates intelligent OCR and NLP tools, the strains of end-of-month accounting, accounts payable, credit limit request underwriting and global finance delivery services can be significantly lessened. Businesses, staff, suppliers and customers are all able to reap the benefits of the RPA platform.
About us:
TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/
Research indicates that employees understand the benefits of robotic process automation (RPA) and are more willing to use it to help them deliver better service experiences
75% of employees believe RPA will improve their performance, reduce errors, grow sales and increase customer experience, according to a survey by a computer software company named A.
More than 2000 employees in the US and UK were surveyed for company A’s State of Automation in Customer Service survey. Significantly, managers and employees both believe in the benefits of automation, but for different reasons.
In the US, 34% of managers managing employees in customer-facing roles believe that RPA helps their company deliver better customer experiences. In the UK, 31% believe that RPA enhances overall sales or saves the company money. When it comes to employees executing back-office tasks, both respondents in the US and UK believe that RPA will be most beneficial for reducing errors and ensuring compliance (over 40%).
When looking specifically at respondents that perform back-office work, the desire for automation around data-related tasks is significant: 40% of U.S. back-office employees and 42% of UK back-office employees said RPA would be most beneficial for accurately processing data, tasks, forms and reports.
Employees also voiced frustration around being bogged down with repetitive tasks. Most employees said they spend over 50% of their working day on repetitive tasks, often a source of employee frustration and turnover that can ultimately result in poor customer service. A quarter of respondents said that over 75% of their working day is taken up by repetitive tasks.
“This survey is a distinct indicator of the shift in mindset within the customer service industry, marking an exciting time for enterprises to invest in intelligent, employee-centric solutions such as company A's RPA,” the President of company A's Product Group, said. “Employees and managers alike now more clearly understand the benefits of RPA and are ready to embrace it. Delivering exceptional customer experience is essential. Brands will only succeed if they provide employees with solutions that help them focus on customer service and alleviate them of repetitive tasks.”
About us:
TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/
Employees and contractors at a medical center named A spend countless hours every year reviewing thousands of medical records to ensure the accuracy of its advantage payments. An automated intake tool is working to change that.
Using emerging technologies such as robotic process automation, optical character recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the Intake Process Automation Tool of a company named B ingests records as they are submitted and identifies potential problems according to set parameters, submission rules and coding guidance. Specifically, RPA orchestrates the steps of the intake process, OCR digitizes the scanned document and then AI and machine learning are applied to understand the document and extract the information necessary to validate the information.
Intake Process Automation (PA) stands to save the medical center A time and money, said company B's lead director for intelligent automation for governments and the technical lead for the medical center A project. The tool processes a record in about a minute, whereas human reviewers average about 65 minutes per record. The agency received 40,000 records in 2018 and expects to get 50,000 this year.
To submit records, health care providers scan them in, resulting in varying formats and lengths. “It could go anywhere a few pages to over 1,000 pages,” company B's lead director said. “Because they’re scanned in, there’s sometimes handwriting in them.”
In the past, medical center A's staff reviewed all that unstructured data, making sure the scans of records were rotated properly and going page by page to check that they had the right date of service, provider and beneficiary.
Now, OCR handles the digitization, but to make sure that names, birthdates and other identifiers within one record match, company B created microservices that use natural language processing and machine learning to distinguish between a date of birth and a date of service. Once that data is in a structured format, it’s possible to do the validations automatically for each page, company B's lead director said.
“If you look at a medical record, you may have multiple names in there,” he said. “You may have the patient name, you may have the physician name, you may have a nurse name, you may have a street name. To a human, it’s pretty easy to differentiate between them, but if you have a machine looking at it, that’s where we’re using natural language processing and machine learning to understand the document like a person would.”
Much of the tool is new technology that center A did not have, the lead director said. His team saw the highly manual, repetitive process as a good use case for RPA, but RPA is not ideal for unstructured data or making decisions, he added. That’s where AI and the company B's AI platform come in. It has natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to help understand the unstructured data in the documents.
Besides time savings, company B's lead director sees two other benefits to the tool. The first is cost savings because center A doesn’t have to pay employees or contractors to handle the repetitive tasks and PA Intake can run 24/7. Still, the tool doesn’t completely remove humans from the review process. If the tool doesn’t have high confidence in the decision it made, the record will go to a person for verification.
“There are still some steps that cannot be automated or haven’t been automated yet or regulations don’t allow them to be automated,” company B's lead director said. “But the expectation is that they’re going to get done faster.” And that translates to faster feedback to providers and better job satisfaction because workers are looking only at complicated records, not checking all the information on every single one.
Another perk is increased accuracy. In fact, the tool returns 95 percent accuracy, and a test found cases in which the bot discovered something invalid that a human had overlooked. “If you’re looking at 1,000 pages, it’s easy as a human to miss some of these things,” the lead director said.
Since the PA Intake went live in April, it has processed more than 6,000 records. Currently, center A is using one tool, but it hopes to have multiple bots up and running to speed the process further. In the fall, company B expects to add more validations such as whether the forms have signatures.
About us:
TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/
