mobile – Memphis Flyer

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“Feature-length HD movies can be downloaded faster than you can read this sentence.”

That’s a quote from the Verizon website about just how fast its 5G Ultra Wideband mobile service will be for consumers.

Verizon’s network is coming to 20 U.S. cities this year. And, as a surprise to the cynical Memphian inside some of us, Memphis made the cut, and the network is expected to radiate across the city soon.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s office announced Thursday that Verizon had chosen the city. The service is already live in Chicago and Minneapolis.

“Today’s announcement is just the start for Memphis and we’re excited to bring the game-changing power of 5G Ultra Wideband service to consumers, business, and government agencies in 2019,” Kyle Malady, Verizon’s chief technology officer said in a statement.

How big of a deal is this? Well, according to Strickland and Verizon, it’s a big deal.

Strickland seemed convinced that making the cut was “another testament that our momentum is real and will play a large part in continuing to advance equitable economic development throughout our city.” (The statement from Memphis City Hall ensured Strickland’s election-year buzzword “momentum” was introduced somewhere into the news cycle.)

Verizon said the new network has the potential to affect ”artificial intelligence, education, healthcare, robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT).”
[pullquote-1] “With its gigabit speeds and unprecedented response times, 5G can be thought of as the ’secret sauce’ that will make driverless cars, cloud-connected traffic control, and other applications that depend on instantaneous response and data analysis live up to their potential,” reads the Verizon website on its 5G network. “The possibilities are limitless.”

Verizon website says 5G isn’t just another iteration of the wireless network. It’ll be 20 times faster than the current 4G network, “making lag times nearly impossible to detect.” With this, augmented reality and virtual reality applications can work “seamlessly,” Verizon said. Also, industrial and machinery and robotics can be controlled remotely, it said.

Verizon/Facebook

Verizon said 5G will create jobs (but it didn’t specify what kinds of jobs those are or where they’d be located).

“By 2035, 5G will enable $12.3 trillion of global economic output and support 22 million jobs worldwide,” Ronan Dunne, executive vice president and group president of Verizon Wireless said in a statement. “Much of that growth will come from the digitization of transportation, agriculture, manufacturing and other physical industries.” Transportation. Agriculture. Manufacturing. A whole lot of each of those exists in the Memphis economic region. But you’ll only be able to connect to the lightning-fast new 5G network with a 5G-enabled device. If you have one, and you leave the 5G network zone, you’ll be automatically handed off to the current 4G network, Verizon said.

The other cities to get 5G this year are: Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Des Moines, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Little Rock, Phoenix, Providence, San Diego, Salt Lake City, and Washington D.C.

Memphis is already home to two biodiesel manufacturers: Milagro Biofuels and Memphis Biofuels. But by next year, the University of Memphis will be making its own biodiesel — and this unit will be on wheels.

The school recently won a $99,000 state grant to make a mobile biodiesel mini-manufacturing unit. The small plant will be taken to area high schools and events to demonstrate how biodiesel is made.

“We’re hoping to advance the manufacture of biodiesel while informing the public,” says John Hochstein, engineering department chair. Biodiesel is a clean-burning fuel produced from renewable resources such as soybean oil, cottonseed oil, and even animal fat. It produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than regular diesel.

The idea for the grant stemmed from one of professor Srikant Gir’s engineering classes, in which students worked together to build a very small biodiesel unit.

“The system the students put together is very nice, but it puts out fuel on a small scale. We’re talking maybe a quart at a time,” Gir says.

But the unit inspired Gir to find funding for a larger, mobile unit.

Once the mobile unit is complete, on-campus cafeterias will donate used vegetable oil to the engineering department. Part of the grant also funds testing equipment so the university can ensure the fuel it produces is suitable for use in vehicles. After the fuel has undergone testing, it will be used in university vehicles.

“We’re not making this to sell on the open market,” Hochstein says. “We’re just trying to make a closed loop on campus. It’s both economically and environmentally positive for the university.”

Andrew Couch, a biofuels advocate with the West Tennessee Clean Cities Coalition, says the mobile facility will create a first generation of college-educated workers with specialties in biodiesel.

“People are going to have a better understanding of what biofuels are before they get jobs working at biofuels plants,” Couch says. “Most people now working in biofuels have come from other process technologies, like chemical plants or food plants. In the future, we’ll have workers who have worked with biofuels in college.”