Latest / The 5G Podcast with Fexingo: Wireless Networks, Carriers, and Mobile Infrastructure / How 5G Is Enabling Telemedicine's Next Phase
Transcript
- Lucas: You know, when most people hear 'telemedicine,' they think of a video call with a doctor — which is fine for a sinus infection. But the real shift happening in 2026 is 5G enabling actual remote procedures, not just consultations. Luna: Right — the kind where the doctor is miles away but the patient is on a table. That's a whole different latency requirement. Lucas: Exactly. And we've got a concrete example that's already rolling out. The UK's National Health Service started a pilot last year where 5G-connected ambulances transmit CT scans to hospital radiologists while the patient is still en route. That means the stroke team can have the scan interpreted before the ambulance even arrives. Luna: That's huge for time-sensitive conditions like stroke. Every minute saved reduces brain damage. But what does the network actually need to pull that off? Lucas: So, a typical CT scan is a data-heavy file — we're talking hundreds of megabytes per study. Transmitting that over a congested 4G network could take minutes or fail entirely. With 5G, specifically using a dedicated network slice, you get guaranteed bandwidth and latency under 20 milliseconds. Luna: And that's not just for file transfer. For something like remote robotic surgery, you'd need even lower latency — under 10 milliseconds — for the haptic feedback to feel natural. Lucas: Right. The NHS pilot isn't doing surgery yet; it's focused on diagnostics in transit. But it's a proof point for the infrastructure. And the business model is interesting too. Carriers like Vodafone aren't selling 'a data plan for ambulances.' They're selling a service-level agreement with guaranteed uptime and latency. Luna: That flips the carrier's role from a utility to something more like a managed service provider. And the price tag reflects that — higher revenue per connection, but also higher accountability. Lucas: Yeah. In the UK, Vodafone's healthcare division has been signing multi-year contracts with NHS trusts. The ambulance slice is one application, but the same infrastructure can support remote patient monitoring, connected ambulances, and eventually tele-surgery. The key is that the network slicing technology — standardized in 5G Release 16 and 17 — makes it possible to carve out a virtual network with guaranteed performance. Luna: So it's not just about speed. It's about reliability and predictability. If you're a hospital, you need to know that when a surgeon moves a joystick, the robotic arm moves exactly 50 milliseconds later, not 200. Lucas: Exactly. And that's where the 5G standard's ultra-reliable low-latency communications — URLLC — comes in. It's designed for exactly this kind of mission-critical application. The technology exists. Now it's about deployment and adoption. Luna: And there's a parallel track in the US. Verizon has been working with several academic medical centers — I think Johns Hopkins and UCSF — on remote ultrasound and even telerobotic procedures. They're using 5G millimeter wave for the high bandwidth. Lucas: Yeah, millimeter wave gets criticized for poor range, but in a hospital campus or a fixed surgical suite, that's less of a problem. You can install small cells in the operating room and get multi-gigabit speeds with single-digit millisecond latency. The challenge is when you try to extend that to ambulances moving at highway speeds. Luna: That's where mid-band spectrum — like the 3.5 gigahertz range — is more practical. It balances coverage and capacity. And that's what most operators are using for their wide-area 5G coverage today. Lucas: Right. So the NHS ambulance pilot uses Vodafone's mid-band 5G with network slicing. And they're seeing transmission times for a CT scan drop from about four minutes on 4G to under 30 seconds on 5G. That's a meaningful difference when every second counts. Luna: By the way — and this is a bit of a shift but it's related — we've been talking about how these real-world applications depend on robust network infrastructure. And one reason we can dive into topics like this is that this show is completely ad-free. We don't run commercials, no sponsors interrupting the conversation. If you find that valuable, you can support the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It helps us keep the focus on the tech, not on selling you something. Lucas: Yeah, and we appreciate everyone who contributes. It lets us spend time on things like the latency architecture behind remote surgery, which is way more interesting than reading a mattress ad. So, back to the NHS pilot — another angle is how the data is handled. Luna: Because it's medical data, so privacy and security are paramount. How does 5G address that? Lucas: Network slicing itself provides isolation. But on top of that, the NHS requires end to end encryption and that the slice is not shared with consumer traffic. Vodafone's implementation uses a dedicated core network for healthcare traffic. So the slice is basically a private network within the public network. Luna: That's similar to what we've seen in manufacturing — private 5G networks for factories. But in healthcare, the regulatory overlay is much stricter. You've got HIPAA in the US, GDPR in Europe, and the NHS's own data governance framework. Lucas: Right. And that's actually a barrier to faster adoption. Every hospital trust or health system needs to do its own security audit, negotiate the SLA, and often run pilot programs before they sign a multi-year contract. So the technology is ready, but the procurement cycle is slow. Luna: But once those contracts are in place, the revenue for the carrier is sticky. Vodafone's healthcare unit reported something like 20 percent year-over-year growth in connected health contracts for fiscal 2025. And that's before tele-surgery goes mainstream. Lucas: And tele-surgery is the big prize. There are already fda approved robotic systems like the da Vinci, but they're typically controlled from within the same room. Extending that over a wide-area network requires not just low latency but jitter — variation in delay — to be extremely low. If the delay jumps from 10 milliseconds to 50, the surgeon could make a mistake. Luna: So network slicing has to guarantee not just average latency but maximum latency. That's a tougher sell for a network that's also streaming Netflix. But 5G's quality of service framework can prioritize that traffic. Lucas: Exactly. And some operators are taking it a step further. In South Korea, SK Telecom has been testing a dedicated 5G network for hospitals that's physically separate from the public network — basically a private 5G deployment on the hospital campus. That gives them full control over the radio environment. Luna: That might be the model for the first tele-surgery trials. Start with a controlled environment — dedicated small cells, no interference from other users — and then slowly expand to wider-area coverage as the technology matures. Lucas: And that's exactly what we're seeing. The first telesurgery procedures under 5G have been done in China and South Korea, with surgeons controlling robotic arms over distances of a few hundred kilometers. They're still in clinical trial phases, but the results have been promising. Luna: So if we look ahead, say, three to five years, what's the realistic adoption curve? Will we see routine remote surgery in rural hospitals? Lucas: I think the diagnostic applications — like the ambulance CT scan — will become standard within two years. For surgery, it's more like five to seven years, mostly because of regulatory approval cycles and liability concerns. But the infrastructure is being built now. Every new 5G small cell in a hospital is a step toward that future. Luna: And the financial incentive is clear: if a rural hospital can avoid transferring a stroke patient to a major city, that saves the system tens of thousands of dollars per case. The ROI for a 5G slice is easy to justify. Lucas: Especially when you consider that the same slice can be used for multiple applications — remote monitoring, tele icu, virtual nursing. The unit cost per use case drops as you add more services over the same infrastructure. Luna: So it's not just a technology story. It's a business model story. And it's happening quietly, without fanfare, in ambulance bays and operating rooms right now. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the kind of 5G story that doesn't make headlines but will fundamentally change how healthcare is delivered. I think we'll look back in ten years and see this as one of the killer apps for 5G. Luna: Absolutely. Thanks for diving into this one with me. Lucas: Always. And for our listeners, if you want to keep hearing about the real 5G applications — not just speed tests — you know where to find us.