Latest / The 5G Podcast with Fexingo: Wireless Networks, Carriers, and Mobile Infrastructure / How 5G Is Quietly Transforming the Dental Industry
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to start today with a number that stopped me cold: about 40 percent of dental practices in the U.S. still run their imaging and patient records over Wi-Fi that was installed before the pandemic. Luna: And that Wi-Fi is usually the same network that schedules appointments, streams music in the lobby, and runs the front-desk credit card terminal. Lucas: Exactly. So when a dentist goes to pull up a high-resolution panoramic X-ray — which can be 50 to 100 megabytes — the whole network can bog down. And that's where 5G starts to look less like a smartphone upgrade and more like a clinical tool. Luna: Okay, so we're talking about private 5G networks inside dental offices, not just the public macro network. Lucas: Right. There's a chain in the Midwest — I won't name them because the data isn't public yet — but they put in a small-scale private 5G setup in three of their busiest clinics about 18 months ago. And they tracked a few things. Average time from the intraoral scan to the model appearing on the dentist's chairside tablet dropped from about 12 seconds to under two. Luna: Ten seconds might not sound huge, but in a practice seeing thirty patients a day, that's five minutes saved per scan. Several scans per patient, multiple patients — it adds up. Lucas: It's not just speed. It's that the dentist no longer has to wait for the image to load before moving to the next step. The scan is there, essentially, before the wand leaves the patient's mouth. That changes the workflow. Assistants can queue up images faster, and the dentist can pull up a side-by-side comparison with last year's X-ray without any loading spinner. Luna: And this is where network slicing comes in, right? Because a dental office also has IoT sensors — like sterilization monitors, temperature logs for the autoclave, maybe even connected handpieces. Lucas: That's the part I find most interesting. 5G network slicing lets the practice carve out a dedicated slice with guaranteed bandwidth and ultra-low latency for clinical data, while routine admin traffic — scheduling, billing, email — goes on a separate slice. So the panoramic X-ray doesn't compete with the credit card terminal. Luna: That's the dream. But how many practices are actually doing that today? I mean, private 5G isn't cheap. Lucas: It's still early. The big dental service organizations — the ones that own hundreds of practices — are the ones testing it. There's a company called Heartland Dental, which is one of the largest DSOs in North America, and they've been piloting private 5G in about a dozen locations. The ROI case isn't about bandwidth per se; it's about chair time. Luna: Because if a dentist can see one more patient per day because the technology doesn't slow them down, that's significant revenue. Lucas: Exactly. And there's the tele-dentistry angle too. A lot of rural clinics rely on specialists who consult remotely. With 5G, a periodontist can review a live 3D scan from a hundred miles away with no perceptible lag. They can even guide the local dentist in real time, marking up the image on their own screen and seeing the changes instantly on the chairside tablet. Luna: That's a level of remote interaction that's really hard to pull off on even a good Wi-Fi connection, because the latency jitter can be unpredictable. Lucas: The other area I'd point to is the instruments themselves. There's a new generation of smart handpieces — drills and scalers with embedded sensors that measure torque, temperature, vibration — and they generate data in real time. Some of these tools are designed to give feedback to the dentist, like 'you're applying too much pressure' or 'the bone density here is lower than expected.' Luna: And that data needs to be streamed and processed with very low latency, ideally on the edge, not sent to some cloud server two hundred miles away. Lucas: Right. 5G with mobile edge computing means the processing happens at a local node, often right in the clinic or at a nearby tower. So the feedback loop is under ten milliseconds. That's fast enough for haptic feedback — the handpiece can actually vibrate differently to alert the dentist. Luna: That's amazing. But also a little unsettling. I'm not sure I want my dentist's drill connected to the internet. Lucas: Fair point. Security is a real concern. The more connected devices in a practice, the larger the attack surface. That's another reason some DSOs are leaning toward private 5G — because they can control the network end to end, rather than relying on public Wi-Fi with whatever firewall the practice manager set up. Luna: So the argument is that private 5G isn't just faster, it's actually more secure than the alternative if done right. Lucas: That's the pitch. And if today's conversation gave you something useful — maybe you're a dentist, or you work with healthcare technology — it's worth knowing that this show stays ad-free because listeners choose to support it. You can find that at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: And it genuinely helps. We don't run sponsors, so this is how the podcast keeps going. Lucas: Anyway — back to the drills. I want to talk about one specific implant surgery workflow that's been redesigned around 5G. Luna: Let's hear it. Lucas: So implant placement used to involve taking a physical impression with putty, sending it to a lab, waiting for a model, and then doing the surgery weeks later. Now, with an intraoral scanner and 5G, the scan is sent to a milling machine in the same city — or even in the same building — and the surgical guide can be 3D-printed in about an hour. Luna: And during the surgery itself, there's software that overlays the planned implant position onto a live video feed from a camera in the operatory. That augmented reality overlay needs to stay aligned as the patient or the camera moves. Lucas: Which is incredibly latency-sensitive. If the overlay lags by even half a second, the dentist is placing the implant in the wrong spot. So the network has to deliver that video stream and the tracking data with essentially zero jitter. That's where 5G's deterministic latency — the ability to guarantee a certain latency — becomes a clinical requirement. Luna: And Wi-Fi, even Wi-Fi 6, can't guarantee that in a busy environment because of contention from other devices. Lucas: Right. Wi-Fi is shared, best-effort. 5G network slicing can give the AR application its own lane. One dental tech company I spoke with said they're working on a subscription model where a practice pays for a 'surgical precision' slice that's separate from everything else. Luna: It's almost like the practice becomes a mini smart factory, with the patient as the product. Lucas: That's a vivid way to put it. But it's not just about high-end implant surgery. Even routine cleanings benefit. Some practices are testing AI that analyzes intraoral images in real time to flag potential cavities or gum disease, and that AI can run on the edge node if the network is fast enough. Luna: So the hygienist takes a photo, and within seconds the AI highlights areas of concern. That could help standardize diagnoses across a multi-location practice. Lucas: Exactly. And it reduces the variability between different hygienists' assessments. One study I saw showed that ai assisted detection caught about 20 percent more proximal caries than visual exam alone. Luna: So we're talking about better outcomes, not just faster Wi-Fi. Lucas: That's the real story. 5G in dentistry isn't about downloading a movie in the waiting room. It's about enabling a level of digital integration that makes the clinical workflow smoother and more precise. The network becomes part of the diagnostic and therapeutic toolkit. Luna: I'm curious about the adoption curve. Do you see this becoming mainstream in, say, five years? Lucas: I think the big DSOs will lead. They have the capital and the centralized IT. For the solo practitioner, the cost of a private 5G setup — small cells, edge server, subscription — is still high. But if network slicing from a public carrier can deliver similar guarantees, that might change the math. Some carriers are already offering enterprise slicing for healthcare. Luna: So you could buy a 'dental clinic' slice from Verizon or T-Mobile without building your own private network. Lucas: That's the vision. And if that happens, we could see a pretty rapid adoption, because the clinical benefits are real. A practice that can see one more patient a day, with higher diagnostic accuracy and lower rework, has a clear financial incentive. Luna: And the patients benefit too — shorter time in the chair, less discomfort, fewer return visits. Lucas: Exactly. So 5G isn't transforming dentistry overnight, but it's quietly becoming part of the infrastructure that enables better care. And I think we'll look back in a few years and wonder how we did implant surgery on a Wi-Fi network that also had to handle the front desk's Spotify. Luna: I guess the takeaway is: next time you're in the dentist chair and the hygienist pulls up your X-ray instantly, there might be a 5G slice to thank. Lucas: That's the idea. And speaking of infrastructure — next episode, we're going to look at 5G in a completely different setting: the construction site. Drones, heavy equipment, safety sensors. Luna: That should be good. But for now, thanks for listening.