For example, the way roads are inspected around the world isn’t very different to how the ancient Romans inspected theirs.

A human inspector, whether in a chariot or a Ford, drives down the road and makes notes – a process that RoadBotics chief executive Mark DeSantis says is subjective as well as “tedious and expensive”.

Mr DeSantis wants to automate the process by fitting cameras to vehicles to monitor the state of the roads as they drive along. Live streaming these images and analysing them in the cloud with image recognition software “is going to change inspection regimes around the world”, he says.

But this “will require a much larger pipe” than currently available, he says, by which he means faster connectivity and a system that enables lots of devices to connect to the internet at the same time in densely packed urban environments – advantages that 5G promises.
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