Because if the technology is perfected, you don't even need a hospital.
Mount a surgical pod on the back of a truck and drive it to the remote village with bad roads periodically to do elective surgery. Or make shipping container sized surgical pods to deploy quickly en masse to disasters or pandemics.
Or... use the truck to bring patients to a proper care facility that's not constrained in capacity by the size of a truck.
Shipping a mobile hospital to a disaster zone is a great idea, but if you want remote surgery there you can just set it up where there's a landline. Also telesurgery only makes sense for specialized surgeries that justify needing a specific surgeon who isn't near you. You can just ship real surgeons to the disaster.
Or… use the truck to bring patients to a proper care facility that’s not constrained in capacity by the size of a truck.
Assuming that the patient is not so sick/elderly/frail that they can be safely and comfortably transported, sure.
But if medivac isn't an option then the current choices are to get the surgeon to come in to do procedures in whatever limited facilities are on hand, or just let the patient be. Even if the doctor is willing to travel, that could wipe hours from their day that could be used to treat other patients.
Shipping a mobile hospital to a disaster zone is a great idea, but if you want remote surgery there you can just set it up where there’s a landline.
You can do that, sure, but a 5G equipped unit can be positioned with greater flexibility and doesn't need to be centralized as much. Disaster situations are inherently unpredictable so disaster relief wants to be as adaptable as possible.
We can go back and forth making hypotheticals all day, but the bottom line is that a flexible unit that can be position within X hundred meters from any working 5g tower is going to be preferable in a general sense to something tied to functional landline.
Also telesurgery only makes sense for specialized surgeries that justify needing a specific surgeon who isn’t near you. You can just ship real surgeons to the disaster.
Again, it takes time to ship in real surgeons. Time during which:
people can die for lack of treatment; and
specialist surgeons are sitting on a plane or a bus and not actually performing surgery.
Not to mention that you can only ship in so many surgeons from any one area without depriving their home area of surgical coverage, whereas with tele-surgery any surgeon within latency range can be called up to operate with little downtime.
Edit: it also just occured to me that 5G tele-surgery would be a huge boon to parts of Africa and the developing world that leapfrogged widespread landlines in the first place in favor of 3/4G.
Landlines also often have a series of switches in between that add latency, and it is difficult to rewire those networks.
One reasons Elon's space internet is likely to make money is that the electromagnetic route is the straight lines while undersea cables are not, giving it significant latency advantage for certain high-speed trading.
I don't remember the source, but that remote surgery thing was using a separate high speed network for emergency services only (edit: also vehicles and some industry), with 5G connection for the last mile.
Edit: correction, "5G consists of three connectivity types: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communications (mMTC), and ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC)", all of that is called 5G but those surgeries have almost nothing to do with the mobile broadband aspect that most people know from 4G.
So far in most places only eMBB 5G is being deployed, but they are starting by building the periphery layer of the 5G network, temporarily using the existing 4G network as its core, but this core will eventually be replaced with the more advanced 5G core infrastructure that can also support its mMTC and URLLC applications.
The hardware that underlies each connection type is not necessarily the same.
Because if the technology is perfected, you don't even need a hospital.
Mount a surgical pod on the back of a truck and drive it to the remote village with bad roads periodically to do elective surgery. Or make shipping container sized surgical pods to deploy quickly en masse to disasters or pandemics.
Or... use the truck to bring patients to a proper care facility that's not constrained in capacity by the size of a truck.
Shipping a mobile hospital to a disaster zone is a great idea, but if you want remote surgery there you can just set it up where there's a landline. Also telesurgery only makes sense for specialized surgeries that justify needing a specific surgeon who isn't near you. You can just ship real surgeons to the disaster.
Assuming that the patient is not so sick/elderly/frail that they can be safely and comfortably transported, sure.
But if medivac isn't an option then the current choices are to get the surgeon to come in to do procedures in whatever limited facilities are on hand, or just let the patient be. Even if the doctor is willing to travel, that could wipe hours from their day that could be used to treat other patients.
You can do that, sure, but a 5G equipped unit can be positioned with greater flexibility and doesn't need to be centralized as much. Disaster situations are inherently unpredictable so disaster relief wants to be as adaptable as possible.
We can go back and forth making hypotheticals all day, but the bottom line is that a flexible unit that can be position within X hundred meters from any working 5g tower is going to be preferable in a general sense to something tied to functional landline.
Again, it takes time to ship in real surgeons. Time during which:
people can die for lack of treatment; and
specialist surgeons are sitting on a plane or a bus and not actually performing surgery.
Not to mention that you can only ship in so many surgeons from any one area without depriving their home area of surgical coverage, whereas with tele-surgery any surgeon within latency range can be called up to operate with little downtime.
Edit: it also just occured to me that 5G tele-surgery would be a huge boon to parts of Africa and the developing world that leapfrogged widespread landlines in the first place in favor of 3/4G.
Landlines also often have a series of switches in between that add latency, and it is difficult to rewire those networks. One reasons Elon's space internet is likely to make money is that the electromagnetic route is the straight lines while undersea cables are not, giving it significant latency advantage for certain high-speed trading.
I don't remember the source, but that remote surgery thing was using a separate high speed network for emergency services
only(edit: also vehicles and some industry), with 5G connection for the last mile.Edit: correction, "5G consists of three connectivity types: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communications (mMTC), and ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC)", all of that is called 5G but those surgeries have almost nothing to do with the mobile broadband aspect that most people know from 4G.
So far in most places only eMBB 5G is being deployed, but they are starting by building the periphery layer of the 5G network, temporarily using the existing 4G network as its core, but this core will eventually be replaced with the more advanced 5G core infrastructure that can also support its mMTC and URLLC applications.
The hardware that underlies each connection type is not necessarily the same.