- Essentially, 5G is a set of technical ground rules.
- They define the workings of a cellular network, including the radio frequencies used and how various components like computer chips and antennas handle radio signals and exchange data.
What are the advantages?
- Speed – The speed depends on where one is, and which wireless services is used.
- Qualcomm, the wireless chipmaker, said it had demonstrated peak 5G download speeds of 4.5 gigabits a second.
- However, it predicts initial median speeds of about 1.4 gigabits.
- In other words, it would be roughly 20 times faster than the current 4G experience.
- E.g. downloading a typical movie at the median speeds cited by Qualcomm would take 17 seconds with 5G, compared with 6 minutes for 4G
- The speeds will be particularly noticeable in higher-quality streaming video.
Latency – There is another kind of speed, a lag known as latency, that may become even more important with 5G.
- The response is not exactly immediate when issuing a command now on a smartphone, such as starting a web search.
- A lag of 50 to several hundred milliseconds is common, partly because signals often must pass between different carrier switching centers.
- 5G, which uses newer networking technology, was designed to reduce this latency down to a few milliseconds.
- Reliability – 5G is also designed to deliver signals more reliably than earlier cellular networks.
- [Networks nowfrequently drop bits of data that are not essential for tasks like watching movies on a phone.]
- This change could bring many benefits, notably in fields such as virtual reality.
- The highest-quality VR applications now typically require bulky headsets that are connected by wire to nearby personal computers that generate 3-D images.
- With 5G, that would be off-loaded wirelessly to other machines, freeing users to move and making it easier to develop goggles the size of eyeglasses.
- In the related field of augmented reality, a smartphone camera could be pointed at a football game to see both live video on the display and superimposed player statistics or other data.
- Besides these, 5G’s impact extends to medicine and other fields that increasingly rely on high-speed connections.
- Officials in the United States and China see 5G networks as a competitive edge.
- The faster networks could help spread the use of artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies too.
