The transition to fifth-generation cellular networks (known as 5G for short) is soon to happen.
What is the change in the making?
The transition to 5G is an upgrade to wireless systems that will start reaching mobile phone users in a matter of months from now (Aug, 2019).
But this is not just about faster smartphones.
This will affect many other kinds of devices, including industrial robots, security cameras, drones and cars that send traffic data to one another.
This new era will leap ahead of current wireless technology, known as 4G.
This would offer mobile internet speeds that will let people download movies within seconds and bring big changes to video games, sports and shopping.
To get the benefits of 5G, users will have to buy new phones, while carriers will need to install new transmission equipment to offer the faster service.
What exactly is 5G?
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 key benefits?
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.
