Inside Look at Upcoming 5G Technology
Perhaps you have heard rumors here and there about an up and coming new 5G Technology. Is this a new cellphone technology or something else entirely? Take note of the fact that 5G Tech is not about mobile devices per se. Actually, 5G Tech is more about new and exciting wireless technology (think WiFi) that promises as yet unseen broadband capabilities.
Capabilities such as download rates in the range of 20 Gigabits per second (Gbps) and uploads at around 10 Gbps. Pay attention to the fact that these speeds allow for 4K video and even Virtual Reality (VR) streaming. For the record, 5G Technology utilizes the exact same radio spectrum that is currently used by 4G LTE networks.
However, 5G makes uses of higher frequencies with shorter wavelengths, or millimeter wavelengths. As you may well remember from your High School or College physics classes, millimeter waves offer up incredibly high bandwidths but can only ever do so over rather short distances. What that means in practice is that this new 5G Tech could in fact be the solution to the last mile challenge.
Recall that the last mile broadband challenge is all about the ability to deliver high capacity broadband to the actual home or business. While running fiber optic cable is expensive in and of itself, actually providing the connection to that individual home or business has to date been the most expensive connection point.
Thus the growing excitement about the deployment of 5G technology. Explaining this a bit further, Simon Bryant, Associate Director at Futuresource Consulting had this to say: “We will have fibre-like performance available on the go. It’s driven by new chipsets for devices and base stations and network construction which will see much greater incorporation of multiple technologies and hand-off between cellular, Wi-Fi and other low power wide area network solutions.
In other words, the 5G technology brings together both fixed and wireless networks. Understand that full rollout of 5G will take some time. In the meantime, expect deployment of 5G to show up in a more targeted manner. That means the installation of superfast Wi-Fi routers in conjunction with increasing the scale of fibre optic networks.
As the rollout of 5G occurs, you can look forward to seeing all manner of device functions to be pushed out into the cloud. The reason for this is that 5G tech has markedly lower times for replies back and forth. How much lower? Think 10 times lower if not more.
Bottom line: 5G technology is the up and coming broadband tech you will start to see more and more of in the near future.
