What Does 5G Really Mean?
The next generation of wireless communication technology is much more advanced, but it requires a lot of new infrastructure.
You might have heard people talking about “5G,” but what does it actually mean?
The network of cell towers and mobile devices that makes life in the Internet Age possible is less than fifty years old. And about once per decade since it was first built, the telecommunications industry has announced plans for an upgrade. “5G” is just the latest iteration: It refers to the coordinated effort to develop and install a new “generation” of wireless communications technologies throughout the 2020s.
Each iteration gets more advanced, and the earliest versions made possible basic capabilities that we now take for granted. The first commercial cellular network could only support voice calls, and it was launched in Tokyo in 1979 by a company called Nippon Telegraph & Telephone. By the mid-1980s, the technology used to create this network — later dubbed “1G” — had been adopted worldwide. Newly-built cell towers relayed calls made from devices like the Motorola DynaTAC, the first commercially-available (and extremely expensive) cell phone.
Later generations of mobile technologies improved on the basics. Cell phones became smaller and now function more like mini-computers than telephones. Download speeds also became much faster. New generations introduced functions like text messaging and internet-browsing — added in 2G and 3G, respectively — which are now standard features of phones, tablets, and other mobile technologies.
The technologies considered to be part of 5G, the fifth generation, were first introduced in South Korea in 2019, and advances continue to be made by companies like Huawei in China. Download speeds for 5G can be as high as 10 to 20 gigabits-per-second — about 100 times faster than 4G download speeds and many orders of magnitude faster than 1G, which was about 2.4 kilobits-per-second. 5G also supports many times more users than 4G, allowing for up to 1 million devices per square kilometer.
In order to make 5G a reality, existing infrastructure will need to be replaced. Cell towers, for example, will need to be retrofitted with new antennas and other components, and new towers will need to be built. 5G’s higher speeds are made possible in part by transmitting data in a band of higher radio frequencies. Because these signals are easily blocked by surrounding objects, companies are installing smaller towers called “small cells” to provide more precise coverage at a higher band. The 5G system is smart enough to automatically switch to the band that will give you the best performance and speed, even if that’s not the highest frequency band.
This hardware update is already well underway in some locations, most of which are cities, and China has deployed the technology at a greater scale than any other country so far.
The scale required is part of the challenge. Worldwide, the number of devices connected to the Internet is predicted to reach 50 billion sometime this decade. As mobile technology finds its way into everything from your watch to your car to your refrigerator, 5G will need to be powerful enough to support a massive new generation of internet users.
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