We have been hearing about the wireless technology for years, both because of the technological revolution it entails and because of the typical fears it arouses among those who do not understand it. In fact, there are still those who do not fully understand what all this is about 5G, not even some presidents of great powers, so we are going to explain what exactly 5G is, what promises the industry brings with this new standard, and what differences it has with the current 4G LTE network.
What is 5G
5G is the fifth generation of wireless communication technologies and standards, the Internet that devices such as your mobile phone use to allow you to connect to the network anywhere. Therefore, you do not have to think of this term as something new, as it is still a development or evolution of the current 4G / LTE.
The idea behind this development is to allow you to call by phone, write as before, and above all, surf the Internet at a much higher speed than today, all while allowing more devices to be connecting at the same time. Do you remember how the speed you had a few years ago in your home WiFi was much slower than now? Well this is something similar, but with mobile connections.
In fact, since you are using your memory, you may still realize how much your connection improved when you started to change the 3G connectivity of the mobile to take advantage of 4G, you were able to navigate at much more powerful speeds that allow you see the current websites without problems, as this is a new evolutionary leap.
This fifth generation of wireless communications is the one that is going to try to make viewing a website on your mobile phone like opening any other file, with such a fast speed that we should be able to upload videos in Ultra HD or 3D models with almost no blinking. The official standard has already been approved, and it promises to be 10-20 times faster than current mobile connections.
What we are sure of is that on paper, 5G is an almost essential technology to survive the electromagnetic bottleneck that exists in large urban agglomerations today. With more and more devices connected, more capacity is needed and more can be connected, for example, to support an ecosystem of always connected smart cars or the increasingly developed Internet of Things.
The speed of the new standard will be much faster, so you can download content almost without realizing it. This is theoretical data, so depending on the operator you could see lower or higher speeds. one point they promised that their first 5G mobile could reach speed peaks of more than 2 gigs per second, which would mean being able to upload or download a video of 15 seconds in Full HD in just 1 second. But it is also said that the final peaks of technology could be up to 20 Gbps (gigabytes per second).
But more important still is the decrease in latency. Latency is the time it takes to transfer a data packet within the network, the time it takes for an action to arrive from the moment you take it until it is consumed. Currently there are already very low latencies, but 5G promises to lower them to between 1 and 2 milliseconds.
This means that interactions with the Internet or the cloud will be almost instantaneous. Added to the download speeds, this will mean that if you click on a photo that you have in the cloud, it would take as long to open on the mobile phone as if you had it already in its memory. An instant interaction experience that could also revolutionize mobile applications.
In any case, and as we have said before, 5G has not yet been fully implemented. This means that we can theorize or comment on what benefits it can bring, but that we will not know definitively until it is definitively implemented and begins to be exploited. At the moment we have already seen demonstrations such as remote-assisted surgeries in real time, in which the surgeon performs the operations from miles away.
A good summary of what the jump from 4G to 5G means was given to us by the chipmaker Qualcomm a few months ago. For them, 4G served to connect people to each other, and 5G is a new leap that will allow “connecting people with everything around us”, promoting not only communications, but other sectors such as automotive, medicine, health or homes. Hopefully this article can broaden your horizons about how the new Internet network system will work and affect our lives more deeply than before. Thank you for reading!
