An Insight on 5G, It’s Applications and Impact on our Daily Lives.
From the Promise of supporting autonomous driver-less cars making crucial decisions on the road, to drones relaying information concerning disasters, smart homes and smart cities, advances in healthcare & medicine, faster download and upload speeds. The promises of a future with 5G sounds too good to be true. In this article we will discuss what 5G holds for the future of mobile communication and how it could affect our daily lives.
What is 5G?
5G simply put is the technology behind the next generation of mobile broadband that will replace, and augment the current 4G standard technology known as “LTE”. With 5G, data speeds are expected to increase exponentially, with faster download and upload speeds and reduced latency. It would also be able to support a higher number of users than what 4G is currently capable of.
According to The ITU (International Telecommunications Union) reports, 5G network speeds are speculated to have a peak data rate of 20 Gb/s for downlink and 10 Gb/s for uplink. After knowing the definition of 5G we need to know how 5G actually works.
Latency
Latency can be defined as the time it takes for data to travel from one source to another on any given network. It is expected that 5G networks could get as low as 4 milliseconds on mobile phones and as low as 1 millisecond in situations such as remote surgeries which utilize Ultra Low Latency communication. This means not only will people be connected to each other but also machines, the city’s infrastructure, automobiles and many more things we communicate with on a daily basis, 5G will allow us to get connected in a manner we have never before seen resulting in no more sluggish network connectivity.
Spectrum
5G operates on three spectrum bands, from low to mid and high band spectrums. Though it seems unimportant, the different level of spectrum band that your phone supports will have a dramatic effect on your everyday use. While the Mid and High-band offer high speeds and low latency, they fail to penetrate buildings and can result in poor network connectivity inside buildings, low-band spectrum however provides wide coverage but are higher in the level of latency they can attain.
Applications and Impacts of 5G
Below are the applications of 5G and what the future holds when 5G becomes the norm of the data communications network.
1. High-speed Data Connectivity
With 5G, expect to see faster mobile downloads and uploads as 5G network speeds are touted to reach 20Gb/s for the downlink while uplinks speed is 10Gb/s which in real time translates to an average of 150mb/s downlink speed and 50mb/s uplink speeds, enabling faster access to the internet. Within a minute you could download a movie of 2gigabytes on 5G, which takes longer than that on the current 4G networks. Run powerful tasks with greater virtual processing power, more than the current generation of mobile networks allow.
2. Enhanced Multimedia Experience
5G will bring a high definition multimedia experience to your mobile phone. High speed streaming of 4K videos will only take a few seconds, providing support for Ultra sharp moving images with clear audio clarity on your smart devices ( No More Buffering ). 5G network will deliver an amazing augmented reality and virtual reality games experience as it allows HD games to be played on these platforms. 4k and 8k would become the norm of displaying entertainment all due to 5G.
As they say “I understand when the video buffers, but when ad’s buffer I suffer”
3. Self-driving Cars
With the advent of 5G wireless networks, the reality of self driving is becoming more realizable. 5G wireless network connectivity has low latency which is required by self-driving cars for autonomous driving. 5G enables the communication between cars and other smart traffic signs, surrounding objects and other vehicles on the road. Every millisecond counts to avoid collisions for passenger safety, decisions are made in near real time, and this is all possible only due to the low latency 5G has to offer.
4. Smart Home and Cities
Homes becomes smarter by utilizing 5G networks for smart devices connectivity and securing one’s home by relaying information to connected smart devices, which can in-turn alert you when there’s something wrong. With 5G smart city integration which includes traffic management, instant weather updates, smart power systems, efficient crowd management and quick emergency response, most happening within a split second can make everyone’s lives easier and more predictable and all this is being made possible with the use of 5G communications.
5. Healthcare and Medical Applications
With 5G technology medical practitioners will be able to perform advanced medical procedures remotely or present with reliable 5G wireless network connections from anywhere on the globe. Things like virtual reality medicine, enabling doctors to reach the unknown parts of the human body will be possible, smart medical devices like wearables will continuously monitor patient’s conditions and activate alerts and countermeasure’s during emergency.
Conclusion
The era of 5G Mobile communications is soon to be a reality, with a lot of questions concerning the radiation emissions due to the low millimeter wavelength the technology works on. All these concerns, just like the concerns raised when 3G and 4G were about to be adopted, are reported to be false and 5G is confirmed to be safe for humans. Despite all major issues raised against it. It is expected that 5G will bring the next leap in Mobile communications technologies but the question is are we ready for it?
