FEATURE
Words by Ren Alcantara
T
here’s been a lot of buzz about 5G of late, what with telcos all over the world rushing to roll the service out en masse. When you ask the person on the street though, all you’re likely to hear they’re excited about is faster connection speeds. While this is true—5G is blisteringly fast—it’s so much more than just raw speed. 5G opens up a lot of possibilities that future tech will be building upon. If you want to get the skinny on the 5G phenomenon, we’re here to give you just that, so read on.
There are a few things that 5G is looking to address, and the first is, of course speed. As content gets more and more rich, we need connection speeds to match. Let us put things in perspective: 4K streaming can be taxing even for some fixed-line connections (think wired home internet). 5G will let us stream 8K content on phones. Whether or not you need 8K on your phone is another thing altogether, but it’s nice to know that it’s possible. 5G allows 10Gbps data rates, which is anywhere from 10 to 100 times better than current 4G connectivity. Movies, work files, music, streaming—if you thought 4G was great, multiply that by at least 10, and that’s the kind of speed we’re talking about with 5G.
more impressive is what low latency will allow technology to do. Let’s start simple, with an example like gaming. Right now, for the most part, games run on the devices they’re played on. When you load a game on your phone for example, your phone does all the heavy lifting, rendering the characters, the environment, sounds, everything about the world your game is in. Even for online games, it’s our computers and phones that do the work, and servers simply take in and
Another requirement 5G was designed to meet is 1 millisecond latency. In the simplest terms, latency is the time it takes for an instruction to be sent, and a reply to be received. Currently, it’s at about 400ms for 4G. While that’s quite an impressive number, what’s
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JANUARY 2021
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