25 Mar /19

5G

5G – Word of the day – EVS Translations
5G – Word of the day – EVS Translations

Considering the potential, importance, and possibilities that are often attached with today’s word, it’s rather ironic that many people don’t actually understand what it means. Additionally, though it will likely be at least several more years until we actually realize its full potential, the foundation for this progress in communication is currently in the process of being laid by network/communication agencies in countries all over the world – such as in Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur last week. So, there’s perhaps no better time to gain an understand of 5G, specifically how it works and what-positively and negatively – it may mean to us in the future.

First, let’s begin by demystifying the name. In a world of increasingly complex, technologically-based acronyms, it’s easy to assume that 5G stand for something highly complicated but it doesn’t. While the science behind it can be a bit technical (we’ll get to that later), the term itself is simply a shortened form of 5th Generation of mobile telecommunication technology. Much in the same way that the 2008-introduced 4G and, later, 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) are the current advancements on the then decade old 3G, 5G is just the next successive advancement that will be expected to carry us through the 2020s.

As with all wireless technology from your home WiFi router to massive cell towers, 5G is a matter of technological availability, bandwidth, and location.

For the longest time, we have been hamstrung by a combination of these 3 interconnected issues. For example, the processing power and miniature antennas for higher frequency bandwidth didn’t exist, so we had to rely on readily available lower frequency bandwidth. From another perspective, with the unsightliness and cost of building and maintaining massive cell towers, they had to be strategically placed, and lower frequency bandwidth, with its ability to travel further, was ideal. Over time though, the technology has advanced, and the number of towers has increased; however, the bandwidth availability hasn’t, leading to congestion.

Compared to previous 4G technology, 5G has been made possible due to advancements in the miniaturisation of higher frequency bandwidth antennas in mobile devices, mobile device processing power, and an increasingly smaller footprint (with increased processing capabilities) of towers and related technology.

These advancements will allow 5G to utilize substantial higher frequency bandwidths (between 30GHz and 300GHz) that have previously been unusable in consumer devices in order to provide a vastly improved product. Again, compared to 4G LTE, 5G is expected to provide peak speeds that will be 20 times faster- even in less than ideal circumstances, the improvement will be noticeable (approximate estimates are 10x faster). Along with higher speeds, 5G will also have a significantly lower latency (meaning less response delay) and the ability to host a higher number of devices per meter (up to 1,000 more).

Looking at current 4G LTE data transfer numbers (which are 22Mbps) and even home WiFi routers (which is 50Mbps), 5G, in addition to being more reliable and responsive, would easily surpass both of them. Considering the revolution that 4G caused – everything from Uber to video calls – it’s no stretch of the imagination to see what is on the horizon with 5G. Responsive, reliable, high-speed data could untether us from our routers at home, make self-driving cars and virtual reality a safe and plausible innovation for a large portion of the population, aid in generating and delivering neural machine translation faster than ever before, or many other things which have yet to be considered.

Of course, with technology there are always risks, and one of the biggest risks is data security. Naturally, as a large telecommunications equipment companies, Huawei (among others) would hope to be involved in the build-out of 5G services and capacity; however, being based in the People’s Republic of China, the company has been consistently held in suspicion of, at the very least, providing a backdoor for the Chinese government to engage in spying. Though there have been numerous allegations and plenty of suspicion, very little actual proof, aside from the obvious governmental links in the Chinese system, has been released; on the other hand, given the complexity of 5G equipment along with the millions of lines of code that will be needed to make a 5G system function effectively, security is of the utmost importance, and all threats must be taken seriously.

Regardless of the risk involved, the promise of 5G is definitely something to behold, especially considering the unexpected benefits that we found in 4G LTE. As much of this still seems like sci-fi, maybe it’s best to end with a quote from The Amazing Criswell at the beginning of the terribly bad sci-fi film, Plan 9 from Outer Space: “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.”