Life in the 5G fast lane!
There’s no faster network on earth, wired or not. Here’s why 5G will change everything — eventually
There’s no faster network in the world! Read why 5G will change your life and discover everything you need to know about the revolutionary new tech.
YOU HAVE HEARD about 5G. You can’t have missed it. But beyond the marketing hype, and outside of its broad position as a next– generation mobile phone technology, it’s not entirely clear what 5G actually is from the outside. Realistically, it’s not entirely clear on the inside, either. “5G” is something of a blanket term, one that has so far covered a whole bunch of disparate technologies and frequencies, and a term that could mean radically different things depending on who’s using it and for what purpose. It could even be a lie, if the actions of AT&T are anything to go by: the company has branded its experimental 4G LTE services as “5G E” — despite them very definitely not being 5G services. What we do know is this: 5G, proper 5G, is revolutionary. It’s astonishingly fast, high capacity, and it’s likely the most important communications upgrade since the invention of the internet.
That’s the headline. On paper, 5G New Radio (or 5G NR, intended to be the worldwide standard) is able to move data around faster than any currently available Wi–Fi tech. It tops virtually every home broadband connection in the world in terms of speed. It has the potential to be 100 times faster than 4G LTE, the current mobile standard. Its latency, that is the time for data to be passed between devices, is fast approaching 1ms — meaning we’ll soon have to start measuring in microseconds. That’s incredible, however those numbers are based on theory, or ideal conditions in the lab. In the real world, things move closer to a quarter of that speed, and sometimes a lot less, depending on environmental conditions and the particular facets of 5G NR supported either by networks or endpoint hardware. But even at real–world speeds, 5G is an astonishing upgrade over any over–the–air comms tech.
JOIN THE BAND
So it’s fast. But what exactly is it? 5G is, as its name suggests, the successor to 4G. While much of 5G’s signal will sit in the same space currently used by 4G LTE (indeed, 4G LTE is intended to stick around for the foreseeable future as a fallback should 5G services not be available) a vast amount of 5G’s current and proposed signals sit in much higher frequency bands. It’s broadly split into three segments: sub–1GHz (close to 4G), 1–6GHz (likely to be where most widespread 5G services are available) and over 6GHz, which will offer the highest speeds at limited range. Not everything is, or will be, available to every operator; 5G space is expensive, government controlled, and telecommunications companies are generally allocated a small amount of space in each band.
Over in the UK, for example, current networks are working with a sliver of airspace around 3.5GHz: EE has a 40MHz slice, Vodafone has 50MHz, and 3 has been allocated 100MHz — more than enough for
some impressive speeds, but elsewhere in the world things are more disparate. South Korea’s three operators, for example, operate high–bandwidth networks in both the 3.5GHz and 28GHz bands, while US operators are experimenting with frequencies all over the spectrum. Eventually, all networks will likely operate in multiple bands. The International Telecommunications Union has defined three use cases for 5G: Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC), and Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC). The former, a logical progression of 4G, is the focus of the initial rollout, while frequencies enabling the latter pair aren’t likely to be used until 2021 at the earliest.
5G’s airspace changes are not its only trick. There’s a big change to the way that signal is handled, with the extra available bandwidth allowing operators to run so–called Massive MIMO services, which use multiple antennas and simultaneous data streams to boost signal strength, reduce interference, and accelerate speeds. The jump to 5G inevitably means, as it did for 4G and 3G before it, new hardware end– to–end: new masts, new phones, new modems. Manufacturers like Qualcomm and Huawei are fervently working on one–chip solutions that can cover both 4G and 5G services; Ericsson’s first 5G radio sports 128 antennas, half for upstream and half for downstream. Multiple signals can mean reduced battery life, although early tests haven’t shown 5G to be any more of a drain than current radios — and if, one day, you’re able to switch off your Wi–Fi radio altogether, switching to 5G is likely to be a net benefit.
5G’s footprint is ever–changing. Its technology is fluid, and next year’s services may look very different from today’s. But whatever they look like, we know that it’s the next generation of communications. Note the lack of a prefix there: 5G lands initially in the phone market, sure, but what we currently know as phones may soon become an outdated concept. It’s set to enable a revolution through all of our tech.
TOMORROW’S WORLD
5G is fast enough that, if (or when) it becomes widespread enough, it could mean the end of cabled broadband connections in the home. Why dig up the road and lay fibre when the mobile solution is more than fast enough? It’ll power the evolution of the Internet of Things, connecting just about every device with lightning–fast responsiveness and enough bandwidth to share large amounts of data. Everything will know what everything else is doing in an instant, with absolute reliability and super–high security, a concept that’s become known as the tactile internet. With the tactile internet will come advanced military applications, vast changes to education, to sports, to every digital device we own.
Tomorrow’s cars are probably the most concrete and easy–to–imagine example of the potential of 5G. Connected cars could communicate directly with each other, passing on information about braking, accelerating, even hitting a pothole; knowing what the car in front is doing means your car will immediately be ready to take action to avoid hazards and accidents.
Smart cars could communicate with 5G devices carried by humans, detecting in an instant when a person is in a dangerous position. A network of 5G cars could efficiently distribute traffic across city streets, with 5G–enabled traffic lights ensuring minimum journey times and pollution. With all this useful data immediately available, and the data from today’s smart car sensors improved and also shared, self–driving cars will trend towards 100% safety.
5G has a world of potential to transform the smart home, too. From ease of setup (charge up your device and you’re online — no awkward Bluetooth or Wi–Fi juggling in sight) to rock–solid reliability, there are a host of benefits.
When 5G’s worldwide rollout grows and networks pick up extra spectrum space, your devices will be able to select which speed they need, dropping to lower–power, slower parts of 5G when inactive, and ramping up the speed when it’s required. 5G’s low latency, which is a tenth of what typical home broadband connections offer us, means smart devices will respond to stimuli far more quickly than they do now — and it means that city-scale transformation is also within our reach.
HEALTH AND SECURITY
Smart cities, or at least the concept of them, have been around for some time — it’s the theory of a fully networked city that uses sensor data to monitor just about every possible metric and act upon it. That’s a perfect use case for 5G. Fully automated and prioritized public transport, automatic trash collections, precise environmental
monitoring, exact energy generation, all networked together and capable of acting in real time. It’s verging on the utopian.
A vast expansion in the world’s connected hardware demands a certain level of trust. The 5G future means sensors everywhere, watching your devices, perhaps watching your every move. That’s going to be a major issue, something that elicits a large amount of public scrutiny in the not–so–distant future. And it opens up new avenues for malicious attacks, as well as making us question our trust in those creating our networking hardware (see The Huawei Problem, opposite). Security is a major concern that has to be at the forefront of the technology’s growth.
There’s also likely to be a high level of hardware scaremongering, given the condensed radio waves of 5G, some of which operate in a similar frequency to military crowd control weapons and microwave internet links, some of which (due to their condensed beams) have been thought to knock birds out of the sky. Without the scientific data to argue against it, we’re not touching that one with a long pole — though we will say that the long–espoused health risks of Wi-Fi or mobile phones have never been close to being proven. However you might feel about the concept of pervasive data sharing, or worry about the government beaming radio waves into your brain, it’s hard to argue that the tactile internet does not have the potential to completely change our society.
speed vs rAnGe
The problem is, 5G is not, at this point, ready to make the tactile internet happen. Not by a long way. For this hypothetical connected future to become a reality, 5G needs rock–solid coverage and availability — and that’s going to be the biggest stumbling block of all. 5G’s higher frequency bands are a double–edged sword because while data certainly can move at ludicrous speed, it often
doesn’t. The higher the connection frequency, the more flimsy and easily absorbed by the environment those signals are, which is a huge problem in cities. Think about the difference between 2.4GHz Wi–Fi and its 5GHz cousin: often, your hardware will be able to sniff out the slower 2.4GHz connection at a much further distance, or through a few more walls. When your phone today can’t find 4G, 3G is there to offer a conciliatory trickle of data — and given that that’s still something that happens all too often, 5G has a long, long way to go.
So 5G signals lack range. This much became obvious from the recent introduction of 5G services in the UK, which require you to be in spitting distance of a mast to receive a signal. This is true of EE and Vodafone’s limited rollout, and (though we’ve not been able to test it at press time) the case is likely to be the same for 3’s August–launching service. Some parts of the spectrum are even more picky than those used in the UK: Verizon’s limited US implementation of its mmWave 5G network (so called because the signal wavelength is so condensed it needs to be measured in millimetres) demands some fairly advanced positional gymnastics to get a signal at all, although when you do the download speeds are very high, in the region of 1.5Gbps. Sprint’s Chicago release using 5G’s 2.5GHz segment, by contrast, is more flexible and easy to connect to, but somewhat slower, closer to 250Mbps.
MASTER STROKE
Short range means the current layout of 4G masts — which are, themselves, much more condensed than those of the previous generation — isn’t going to cut it. To properly roll out 5G, it’s likely that networks will need to install micro–masts or at least signal repeaters street by street, an expensive proposition made more expensive by the cost of airspace in the 5G spectrum, and whatever fees local authorities decide to put on installation space.
There’s also the question of how those individual 5G masts are connected together. UK telecomms regulator Ofcom suggests that 5G could one day move as fast as 20Gbps, but provider EE’s current nodes speak to each other through fibre connections that top out at 10Gbps, and that bandwidth is shared between all of its users. Fibre is, if not trivial, at least possible to upgrade end–to–end, but that’s another item on the 5G shopping list.
All of this costs money. While ubiquitous 5G may (and, indeed, must) drive down prices in the future, networks weathering the cost of widespread installation are not exactly driving early adoption by making their services cheap. Some have currently taken what might be seen as a fairly typical stance on consumer pricing: some early SIM plans, for example, charge more for data–capped 5G access, while Vodafone’s offerings are slightly cheaper, with unlimited data, but make selecting 5G options confusing at best. Pricing will fall as it did when 4G launched, as the increased user capacity of 5G networks reduces their overheads. Look at prices in a year — they’ll be a lot less.
MASTER STROKE
We’re not at the point that you absolutely need to jump on 5G immediately. Unless there are services in your immediate area, or you’re looking to take advantage of features like free data add-ons, which get you media downloading or Twitch streaming outside of your data cap, 4G will likely be adequate for now. And even if 5G does reach your area, don’t select a network on the basis of availability or even price — pick the one with the benefits that work for you, as 12–month contracts mean it’ll be a choice that likely follows you to 5G’s next evolutionary stage. If it works for you, though, attach yourself to 5G and don’t let go — because it’s only going to get better.