5G network standard
The clever but controversial communications tech explained
You can make a living on YouTube claiming Bill Gates invented 5G to spread coronavirus
YOU WILL LEARN Why 5G has incredible potential for enhancing communication and tech experiences
In January 2020, a Belgian newspaper started a conspiracy theory that would end up with people in England setting fire to phone towers. The Het Laatste Nieuws published an article pointing out that since 2019, several 5G mobile phone towers had been erected in Wuhan in China… coronavirus came from Wuhan, therefore the conclusion for some was that ‘5G causes coronavirus’.
You can now make a good living on YouTube telling people that Bill Gates invented 5G to spread coronavirus so that we’d all get microchipped and forced to run Windows XP as the operating system for our brains.
It’s a shame that 5G has become something some people fear. It’s a wonderful, potentially world-changing communications technology that’s designed specifically for the demands of a society where everything is connected to everything else – and it all just works.
What is 5G anyway?
The G stands for generation, and 5G is the fifth generation of mobile phone technology. The first generation used analogue radio signals and was only capable of making voice calls; 2G went digital and introduced SMS texting; 3G delivered mobile data and 4G delivered it more efficiently and more quickly.
4G was when mobile broadband became a reality. Before then mobile data was too slow. Just ask anyone who bought the first iPhone in 2007: it didn’t even use 3G. Instead, it used an enhanced version of 2G phone technology called EDGE. Looking back it was absolutely awful, with terrible coverage and a theoretical top speed of just 384Kbps. Today, Apple says it’s achieving 4Gbps with the iPhone 12 in the US. That’s 10,416 times faster.
How 5G works
Like all mobile phone connections, 5G uses radio waves. But it uses them in a much cleverer way than previous phone generations. It uses something called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), to transmit its signal across multiple different channels simultaneously; and it uses Multiple Input Multiple Output antennas (MIMO) to transmit and receive on those channels. The result is much less interference, less lag – the gap between requesting data and receiving it – and much faster data transfer speeds. 5G can hit peak speeds of 20Gbps, with sustained data transfer rates of over 100Mbps.
One of the things that makes 5G so interesting is that it can deliver the best of both worlds. Low frequencies (6GHz and below) travel much further and suffer from less interference than high ones, so 5G uses those frequency bands; but high frequencies known as mmWave (24GHz and upwards) can transmit much more data more quickly, so 5G uses those frequencies too. mmWave is one of the technologies Apple’s 5G radio uses in the iPhone 12, albeit only in the US right now.
By using both very high and very low frequencies, 5G networks can deliver more reliable and faster coverage, and they have much more capacity than older phone tech. That’s important in our increasingly connected world, where everything from wristwatches to luggage tags can have a mobile data connection. 5G networks can handle roughly 100 times the traffic of 4G ones.
Why does 5G matter?
When every iPhone and every Mac can get fibre broadband speeds from the mobile data network, all kinds of interesting things become
possible. It’s rather like Wi-Fi in that respect: once it became possible to connect lots of different things around your home without cables, people started coming up with new, interesting and useful ways to take advantage of that – whether it’s wireless security cameras streaming to your iPhone, being able to answer calls on your iPad or being able to work across all your different Apple devices and pick up where you left off as you move from device to device.
5G does the same on a much wider scale. We know Apple is betting the farm on Augmented Reality being absolutely huge in the not-too-distant future, and 5G is a key component of that: a pair of Apple AR glasses with 5G connectivity could deliver and display data instantly whether you’re navigating a new city, trying to pick a new couch for the front room or meeting your friends virtually in a real-world space. And then there’s the Apple Car, which could use 5G to communicate with a city’s parking system and drive you to a free space, or communicate with other cars to identify and route around congestion.
Some of the most profound benefits of 5G won’t be quite so sci-fi, though. We’ve seen how powerfully the Apple Watch can help us with our health and fitness; 5G-enabled health trackers could help people manage chronic conditions such as diabetes, providing much better data to healthcare providers and warning of any problems. Low-powered sensors of all kinds could make all kinds of infrastructure smarter, delivering the “smart cities” we’ve been promised for so long.
Of course, none of these things will appear overnight. But 5G is laying the foundations for some pretty amazing things we’ll see in the years to come.