gopal441
2016-06-02, 06:43 PM
With 3G fading into a distant memory, consumer devices finally have two feet planted firmly in 4G territory. What was once a carrier buzzword, sometimes sold as a fib, is now de rigeur for smartphones and tablets… but what’s next?
What is 5G?Like 3G and 4G before it, 5G is a set of mobile standards. Basically that means that 5G technology will be defined as anything that falls within those parameters, which mostly pertain to speed. For example, LTE is the most common flavor of 4G mobile connection, though a competing standard known as WiMAX and HSPA+ were also (arguably) categorized as 4G, though are now considered mostly precursors to true 4G LTE networks.
With the rise of video sites like YouTube (http://www.dailydot.com/communities/youtube), and other multimedia-heavy social platforms, data consumption has grown exponentially. Part of the challenge of 5G networks will be to balance voracious data consumption with network limits, battery life, and the cost of providing such a service to begin with.
According to the 5G Innovation Centre (http://www.surrey.ac.uk/5gic/what-5g), a group headquartered at the University of Surrey that specializes in mobile networks, “[5G] will need to offer far greater capacity and be faster, more energy-efficient and more cost-effective than anything that has gone before.
In the future, many applications—from advanced gaming to driverless cars—will require much shorter network response times to enable very rapid reactions."
What will we use it for?Striking that balance will have potentially huge implications in the Internet of Things (http://www.dailydot.com/tags/internet-of-things)—the term coined for everything from smarthomes to self-driving cars and ingestible sensors. Once everything is connected, we’re going to expect all of our devices—not just our smartphones and computers—to communicate immediately and fluidly. As more devices flicker online, the burden on wireless networks to shoulder all of that device chatter will reach unprecedented new heights. As companies like Google (http://www.dailydot.com/tags/google) and Facebook (http://www.dailydot.com/communities/facebook) are racing to enable global Internet connectivity, markets in the developed world have pushed into use cases we couldn’t have dreamed up five years ago. The rise of virtual reality, persistent virtual worlds requiring persistent connections, is one example.
As described by the 5G Innovation Centre, the key to 5G will be cleverly optimizing network connections to make use of the tech that’s out there, balancing patterns in user behavior—peak use times when everyone streams a Netflix premiere, for example—with the resources available. That challenge isn’t new, but it’s something anything in the running to be called a 5G network will need to tackle.
E*******, a mobile company that’s already been flexing its 5G muscle, is shooting to have such a system ready by 2020. In a lab test last year, E******* hit the5 gigabits per second (http://www.cnet.com/news/e*******-tests-out-crazy-fast-5-gbps-wireless-speed/) (Gbps) mark, though lab conditions are generally far closer to ideal than real-life tests.
For comparison, a typical 4G LTE speed (http://www.cnet.com/news/4g-lte-showdown-how-fast-is-your-carrier/) on Verizon hovers around 33 megabits per second (Mbps) in late 2014. For a sense of how quickly our expectations for mobile data speed shot up, in 2013, 4G LTE download speeds in New York Cityaveraged just 6.7 Mbps (http://www.zdnet.com/pictures/the-average-4g-lte-speeds-in-the-largest-us-cities/11/)—and it probably felt pretty fast back then, too.
According to E******* (http://www.e*******.com/res/docs/whitepapers/wp-5g.pdf), 5G networks will need to hit 10 Gbps peak speeds, with 100 Mbps speeds as a reachable goal in most non-rural settings. Due to the high stakes nature of the devices that will be cruising along on future mobile networks—think traffic lights, front door locks, and biotechnology—networks should aim to reduce latency to less than 1 millisecond (ms).
Latency refers to the amount of delay time it takes for a device to communicate to a network and it's the real-world confounding variable that makes the sort of ideal speeds mobile companies can achieve in a lab setting mostly impossible in a real world settings full of literal and figurative barriers between devices and mobile networks.
What is 5G?Like 3G and 4G before it, 5G is a set of mobile standards. Basically that means that 5G technology will be defined as anything that falls within those parameters, which mostly pertain to speed. For example, LTE is the most common flavor of 4G mobile connection, though a competing standard known as WiMAX and HSPA+ were also (arguably) categorized as 4G, though are now considered mostly precursors to true 4G LTE networks.
With the rise of video sites like YouTube (http://www.dailydot.com/communities/youtube), and other multimedia-heavy social platforms, data consumption has grown exponentially. Part of the challenge of 5G networks will be to balance voracious data consumption with network limits, battery life, and the cost of providing such a service to begin with.
According to the 5G Innovation Centre (http://www.surrey.ac.uk/5gic/what-5g), a group headquartered at the University of Surrey that specializes in mobile networks, “[5G] will need to offer far greater capacity and be faster, more energy-efficient and more cost-effective than anything that has gone before.
In the future, many applications—from advanced gaming to driverless cars—will require much shorter network response times to enable very rapid reactions."
What will we use it for?Striking that balance will have potentially huge implications in the Internet of Things (http://www.dailydot.com/tags/internet-of-things)—the term coined for everything from smarthomes to self-driving cars and ingestible sensors. Once everything is connected, we’re going to expect all of our devices—not just our smartphones and computers—to communicate immediately and fluidly. As more devices flicker online, the burden on wireless networks to shoulder all of that device chatter will reach unprecedented new heights. As companies like Google (http://www.dailydot.com/tags/google) and Facebook (http://www.dailydot.com/communities/facebook) are racing to enable global Internet connectivity, markets in the developed world have pushed into use cases we couldn’t have dreamed up five years ago. The rise of virtual reality, persistent virtual worlds requiring persistent connections, is one example.
As described by the 5G Innovation Centre, the key to 5G will be cleverly optimizing network connections to make use of the tech that’s out there, balancing patterns in user behavior—peak use times when everyone streams a Netflix premiere, for example—with the resources available. That challenge isn’t new, but it’s something anything in the running to be called a 5G network will need to tackle.
E*******, a mobile company that’s already been flexing its 5G muscle, is shooting to have such a system ready by 2020. In a lab test last year, E******* hit the5 gigabits per second (http://www.cnet.com/news/e*******-tests-out-crazy-fast-5-gbps-wireless-speed/) (Gbps) mark, though lab conditions are generally far closer to ideal than real-life tests.
For comparison, a typical 4G LTE speed (http://www.cnet.com/news/4g-lte-showdown-how-fast-is-your-carrier/) on Verizon hovers around 33 megabits per second (Mbps) in late 2014. For a sense of how quickly our expectations for mobile data speed shot up, in 2013, 4G LTE download speeds in New York Cityaveraged just 6.7 Mbps (http://www.zdnet.com/pictures/the-average-4g-lte-speeds-in-the-largest-us-cities/11/)—and it probably felt pretty fast back then, too.
According to E******* (http://www.e*******.com/res/docs/whitepapers/wp-5g.pdf), 5G networks will need to hit 10 Gbps peak speeds, with 100 Mbps speeds as a reachable goal in most non-rural settings. Due to the high stakes nature of the devices that will be cruising along on future mobile networks—think traffic lights, front door locks, and biotechnology—networks should aim to reduce latency to less than 1 millisecond (ms).
Latency refers to the amount of delay time it takes for a device to communicate to a network and it's the real-world confounding variable that makes the sort of ideal speeds mobile companies can achieve in a lab setting mostly impossible in a real world settings full of literal and figurative barriers between devices and mobile networks.