5 things you need to know about 5G

In just a few years you may be able to download a full HD movie to your phone in a matter of seconds! Video chats will be so immerse that it will feel like you can reach out and touch the other person right through your screen!

Well, most of us still don’t have 4G, but the network operators are already talking about 5G. So, what does that mean for us? Here are five things you need to know…

1. It’ll be much faster
This is obvious, but it’s important to realise just how incredibly fast it will be. It’s expected to run at about 10Gps, which is fast enough to download an HD film in just a couple of seconds. Theoretically, it could be a lot faster, some tests have even hit a whopping 800Gps – at that speed you could download 33 HD films in one second!

It’s also fast enough to stream 8K films in 3D, 4K is only starting to trickle out now, and it has four times as many pixels as a standard HD… so, 8K will have eight times as many and that will be super sharp!

With the arrival of 5G, more devices will be using the internet, so network capacity will have to be upped quite a bit. It won’t be just mobiles and tablets using the spectrum, Inanimate objects like cars, fridges, trains and more will also use it!

2. It will change how we live
5G doesn't just mean even faster network speeds, it will also guide in small cities. In other words, driverless cars, the internet of things, and plenty of other technologies that have been tipped as the next big thing will finally be able to spread out their wings.

This is all thanks to a harmonization of the radio spectrum. At the moment, the radio spectrum is a mess of different bands serving different types of communication. For the launch of 5G, the entire spectrum will be restructured, which should make all forms of network data communication more efficient.

3. It should launch in 2020
The first frequency bands should come into use in around 2020, and the other two should be hot on its heels! But other countries could have trial networks up and running even sooner…

Samsung apparently wants to run a trial 5G network during the 2018 Winter Olympic Games and Huawei could also have one up and ready for the 2018 World Cup.

4. It won’t break
Experts have predicted that 5G will be as reliable as a fibre broadband connection! That’s thanks to advances in antenna technology, which should – fingers crossed – mean an end to connections dropping out. This is reassuring for us if it’s going to be piloting our driverless cars.

It is predicted that 5G will have a latency of just one millisecond – that’s 50 times faster than 4G! That should mean it’s suitable for use by robots carrying out millimeter accurate surgery on patients.

5. It will be standardized soon
Standards for 5G are expected to be finalized towards the end of this year or the beginning of 2016, which is good, because at the moment no one can agree on what the requirements should be.

The GSMA (Groupe Speciale Mobile Association), basically the people representing the interests of mobile operators around the world, put together a list of what its members thought 5G should be made up of. And they differed dramatically…

So there’s still quite a way to go still, but it will definitely be worth the wait!

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Written  By: Christine Romans
CopyWriter at The Computer Guyz Cape Town