What is 5G?

5G has been a decade in the making but its finally coming to a reality. Carriers have been rolling out fixed 5G in select cities the past few years, with a more comprehensive rollout expected this year.

Here’s a little information on what exactly 5G is…

5G is the next generation of mobile broadband that will eventually replace, or at least augment, your 4G LTE connection. With 5G, you’ll see exponentially faster download and upload speeds. Latency, or the time it takes devices to communicate with wireless networks, will also drastically decrease.  5G operates on three different spectrum bands. While this information may not seems important, it in fact has a dramatic effect on the everyday use.

Low-band spectrum can be described as sub 1GHz spectrum. It is the primary band used by carriers in the United States for LTE, and bandwidth is nearly depleted. Low-band spectrum offers great coverage area as well as wall penetration; peak data speeds top out around 100Mbps.

Mid-band spectrum provides faster speeds and lower latency, however, fails to penetrate buildings as effectively. Peak speeds up to 1Gbps on a mid-band spectrum.

High-band spectrum delivers the highest performance for 5G, but there are quite a few weaknesses. High-band spectrum aka mmWave, can offer peak speeds up to 10Gbps and has extremely low latency; the main drawback being low coverage area and building penetration is poor. Small cells will allow the high-band spectrum (5G) to cover small geographic areas, using low-power base stations, and can be combined with beam forming to bolster coverage.

5G will offer significantly faster data speeds. Peak data rates can hit 20Gbps downlink and 10Gbps uplink per mobile base station. Peak data rates sound pretty impressive, however actually speeds won’t be the same, unless you have a dedicated connection, its the speed shared by all users on the cell. the spec calls for user download speeds of 100Mbps and upload speeds of 50Mbps. Latency, the time it takes data to travel from one point to another, should be at 4 milliseconds in ideal circumstances, and at 1 millisecond for use cases that demand the utmost speed. 5G should be able to support many more connected devises that LTE, supporting 1 million connected devices per square kilometer. Thats a huge number, which takes into account the slew of devises that will power the Internet of Things (IoT).

What will 5G do?

5G will undoubtedly change the way we interact with technology on a day to day basis, but its also an absolute necessity if we want to continue using mobile broadband. Carriers are running out of LTE capacity in many major metropolitan areas, users experience slowdowns during busy times of the day. 5G adds huge amounts of spectrum in bands that haven’t been used for commercial broadband traffic.

With Autonomous vehicles on the rise, in the future, your vehicle will communicate with other vehicles on the road, provide information to other cars about road conditions, and offer performance information to drivers and automakers; this kind of vehicle to vehicle communication could ultimately save thousands of lives.

5G will also allow cities and other municipalities to operate more efficiently, tracking usage remotely, sensors can notify public works departments i.e.: drain floods, streetlights, any malfunctions, surveillance cameras can be installed quickly and inexpensively.

The list goes on for all of the things 5G will have a positive effect on: remote device control, healthcare, IoT…Internet of things is one of the most exciting and crucial aspects of 5G. With 5G speeds and low latencies, the IoTwill be powered by communications among sensors and smart devices.

Each carrier has a different 5G rollout strategy and here at Westco we are all hands on deck to get the rollout moving even quicker! We’ll keep you updated! Hope that was helpful information giving you a better understanding of 5G. “If you’re not first you’re last” we just want to do our part to make it Go FAST! haha