Techstein

The first platform of 5G or Fifth Generation Internet service was created by Ericsson in the month of February of 2017. While commercial operations began in China on 1 November 2019. Although it is accessible for public use, 5G is only available in very limited areas due to its architecture, cost of installation of 5G towers and 5G Phones which are quite expensive for everyone to afford(No, 5G does not come with a software update).

The problem in 5G come with the coverage area. Unlike 4G, 5G works on three different spectrums. The low-band spectrum, mid-band spectrum and the high-band spectrum.

• The low-band spectrum offers a better a range of coverage with a peak speed of 100 mbps. Due to the coverage area it is the primary band used by most of the ISPs(Internet Service Providers) as it replaces the cost of installing more towers for better coverage.

• The mid-band spectrum provides peak speed upto 1gbps but fails when it comes to wall penetration ,which means the signals will fluctuate when there is an obstacle between you and the tower, even elements as insignificant as rain can result in signal drop.

• As we know that “The higher the frequency of a wave, the lower the range”. The high-band spectrum works on mm waves which provides better wall penetration and peak speed upto 10gbps but the downside comes with the coverage area which is less than 1 square mile. i.e. It provides the highest bandwidth of its capacity within 1 square mile of the transmission tower.

4G Vs 5G

A quick comparison of the Fourth Generation Technology Vs The Fifth Generation.

Comparison	4G	5G
Introduction	2006	2019
Advantage	High Speed	Higher Speed with low latency
Technology	LTE	mm Waves
Bandwidth	100 MHz	upto 300 GHz
Speed	25 mbps	250-350 mbps
Coverage Area	10 Miles	1000 feet

Commercial Application of 5G

With great speed comes great responsibility.

Although 5G is still quite far from being fully available to everyone which is due to the cost of building a whole new infrastructure, because unlike 4G towers which are backwards compatible(meaning they can still connect to a 3G network when a 4G network is not available), 5G towers cannot connect to a 4G network because they operate on another spectrum which has a much higher frequency than any 4G network. But once the infrastructure is fully built, we are talking about a whole different experience of the internet.

• The most anticipated application of 5G are Autonomous Vehicles, although they are being operated on 4G netwroks, but with reduced latency, the response time would increase to 100 times faster. Thus enabling more efficient operation.
• Remote Surgery is another application of 5G which was successfully tested in China on January 8, 2019. With a delay of just 100 milliseconds the doctor was able to remove a liver of a laboratory test animal successfully that was over 50 Km away. This is reportedly the first remote surgery over 5G.
• 5G is going to be a great deal in the IoT industry(Internet of Things), According to  Statistica/IHS predicts IoT devices will increase from 2 per person today to 10 per person by 2025, which will require a larger and faster network to manage.While 4G is doing a decent job, 5G will make it alot faster to handle large amount of data in a short span of time.
• A public trial of AR/VR Streaming via 5G was conducted by a joint program of the BBC, in which the AR model of the Roman Baths was recreated for the end users, to demonstrate the ability of the technology. A faster connection provides a smooth real time rendering of the AR world which provides a lag free and immersive experience on mobile devices.

Overlooking all the myths, 5G is a great step towards the future of the internet, that will enable every community to get seamless services in the least amount of time.