How far are we from the legendary 5G?

If the upper left corner of your phone desktop shows 4G or LTE, it is good enough for now. However, in the near future, when we say "soon" we mean several years later, not just a few months later, our phones will show 5G.

The mobile industry is excited about developing the next generation of high-speed wireless network services, and this call will continue to be reflected at the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Although it is the current technology hot spot, don't believe the hype. The real 5G transformation will not come soon. One reason is that operators must also upgrade their massive infrastructure. In addition, 5G is not just a technology that makes your mobile network run faster. The 5G revolution will have a wider and more far-reaching impact. It will be an information pipeline that connects self-driving cars, VR headsets, delivery drones, and billions of connected devices in the home.

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The foundation of 5G

In some ways, 5G is pretty much what we imagined it would be: faster than 4G, but not as fast as telepathy. It has no unified definition yet, nor hardware standards to build on, but the major carriers are already busy testing and promoting their own technologies.

The only thing that the operators agree on is the vague direction of 5G development. 5G will have extremely fast speeds, extremely stable status, and a dazzling number of functions. The speed of 10Gbps will not be just a legend that has never been heard of. In a long time, it will also replace home Wi-Fi networks, providing faster speeds and wider coverage.

"Overall, 5G will provide a wider 'pipeline' and faster speeds," said Verizon spokesman Marc Tracey. Specifically, 5G will be ten times faster than 4G LTE. Users will be able to download a movie in seconds and enjoy a live VR experience with little lag. 5G will also have less delays in network communications.

How will 5G work?

Currently planned 5G networks will operate in high-frequency bands of the wireless spectrum between 30 GHz and 300 GHz, which is known as millimeter wave spectrum. These millimeter waves can transmit heaps of data at very high speeds, but they can't travel as far as the lower frequency waves used in 4G networks. High-frequency millimeter waves also have difficulty getting around walls, buildings and other obstacles.

On lower frequency networks like 4G LTE, antennas can be placed farther apart and obstacles aren't a big problem. When 5G networks are built, carriers will have to use more antennas to achieve the same coverage as current networks. By then, we'll see mini antennas almost everywhere.

That’s why some 5G development participants, such as Qualcomm and Intel, are also experimenting in the sub-6 GHz range as a complementary approach, using something more stable to supplement millimeter wave signals. Like other technologies, 5G will inevitably have inconveniences in its early stages of development.

Do I need to buy a new phone to use 5G?

Yes, they will, and there will likely be some small antennas on the phone, as mentioned before, but it will get bigger very quickly.

How long do we have to wait?

U.S. carriers currently plan to begin widely rolling out 5G in 2020, which seems like a long time to wait, but the plan is ambitious enough because the emergence of 5G also means new antennas, new devices and new wireless data applications.

"In the current 4G market, we see data-centric, smartphone-centric usage," said Rob Topol, general manager of Intel's 5G business. "For 5G, we are looking forward to much more than smartphones." This means that more categories such as self-driving cars, virtual reality, drones, etc. will enjoy the convenience brought by 5G.

Verizon recently announced that it will launch 5G service in 11 cities in the United States by mid-year, but this time the service is for fixed broadband rather than mobile network services. AT&T will provide DirectTV Now video service over 5G to a small number of customers in Austin, Texas. Last year, Sprint provided live 4K video via 5G at a football game. In addition, T-Mobile is also planning to make 5G high-speed pipes for VR video.

On the hardware side, both Intel and Qualcomm have launched 5G modems, along with other infrastructure to support the various 5G trials that will take place this year.

Of course, these tests were conducted before any technology was standardized. They involved individual cases and were far from sufficient to support the deployment of large-scale wireless infrastructure for hundreds of millions of people.

Identifying a “common language” is a top priority

Because 5G is being developed for the tens of billions of devices around the world that rely on it, the network will be designed to meet the needs of each device. If you want to play a 4K video on a big-screen TV, we value its data throughput. If you use 5G to connect a controller to a drone, we value its fast response.

For mobile devices, 5G will allegedly fix many of the problems with 4G and existing wireless technologies. It will be designed to support more concurrent users and devices and provide them with faster speeds than 4G.

But before all of this, first of all, there are some things that must be done. "We need to have a formal process, 5G needs to be defined first, which is the first priority now." said Jan Dawson, senior analyst at Jackdaw Research, "Only then can companies start promoting these services to users. We still have a long way to go."