The essence of 5G is speed upgrade! Packages will become cheaper and cheaper

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About two years ago, when 5G had just come into people's attention, the various beautiful visions of 5G seemed like scenes from science fiction movies.

But now, one year after 5G was commercially available, people's views on 5G have become more rational and realistic.

In essence, 5G is just a speed upgrade for 4G, and it is still a long way to go before it can subvert the landscape of mobile Internet.

Most so-called "innovations" do not fundamentally solve the problem, they just want you to spend more money.

Innovation that is constantly falsified

When 5G was first mentioned, people envisioned many innovative application scenarios, the most "Versailles" of which was high-end telemedicine.

It sounds so sci-fi that a doctor can perform surgery on a patient remotely using a robotic arm thousands of miles away through a 5G network.

Later, people suddenly realized that hospitals couldn't afford to install fiber-optic broadband. Isn't fiber-optic more reliable, stable and faster than 5G?

The industry generally believes that the biggest innovation of 5G networks is the Internet of Everything, and the killer application of the Internet of Everything is autonomous driving.

However, according to the current performance of 5G networks, it is still very difficult to support autonomous driving. Moreover, for the automotive industry, the more urgent thing is actually the switch to new energy as the foundation, which is at least 10 years away.

There are still limitations on the technical level

As we all know, 5G networks have two major frequency bands: Sub-6GHz and millimeter wave. The former has low cost and wide coverage, while the latter has high cost and high performance.

We chose Sub-6GHz based on my country's vast territory and the maturity of 4G networks, which are easy to upgrade. If we do not distinguish and use the technical characteristics of pan-5G to describe the application scenarios of my country's networks, it will obviously cause a lot of misleading.

According to the current 5G network speed test, the actual average speed of mainstream 5G mobile phones such as iPhone 12 Pro or Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G is only about 500Mbps, and the delay is not as low as the legend.

Considering the increase in 5G users in the future and the 5G bandwidth being occupied by more people, the real 5G in the future will just be faster than 4G.

The demand is not urgent

Currently, the only place where people can use 5G is mobile phones, and upgrading mobile phones to 5G networks does not seem to bring much change in application modes except for faster speeds.

Streaming media 1080P is upgraded to 4K. How much difference can a small mobile phone screen tell? 320KB MP3 music is upgraded to lossless. Who can hear the difference without professional equipment and extremely quiet environment?

In fact, long before 5G networks were put into commercial use, experts pointed out that 5G networks would not bring about a revolution in application models, and their prospects lay more in the industrial Internet.

Because in the 4G era, people have almost fully tapped the potential of mobile application models. No wonder some netizens say that as long as the 4G network speed can meet the standards, there will be no shortage of food, clothing, housing and transportation.

It would be good if we could return to rationality quickly.

To date, 5G networks have been commercially available for more than a year, and the price of 5G mobile phones has fallen below 1,000 yuan.

Unfortunately, the killer applications of 5G have not yet appeared, and people have no clue or direction at all. Perhaps we should put aside the burden of "5G will inevitably bring about a revolution" and return to a rational mindset. Isn't faster progress?

If we do the math, the life cycle of 5G is no more than ten years, and ten years is not even a speck of dust in the long river of human history.

It took at least 30 years from the rise of mobile phones in the 1990s to the current changes in our lives. Perhaps 5G in the past decade is just the beginning of the budding or breeding of the Internet of Everything. After all, there will be 6G and even XG in the future...

The turning point of 5G is just around the corner

If we follow the pragmatic idea that 5G networks will be faster and more abundant, perhaps we will be much happier. In the past, it was impossible to load videos on mobile networks, but now we can watch videos on TikTok and Kuaishou anytime and anywhere. Isn’t this progress?

In the past, we didn’t dare to download anything on the mobile network, but now we can just download and install hundreds of megabytes of apps and use them at will. Isn’t this also progress?

It is inevitable that the rates will become cheaper and cheaper

Mobile networks will inevitably become faster and faster, and charges will inevitably become cheaper and cheaper. 5G is just one of the nodes. There may be fluctuations at this node, but the general trend will not change.

It is foreseeable that 5G packages will inevitably be reduced in 2021, and 5G chips will inevitably become more mature due to the popularization of 5nm technology. The real 5G replacement wave is coming, and the turning point of 5G is just around the corner.

When most people can afford and enjoy 5G networks, perhaps truly killer 5G applications can be developed. When it comes to the issue of 5G network and application model innovation, the logic is that the chicken comes first and the egg comes later.

But by that time, 6G will be just around the corner. This is the pace of technological evolution!