The world is arriving on an exciting new era of transformative digital technology. This revolution will arrive to most of us with very little awareness of the brawn required to realize it. Like most revolutionary technological advancements, it will seem to come suddenly -- as if someone turned on a light switch -- and memory of a time it didn’t exist will quickly fade.
The foundation for the 5G revolution was laid many years ago with the advent of 3G and the beginnings of the wireless world we know today. Over the past two decades, thanks to relentless and extensive improvements across the technology landscape, incremental developments have set the stage for the digital world’s future.
Futuristic Tech Becomes Day-to-Day Life
5G is the name given to a global project to invest in the collective digital future. It is an ambitious, worldwide undertaking to replace the current wireless infrastructure with an entirely redesigned concept. Once 5G arrives, complete digital connectivity on an unprecedented level will become the norm.
The 5G revolution and Industry 4.0 has the goal of finally grasping the promises of connective Artificial Intelligence (AI). It will be what connects the Internet of Things (IoT), the certainty of Virtual Reality (VR), and the driver of Autonomous Vehicles (AV). Once this next step in technological evolution is in full force, it will enable a mesh of future innovative ways to web human and digital existence together.
What We Can Expect from 5G
The new wireless infrastructure represents a complete re-imagining of the who, what, where, when, and how we communicate. With 5G technology, the world will soon experience:
- Faster Data Rates: Users can expect speeds of between 100 Mbs to 10Gbs.
- Larger Capacity: 5G will support 100 times more devices and 10,000 times more traffic within the same geographic area than current capabilities.
- Lower Latency: Round-trip transfers of data will feature <1 millisecond delay times.
- Better Coverage: A reliable wireless signal will be available nearly everywhere on the planet.
- Increased Energy Efficiency: Designers expect battery life on some devices to last up to ten years.
Want to learn more about what the 5G revolution will look like for device manufacturers?
The incumbent global wireless standard, 4G, officially launched in 2008, was the second generation of a worldwide standard that continued the telecommunications industry’s aim to serve the consumer market with enhanced mobile data capabilities. 4G offered users, for the first time, the capacity to watch videos on their smartphones and opened the door to possibilities for a completely connected future for end-users and the business sector.
As digital technology continued to advance, wireless network architects soon realized that the current system lacked the necessary robustness to provide for the future. Work began designing a system to accommodate billions of intelligent devices interconnected and provide intuitive interfaces to human interaction. As the age of pervasive computing dawns, 5G will provide the pathways on which autonomous networks will operate. This web will lay in the background to connect massive amounts of data to various new and useful applications.
5G promises to transform the way people communicate, learn, conduct business, entertain themselves, create art, travel, and interact with the world around them. It will potentially affect virtually every aspect of human existence.
Enablers of the 5G Revolution
The implementation of the 5G network requires a massive retooling of architectures and strategies for providing wireless connectivity. To solve the problems of latency and capacity in the system and to utilize unused portions of the frequency spectrum, designers adopted a small cell network architecture. This architecture carries a strategy of network management that imposes some advanced requirements on the hardware and software protocols to realize reliable network connectivity.
