Especially if we live in the countryside.
Is it the information superhighway we have all been waiting for?
A quick recap of what the ‘G’ generation stands for:
1G mobile phones
2G text messaging
3G access to the internet
4G increasing internet access speed x 10
5G superfast - 100!!! times internet speed of 4G
Meaning an HD movie could be downloaded in 10 seconds over a 5G network, compared to the 4G download time of somewhere around 10 minutes, why? Well I’m slightly with you on that one.
So what is 5g?
Currently mobile data is made up of radio waves, ‘low-band waves’ and ‘mid-band waves’ 5G adds millimeter waves or mmWaves to this frequency set .
Low-band - long distance big waves,
Mid-band - smaller waves, better bandwidth less distance
mmWave - short distance very high bandwidth - ie; superfast.
But mmWaves can't deal with trees, houses, or anything at all in its way - buses, people, cats… This is fine in a city as there are many masts, but in the countryside? We sure do have a lot of trees and not so many masts.
mmWaves can also interestingly carry out ‘beam-forming’ only interesting as it sounds like it is straight out of Star Trek, beam-forming is a method of focusing the beam or mmWave directly at its recipient. Ergo; even faster.
At the other end of the spectrum there is IPv6 - low-power wireless area networks (WAN). Good for the Internet of Things (IOT) while there still aren’t that many ‘things’ being smart as this is tiny amounts of bandwidth just enough for a fridge to say ‘more milk please’ or a washing machine to say ‘the water’s clean’. Once everyone’s kettle is saying ‘hi’ this will start to require 5G too for the shear volume of little utterances!
But currently 5G even without Star Trek powers is intermittent and battery draining and in the countryside where most of us hardly get 4G and are still waiting for fibre optic or ‘superfast’ fixed connections, it probably isn’t something to get too excited about too soon.
So why do we need it?
Mainly because the more bandwidth we have the more normal it becomes and the more we don’t think about the load we are requesting through ‘thin air’. Social media went from text, to image, to video, Netflix wants us to watch films on the go, and gaming with its hyper-real rendering is about 80% of internet bandwidth already. We are so connected in everything we do from business, to health, travel, life, money and this will only grow until we perhaps even live fully virtually (take a look at some of the Internet DNA podcasts to learn more about this).
Driverless cars, yes they are hungry for 5G too.
My only concern is… is it affecting our health?
5G probably isn’t going to change my life, but it may well change my children’s and we won’t know the real health implications until perhaps I have already lost my marbles. Whether the misplacement of those marbles is down to invisible waves transporting invisible mountains of quite frankly not always that useful information or not, I will never know.
--
Abi Fawcus is a freelance UX Consultant, Website Designer, Logo Designer and Graphic Designer based in Woodbridge, Suffolk. Contact me for more information.