5G : Entry to the New decade with Speed
As we step into the end of year 2019 and also towards end of the decade, the discussions about technologies and the progress we’ve made throughout the decade are higher than ever.
One such technological advancement is the deployment of long awaited 5g network, the successor of 4g/LTE.
While a few countries have already been provided with the 5g bands by the providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, Vodafone and so on, a lot of them have a long time to wait for the services to be available.
5g is being offered with multiple bandwidths suitable for different fields where the speeds range from few Megabits all the up to gigabits per second. Next we shall see what 5g is and what 5g speed tests say.
5g is the highly advanced wireless technology whose researches started in November of 2012, started actual deployment in the late 2018 until now in the major cities of a few countries.
Some of these countries include China, United Kingdom, Korea, USA and Germany. As of October, Korea already had 4 million 5g mobiles and is expecting around 5 million of them by the end of the year while China expects around 150 million users by 2020.
Along with the services being provided, smartphone manufacturers also have stepped up in the 5g race, releasing their Premiums and flagships with 5g support in these countries.
Some of the devices supporting 5g include:
- Samsung Galaxy S10 5g
- Samsung Galaxy note 10+ 5g
- Oneplus 7 pro
- Huawei mate X
- Huawei mate 30 pro
- Oppo reno 5g
- LG V50 Thinq
- Xiaomi MI Mix 3
- Moto Z3
- Redmi K30 5g
- Samsung Galaxy A90
However advanced the technology might seem, the 5g millimeter wave cannot be used for general purpose communications as it cannot penetrate walls, thick surfaces or trees. It is said that even a heavy rainfall can distort the signals. Due to these setbacks, 5g is being offered in 3 different bandwidths: The 5g millimeter wave, Mid-band and the low-band.
The 5g millimeter wave is the fastest among all whose wavelength ranges from 24 GHz to as high as 72 GHz. The speeds are as high as 1-2 Gigabits per second. Due to the high bandwidth, the range is short and more cell towers are required. Indoor coverage is limited. A few ISPs like Verizon in the US and Optus in Australia are establishing indoor Hubs to offer mmwave 5g.
The Mid-band wavelengths are smaller ranging from 2.4GHz to 4.2GHz offering 100-400 Mbps of speed.
The Low-band is much similar to the 4g bands and also offers similar speeds. Wavelengths are below 1GHz and offers speeds upto a few hundreds of megabits per second. Although performance might improve, but cannot be much higher than that of 4g.
The air latency is said to be around 8-12 miliseconds. The net latency(ping) is found by adding the air latency to the server latency. According to Verizon, Their latency is round 30ms in the early release while servers close to towers may reduce this by 10-20 ms.
Although the deployment of 5g started early this year, only a few countries (very few cities of those countries) have actually received the 5g services. Few countries including India might have to wait for a few more months or years to get the access. (5g launch in India is rumoured to be set around the late 2021 or even 2022) Also, there have been debates about whether 5g is safe, whether it gives any better results than that of 4g in the lower band networks. Though the researches have been fruitful, we are yet to see what the next decade is about to offer.
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