1. It's going to be ridiculously fast:5G speed brings insane speeds. Think being able to download a full length movie to your smartphone in a second and you've got some idea of what the uplift in speed will be like come 2020. Forget 4K quality films, as by 2020 we will all be hankering for 8K films in 3D (16 times the pixel count of full HD) and the uplift in speed will make allthis possible (at least in theory). It'llbe that fast you might not even need that expensive fibre-optic connection.The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has already proposed a 100Mb/s-to-1Gb/s user experienced data rate for 5G with a 20Gb/s peak data rate and as an early indicationthose speeds are already way beyond what is already available. Before we can even think about those speeds becoming a reality the ITU has a huge job on its hands to completely restructure all parts of the existing spectrum and harmonise them so that they support the rollout of 5G technology worldwide. The move would mean that mobile internet access would not be restricted to one country for a user like it is today for 4G/LTE.2. The rise of the Internet of Things:Get ready to see sensors everywhere! 5G will be a much smarter way for devices to access the internet and the rollout has as much to do with the growth of IoT devices as it does anything else. Whilst 5G is ready to become the smartest network ever, the devicesthat connect to it will have to be too. Everything from washing machines, smart meters, traffic cameras, driverless cars, smart roads and sensors attached to trees will be buzzing data to each other over the network at all times.Gartner's recent estimates of 25 billion connected "Things" by 2020 goes to show just how extensive the network will need to be to cope and it's hoped 5G will be that safety net to make things go smoothly.3. Huge increase in bandwidth capacity:New devices means new needs. All those new devices means that capacity will be one of the biggest needs for 5G to address and one estimate from theanalyst community reckons that it has the potential to bring capacity that is 1,000 times higher than it is currently. Other vendors put the capacity at somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times larger than the current state and combined with the new "things", it's the largest use case that has so far been put forward by companies attempting to justify why we need 5G. Perhaps the most tantalising example of how 5G could transform our lives is in transportation. A future world where none of us need to even drive our own cars is finally on the way. Collision detection, real-time navigation, remote traffic management and automatic breaking systems are just some of the innovations that will be made possible by the implementation of 5G networks. 5G is not critical for driverless cars but having it will help significantly .4. "It won't break":5G is the future of wireless connectivity. One of theboldest predictions of any is that 5G will dispel all reliability issues and deliver a network that "doesn't break". A study released by Ericsson midway through 2014, includes "exceptionally high reliability" in a list of features that next generation networks will be able to support when they are eventually rolled out. The latency of 5G is expected to be just a single millisecond (50 times faster than 4G) and the reliability factor issomething that driverless cars and connected "things" will need for their usage to reach the heady figures mentioned earlier. After all those points and the expectation of what 5G might end up becoming, we are still miles away from a harmonised set of rules that will influence the most important factor of them all - speed. We should get that later on this year when the ITU has concluded its studies and from there on, it'll be a mighty fast four and a half years until 5G starts to rollout.5. Europe to "leapfrog" them all?Will London be first? UK consumers aren't expected to see it rollout until around 2020 at the very earliest with the price of the technology likely to be too high for anything to take place before later that decade. KT Telecom, however,has other ideas and the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang could indeed see the first commercial rollout of the technology. CEO Chang-Guy Hwang told a gathering at the Mobile World Congress 2015 that itwould be the first commercial rollout of its kind and, even though Nokia Networks CEO Rajeev Suri dampened this by calling it a trial network, it's still a big step for the games that take place in under three years time. Even though Korea looks like being the first country to see a trial of the technology, Europe could be at the front of the queue for any commercial roll out if Nokia Networks CEO, Rajeev Suri, is to bebelieved. "But, Korea could be first with 5G, followed by Japan and then the US. However, Europe could leapfrog all of these," he said at MWC 2015. Get excited UK!
Comments