5G

On the 24th October, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel and several other operators, including some that are no longer operational, will have to pay to the government within 90 days a combined more than 1.02 lakh crores in AGR (adjusted gross revenue) as spectrum usage charges and license fees.

Due to this decision cellphone plans got up to 42% costlier and if the court didn’t give Vodafone Idea more time to pay the due AGR then the company will collapse and we will only have two companies in the telecom sector- Jio and Bharti Airtel (We all know what’s happening with BSNL).

Competition in every sector is very important because it pushes companies to improve their product and give the best possible product to their customers. At the time, when the telecom sector is in crisis talking about 5G is just like talking about 5 trillion economy in the time of economic slowdown. But as the hype of 5G is getting bigger & bigger every day, today we will talk about the different aspects of 5G and how it will change our everyday life.

Every time the technical rules that define the inner workings of cellular networks changes, we get a new “generation,” or “G” of technology, meaning to reap the benefits people have to buy whole new phones, and carriers will need to install new transmission equipment to deliver the speeds they promised.

When we got 1G it was for voice calls only, but then 2G gave us text messages, 3G added that multimedia support that we can’t imagine being without, like video chats and faster speeds, and now we have 4G – which has all the features of 3G But an added bump of speeds from 14 Mbps to 100Mbps which changed the game.

5G is anticipated to give users the fastest connectivity they have ever experienced. It will be 10 to 100 times (or even more) faster than 4G which means that you can download all 8 seasons of GOT in just 1-2 minutes.

But the thing that sets 5G aside is it's crazy low latency rate which is the amount of delay between the sending and receiving of information. Now 4G tends to average about 100 to 200 milliseconds and to be fair a hundred milliseconds is fast human reaction time is about 200 to 300 milliseconds but 5G will get it down to one millisecond that's almost real-time.

5G will allow devices to communicate with each other in real-time and it can do major improvements in the responsiveness in devices that use sensors to make important decisions; like self-driving cars that need to suddenly brake, or industrial robots that can be sent to hazardous areas and be controlled remotely from anywhere in the world or better yet, anything in the healthcare field. From telemedicine, precision surgical robots, to remote surgery, or even virtual physical therapy sessions.

Network slicing is another hot feature of 5G. It is the ability to partition off segments of the 5G network with specific latency, bandwidth, and quality-of-service guarantees, that could change the underlying economics of cellular service. So, if a hospital or factory needs a dedicated wireless network with specific requirements they can use software to allocate slices without human involvement.

But 5G has one major drawback. It uses a mix of frequencies with most of the attention on the brand-new millimeter waves that are compared to the 15 to 40 centimeter long waves used by 4G and shorter waves and higher frequencies have a massive problem they don't go very far. On a 4G network, you can go 10 kilometers and barely lose signal, 5G max out on about 300 meters and it can't go through walls or even bad weather like rain.

So a new infrastructure is needed. That’s why we have to get small cell sites. Hundreds, if not thousands of lower-power base stations (outputting only 2-10 watts each) will have to be built-in and around city homes to keep the connectivity in place.

So, just like any other technology, 5G also has its pros and cons but one thing is for sure that once available, it will definitely change the world around us.