THE 5G DREAM
A ZILLION INTERNET of Things devices all connected at once. Lagless cloud-based gaming. Cable-free connections for home Internet. Doctors operating remotely on patients. Smart farms. An end to traffic jams. And, yes, 10Gb/s in your pocket. All of that and way, way more is the promise of 5G. If it delivers—and it’s a big “if”—5G is going to change our lives.
Simply put, 5G is just the inevitable progression of cellular wireless communication networks. It’s the fifth such generation, hence the name. As for 5G’s sales pitch, it goes like this: 5G will be vastly faster than previous networks; it will achieve dramatically lower latencies; and it will support a far larger number of devices connected in parallel.
The precise impact of all that will be complex. Early demos of 5G technology involving multiple gigabits of bandwidth delivered to smartphones have inevitably grabbed the headlines, as have teething problems that hint at real-world limitations for the new technology. But it will likely be the more nuanced capabilities of the new network, rather than YouTubers firing up Speedtest on their 5G handsets, that will have a greater impact on how we live and work.
For instance, future visions of a vast array of connected devices—including the so-called Internet of Things—will depend on it. Potentially world-altering technologies, such as autonomous cars, fall into that category. Similarly, much lower latencies will hugely reduce the need for wired connections to client devices of almost any kind. Wireless local delivery of really
