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Digital Life in the 5G Era

How the Upcoming 5G Networks Can Change Our World

By Istvan LiptakPublished 5 years ago 3 min read
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Photo credit goes to Kalhh on Pixabay.

OASIS (that's an acronym standing for Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), the virtual reality social network slash MMO in the Spielberg movie Ready Player One that linked all the residents of... well, pretty much the whole world together was a marvel of computer programming and server technology. It offered its users a completely lifelike experience, down to the touch (thanks to the use of VR visors and haptic jumpsuits), all this in the highest definition possible. Imagine the hardware needed to run a simulation of this size, with so many users logged in at the same time. And imagine the bandwidth needed for so many users to be logged on simultaneously—a wireless network (you didn't think Wade's van was connected to a fiber network, did you?) capable of transferring insane quantities of data each second, 24 hours a day. While we have nothing that's capable of such unimaginable bandwidth at this time (although German scientists have already devised a scalable network capable of transferring at least 100 Gbps that can go up to terabits) the upcoming 5G mobile standard can give us a taste of things to come. In short, 5G will change the worldor at least the digital one. Now let's take a better look at what exactly it is and how it will prove to be useful in the future.

A New Range of Frequencies

Mobile communications have been evolving since the late 1970s when their first generation of standards was rolled out. Today referred to as 1G, it was analog back then—so switching to digital through 2G (plus the addition of mobile data transfer and texting) was a huge leap forward about a decade later. 3G, the network that's still currently in use in many areas, offered the first foray into mobile broadband, video calling, and such. 4G pushed the speed even higher, allowing us to play on-the-go with little to no lag, stream in 3D, and store our stuff in the cloud. And now we're on the verge of 5G, another big leap forward when it comes to network speeds and simultaneous connections.

5G will make use of the existing 4G infrastructure at first, improving speeds through the introduction of more efficient data transfer methods to boost mobile broadband speeds by up to 50 percent. Later, in turn, as a new network of antennae will be built, it will show its true potential: hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections, insane transfer speeds, and a never-before-heard quality of voice calls. The first 5G phones will be rolled out as early as next year, and a year later, it will become broadly available pretty much everywhere.

What 5G Will Change

For one, it will boost the speed at which data is transferred in mobile networks. This won't only mean that you'll be able to download PUBG in seconds and not minutes as you do now and stream 4K HDR video from the web, but also that the speed and the latency of the connection will finally be low enough for new use cases, like autonomous cars continuously communicating with their servers to avoid any incident while on the road. Among the other use cases, we find those involving the Internet of Things, with smart homes being able to communicate in more meaningful ways with their owners. Finally, think of all the high-quality live video transmissions that will become possible using this new, high-speed network—you'll be able to enjoy the sunset at the Niagara Falls, for example, using your phone as a VR headset while sitting in your home in Perth (the capital of Western Australia).

5G will indeed change the world—and bring OASIS one step closer to reality. Let's just hope that the "real world" depicted in Ready Player One will never come...

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Istvan Liptak

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