5G will be more than just a speed upgrade to 4G, which currently powers much of the world’s mobile internet. This gradual infrastructure overhaul is expected to affect not only computers, but electronics and machines in all sorts of fields, essentially bringing together the “Internet of Things,” according to BGSU Computer Science Professor Hassan Rajaei.
The “Internet of Things” is the term for the network of devices that use data about their environments and how they are used, collected through sensors, to improve overall efficiency.
“The Internet of Things, or IOT, has been around for two decades, 20 years. You need to have a huge amount of data collected and passed through to the cloud to be crunched. These technologies get together to give us a better service, which includes smart cars, smart homes, smart buildings, smart education, smart healthcare,” Rajaei said.
5G has a high bandwidth that would support several downloads in short amounts of time, but another important development is its connections have almost no latency. Latency is the amount of time that a connection takes to respond to commands. This feature has allowed vehicles to communicate with each other while driving and enabled surgeons to operate on patients over great distances, using robots.
David McDonald, information technology manager for the city of Bowling Green, believes that 5G will potentially render Wi-Fi obsolete.
“5G is basically going to be better than Wi-Fi can ever be. Sacramento, California, is one of the few cities that already has 5G throughout, and they’ve been advertising that they have it everywhere to attract business,” he said.
Though some areas of the country have set up 5G infrastructure proactively, there are instances of false marketing and confusion over what 5G actually is. Tech enthusiast Audrey Weaver warns that the 5GE presently offered by AT&T is deceptive.
“AT&T has optimized and streamlined 4G and they call it ‘5GE.’ The power between 4G and 5G is a night and day difference. Based on the research I’ve done, we’re still at least a year off from having true 5G,” she said. “AT&T had this update, this patch if you will, where they changed the 4G icon ‘5GE.’ The ‘E’ is supposed to disclose that it isn’t actual 5G, but usually consumers don’t see or think about the ‘E’ at the end of the icon.”
One downside of 5G is that the installations need to be set up in close proximity to each other for consistent coverage. Current cell towers cover several miles radius, but they are the size of tall trees. In contrast, 5G cells only cover a couple thousand feet radius, but they are easier to install because they are the size of large books.
Chinese industry titans, Huawei and ZTE, have been making good progress with their country’s own 5G infrastructure, thanks largely to having close connections with the government itself. Rajaei predicts that 5G will be somewhat widespread in the U.S. five or six years from now.
“Today most of the providers, let’s say Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, they said that they have it available right now. There are a lot of problems that need to be solved though,” Rajaei said. “The wide use of 5G will probably be in 2023. The prediction is that in 2025 it will be everybody’s.”
