India’s progress in communications technology in recent years has been rapid. Increased affordability, propensity to spend, and lower internet tariff rates have all helped the communications sector boom in India. This has put India on the verge of rolling out 5G technology based services.
5G networks are the next generation of mobile internet connectivity, offering faster speeds and more reliable connections on smartphones and other devices than ever before.
One would be able to download a High Definition (HD) film in a few seconds.
Video buffering during a streaming session would virtually disappear as data transmission would happen at lightning speeds on a 5G network. This would happen because 5G networks would deliver data with less than a millisecond of delay. Currently, 4G networks have a delay of around 70 milliseconds. All this would happen when 5G networks are built alongside the existing 4G LTE networks.
The standalone 5G networks, operating at very high speed frequencies, could easily achieve Gigabit plus browsing speeds.
Experts believe that with advances in communications technology, the world is fast moving towards a connected society.
With all our devices being smart and connected to the internet, we would be able to look at Smart Homes that are energy efficient, save time on housekeeping and shopping, and enjoy safer and more efficient public and private transportation. Besides, it also enables new approaches in education, healthcare, transportation, energy, and entertainment.
5G networks could run on 3400 Mhz, 3500 Mhz, and 3600 Mhz. spectrum bands respectively.
It is important to note that airwaves in the 3500 Mhz band are considered ideal for the first wave of 5G.
Going forward, millimetre-wave spectrum may play a significant role in 5G networks.
They are called millimetre-waves as they wary in length from 1 to 10 millimetres, unlike radio waves that serve the present smartphones.
Millimetre waves are broadcast on frequencies between 30 and 300 Ghz. They have largely been used by those running satellite networks and radar systems.
How Do these High Frequencies Help 5G?
- These high frequencies are helpful for a variety of reasons. As a matter of fact, one of the most important being that they support a huge capacity for fast data.
- Next, not only are they less cluttered with existing cellular data, and so can be used in the future for increasing bandwidth demands, they’re also highly directional and can be used right next to other wireless signals without causing interference.
- This is very different than 4G towers which fire data in all directions, and potentially wastes both energy and power to beam radio waves at locations that aren’t even requesting access to the internet.
- 5G also uses shorter wavelengths, which means that antennas can be much smaller than existing antennas while still providing precise directional control.
- Next, since one base station can utilize even more directional antennas, it means that 5G can support over 1,000 more devices per meter than what’s supported by 4G.
- As a consequence of all this, 5G networks, when they become widely available, will be able to beam ultrafast data to a lot more users, with high precision and little latency.
- Another difference between 5G and 4G is that 5G networks can more easily understand the type of data being requested, and are able to switch into a lower power mode when not in use or when supplying low rates to specific devices, but then switch to a higher powered mode for things like HD video streaming.
- 5G is 10 times faster than 4G. This means that during the time it took to download just one piece of data with 4G (like a movie), the same could have been downloaded 10 times over a 5G network.
Some Negatives of 5G
- Most of the super-high frequencies of 5G networks work only if there’s a clear, direct line-of-sight between the antenna and the device receiving the signal. What’s more is that some of these high frequencies are easily absorbed by humidity, rain, and other objects, meaning that they don’t travel as far.
- It’s for these reasons that we can expect lots of strategically placed antennas to support 5G, either really small ones in every room or building that needs it or large ones positioned throughout a city; maybe even both.
- There will also probably be many repeating stations to push the radio waves as far as possible to provide long range 5G support.
- Also, the spectrum that we use today for 4G technology is for the lower bands. This cannot carry large amounts of data. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of Giga bits of data in a second. For this, it is natural that we need higher frequencies.