5G: Is the Hype Justified?

There’s a lot of hype around 5G now. We took a deep dive on the topic with expert Jack Shaw, president of Breakthrough Business Technologies and co-founder of Blockchain Executive, and learned some fascinating facts about the future of cellular communications.

I think most people think 5G is just a faster, better 4G, but it's really something quite different, isn’t it?

In reality, 5G has many advantages in terms of higher speed, greater capacity, and lower latency. One of the reasons it does is because it uses a different, higher, more capacious frequency on the wireless electronic communications spectrum. Those higher frequencies can hold a lot more information. So you can transmit a lot more data.

However, higher frequency also means that you can't transmit as far as you can with lower frequency 4G. Under certain circumstances, it can be more difficult for 5G to penetrate through walls or dense environments like concentrated urban environments.

With 4G wireless communications, you've got a cell tower typically every few miles. The towers are tall because they broadcast out over a radius of two or three miles. With 5G, you have many more actual wireless nodes transmitting the signals, and they are using a mesh environment to enable the signals to hop from one to another.

Mesh networks are common in large Wi-Fi implementations. Rather than a single point that broadcasts out over a given distance, you have a number of wireless access points that communicate with each other and pass the signals to the next point. And those points, in turn, can be connected to a number of individual wireless access points to communicate with each other so that the information can be shared and redistributed. These nodes communicate with each other and relay the signal to one another so that you have a good signal penetration everywhere.

Generally, you’re going to have nodes every couple of hundred yards and sometimes, even more closely together. But because of that, they don't have to necessarily be on high towers. They can be on existing light poles, or building corners, or just up at the tops of buildings. So rather than seeing a lot of new towers going up for 5G, what you're going to see is 5G wireless transmitters all over the place. And that gives us a lot more speed because of the higher capacity of these higher frequency bands.

Just how fast is 5G, and will it eventually replace 4G networks?

Right now, 5G, with 10-gigabit wireless communications speeds, could be up to 100 times faster than 4G. If it's 100 times faster, for example, an 80-gigabyte medical image that would take about six hours to download today would download in about three minutes with 5G.

I’m predicting that by 2025, we will see 5G rolled out pretty broadly across most of the United States and for that matter, most of the world. But it won’t replace 4G, especially in rural areas where it’s impractical to have this huge node network.

The second characteristic you mentioned was capacity. What kind of capacity does 5G have?

To grasp the capacity of 5G, let’s take an example. If you take the length of a football field from the back of one end zone to the back of the other end zone, and an area just as wide, which typically is what you would see on the inside of a football stadium, that's about a hectare in area.

Right now, with 4G, you can have about 20 devices transmitting and receiving per hectare simultaneously and allow all of them to get the full 4G access. So, if you go to a football game with 50,000 of your friends and even 5% of them at any point in time are trying to transmit selfies, all of a sudden you've got way more demand than 4G can handle. The speed is there, but 4G can only handle a certain amount of data at a time.

5G, on the other hand, could handle around 10,000 devices: 500 times the capacity. So, you can see why one of the first implementations of 5G technology will be in the NFL and major sports. These organizations want people sending selfies and pictures and tweets from their sporting events.

The final characteristic you mentioned is low latency. Let’s talk more about that now.

Latency is, of course, the response time from the moment a signal leaves a device until it gets to the destination, and back. With 4G, the best response time is about 100 milliseconds, or 1/10th of a second, round trip. For most of what we do, that's fine.

But for certain kinds of remote-control operations, you need a much lower latency. And 5G, as it starts to roll out, will be able to deliver latencies on the order of 10 milliseconds or 1/100th of a second and eventually, theoretically, it could be as low as a single millisecond.

Today, surgeons can stand in the next room, hardwired to a robotic surgical device that's doing a prostate surgery, for example, and they can see on the screen exactly where the device is. They can actually control that scalpel much more finely and accurately than they could if they were in that same room holding the scalpel in their hand. Because they might move their hand a quarter of an inch and the scalpel might only move a fraction of a millimeter—giving them extremely fine control. Plus, they have a camera in there so they can see precisely what’s happening. Because they're hardwired, they're getting response times at the speed of light; they're seeing the instrument move as they move it.

But if you're working from somewhere across the country, you don't want to be doing surgery remotely because the image that you're looking at is showing you where the scalpel was two- or three-tenths of a second ago, and it's not where it looks like it is to you. This makes remote robotic surgery impractical right now. With 5G, it will become practical because the latency will be so low that even if you're 1,000 miles away, you'll be able to see the scalpel in the exact location that it's actually in at that moment.

This also comes into play, for instance, with autonomous vehicles because they have sensors from various different detection devices to figure precise locations: the edge of the road, the vehicle in front of it or behind it, and so on. AI is helping to do this analysis and react. All these decisions about whether it’s safe to change lanes, accelerate, or pass a slower moving vehicle must be made in real time.

Five or 10 years down the road, we’ll be able to make much better use of the available highway space by being able to have these vehicles essentially draft each other. Low latency in 5G will allow autonomous vehicles to drive inches apart, driving 60, 80, even 100 miles an hour safely. And if there's the slightest variation, because, say, one car hits a bump on the road that slows it down a fraction, the other car will sense that immediately. It will adjust its speed and know that the car behind it is adjusting its speed just enough to reflect that adjustment and keep them from crashing into each other.

This means you'll be able to have automobiles that are operating using the available space more effectively. In turn, this will reduce congestion on the highways, allowing higher travel speeds and the ability to do so because they're drafting each other, and providing better energy efficiency.

Are there any other major advantages for industry that we haven’t discussed?

The way in which 5G is being implemented by the big telecommunications companies is with a highly automated implementation process. In other words, they have virtual software systems that are automatically configuring the 5G deployments. As the telcos roll it out over the next couple of years, these virtual systems will automatically configure systems to meet utilization demands.

It will be simpler for the consumer market as demand is much more predictable. In the business environment, you're going to have lumpier growth. But, overall, the advantage of having these virtual deployment systems that have a simplified form of AI managing the deployment process is that, unless it's something really extreme in terms of the level of demand, customers can get up and running. It means businesses will be able to implement and scale up very, very quickly – in a matter of seconds if the carrier has the right automated systems in place.

For more on 5G, check out the results of an Oracle survey, “Oracle Survey Finds Enterprises Ready for Benefits of 5G.” If you would like to get the perspective of the telco industry, we recently spoke to expert Peter Jarich at GSMA Intelligence in a post “The Key to 5G Is the Enterprise.”

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Jack Shaw is a strategist, author, and thought leader who prepares leaders for digital transformation — managing the strategic business impacts of such current and emerging technologies as AI, blockchain, 5G, Internet of Things, and 3D printing.