What is 5G Network Technology Definition and Meaning - Information Technology

What is 5G Technology

5G means fifth generation. But how did we get here? And will it actually be better? Debatable. You're going to not regret it. It's a double negative-- doesn't matter. You're not going to regret it. Please join, thank you, 5G, let's kick into it. The G stands for generation. And each G describes one of the generations of wireless technology. But as simple as that sounds, and before you get too bought into this, I feel I should point out that that's kind of a big lie. A big part of generations is the marketing. Remember all the confusion about LTE versus 4G? There are differences, and we'll get there. But it was confusing in the marketing. Anyway, as 5G rolls out, we're getting this marketing attack again. But there are actually frameworks and standards for the G's. The thing is, sometimes we get half G's or 3/4 G's. And you don't ever hear about those, cause they're not easy to market. So let's talk about them in order. 0, 1 and 2G were just about making and getting calls without wires. That's it. Three and four have been about adding data transmission to those devices. And 5-- [SIGHS] 5G is promising to like, anoint your first born girl as Khaleesi or something, seriously. According to a paper in the International Journal of Computer Science and Management Studies, 5G is, quote, "assumed as the perfection level of wireless communication in mobile technology." Ahh, we might not need any wires at all for this system. And instead, every wireless device will communicate over the air across the system with each other. So you definitely want to stick around. So here are the questions. What is 5G? What about the other G's? What will it do for me? How will all these new devices work? And is this so much better? Plus, what about 6G? Yeah, we're going there. So let's start back at zero. According to the IJCSMS, before the 1970s, there was what we can look back and dub 0G mobile telephony technologies. Prior to cell phones, there were CB radios, police dispatch radios, and the like. And eventually, they did what they called 0.5G. And they formalized the telephony part, as we think of it, the dialing part.

By using VHF radio bands to connect these devices to the regular telephone network, the portable boxes got their own phone numbers. By the end of the 1970s, the idea of 1G was established, as the first cell phones were created. 1G refers to an analog radio signal sent from your device to a tower, then transmitted through the phone network. In the first cell phones, there were basically no security at all. Your voice would normally fall from 85 to a few hundred hertz. And these old cell phones modulated your voice up to 150 megahertz and then transmitted that signal. And that's it. Anyone who picked up the signal could reverse the modulation. Being digital meant that 2G phones could be encrypted. But also, that there were these little empty spaces in the data stream. And engineers realized that these would allow for short messages to be sent. They called them short message service or SMS. The text message was more. That's right. The text message is older than the movie, Jurassic Park. And by the way, they should not cost anything, because all they're doing is piggybacking on data that's already being set. But don't get me started. 2G is also where the term CDMA and GSM come in. CDMA is code division multiple access. It was created by allied forces during World War II to keep the Nazis from jamming their signals. GSM was invented in Finland and quickly became the standard across Europe. And it means global system for mobile communication was invented for mobile phones. And it's one of the most common standards for cell phone use worldwide. GSM is what allows for international roaming. Your phone, no matter who the carrier is here in the US, likely has GSM built in, but we'll come back to that. The basic difference between the two is how the calls are sent to the system. CDMA networks assign every handset a unique ID. And the network picks out the calls and data based on that ID. This is why you couldn't just swap phones on Verizon. You had to physically go to the store so they could update the network's white list with your new unique ID number. And then you could use the phone and would take time. It was annoying. And nobody wanted to go to the damn store-- no mom-- no. GSM, on the other hand, is not user ID-based but time-based. So if three people call in the same network in the same area and, thus, are using the same radio frequencies, each user gets a time slot and stick to it. Those three calls in an order would look like this, but really, really, really fast.

The network, then, takes all the traces, say, and put them together into a single call. Sim cards could be swapped out in different phones. You didn't have to go to the network carrier. In order to get on the white list, you could just swap it in. And the network knew who you were. At this point, we start to see what they would call 2 and 1/2 and 2 and 3/4 G. This means engineers are adding more data access to this digital stream. The standards here were called GPRS and Edge. GPRS is the general packet radio service. I remember seeing that on my very first Nokia box phone in 2004. So nostalgia. Oh, my god, OK. GPRS was a protocol that let devices use the GSM network to move more of these little data packets from the worldwide web to you and back again. GPRS was slower than even dial up. But it was internet. And it was anywhere. And it was in your pocket. Pretty sure in 2004 I paid $45 for 600 minutes, 150 text messages, and a few megabytes of GPRS internet. The first data connection, as we think of it now, the always on connection was called Edge. That's the e on your phone. When you have bad service, they mostly have turned that off now. It means enhanced data rates for GSM evolution or enhanced GPRS. While GPRS would peak at about 114 kilobytes per second, Edge had a blazing fast 384 kilohertz per second, about as fast as the speed dial up modem. This all happened around the year 2000, by the way, when cell phones looked a lot like this, not exactly Jobsian revolutions yet. Remember when you're going on the stairs to your hall meeting as an RA at Western Michigan University? That was me. And the theme of the meeting was anything but clothes. So I wore a sleeping bag. I put my Nokia in a little pocket of the sleeping bag. And I slipped on the stairs and bam, landed right on my screen. And it cracked. First person I knew to have a cracked screen. Now, it's just the millennial struggle. Whew. So from there, we get to 3G and 3 and 1/2G. Now, we start to see the standards organizations coming up to help all the countries and companies work with the same roadmap. Around this time, the Third Generation Partnership Project or 3GPP was created to shepherd the first 3G phones and to shepherd the first 3G phones and create standards under the United Nations International Telecommunications Union. The ITU created the IMT 2000, which is a standards document that is so, so boring so don't worry about the details. But the point is, it's the standard that everyone could use and said, 3G promises quote, "faster communication services, including voice and fax and internet, anytime and anywhere with The first 3G network launched in Japan in 2001. But there weren't too many devices that it could actually take advantage of it. When the first iPhone came out in 2007, it didn't even have 3G. It had 2 and 1/2G Edge. So from there, we get in this cycle where the IT, you would set requirements. The 3GPP would work to create iterative technical standards. And the phone manufacturers and networks implement those technical standards. Then the standards are GSM and GPRS and Edge and HSPA and HSPA+ and so on. And this is where the rubber really meets the information superhighway, because 3G lets us actually use the real internet if more slowly than maybe we're used to today. As the 3GPP started to crack the whip and release standard after standard, 3G data speeds would increase from 1.92 megabits per second or five times faster than Edge up to what we would call the LTE standards, which can reach 100 megabits per second. Download speeds roughly what we have now under the 3G standard. Yeah, we're technically still using, in some cases, 3G standards. I know your phone might say 4G. But it might be using a 3G standard, because they include YMAX and HSPA+. They are updates to the original 3G standards. And, in fact, you might have a 3G phone in your pocket that uses those, even though the top corner might say 4G, because there's no rules that say they can't lie to you about what G you're on. How you feeling about that 3G phone now, I was already joking, though. The newest phones are faster. But when the standards were set in 2008, no one knew exactly how to get there. So the first 3G advanced phones weren't technically 4G according to the ITU standard. They just wanted to sell you new phones back then.

The latest crop of mobiles use real LTE and LTE advanced, as well as LTE Advanced Pro, which we would call 4 and 1/2G. And that's why networks can keep bragging about speed increases. And LTE, in general, is why Verizon and Sprint now have SIM cards, because the LTE standard requires them. LTE allows users to call and use data at the same time just like GSM standards. Remember when you couldn't do that on Sprint and Verizon? Yeah, so silly. So now, we are comfortably in 4G lamp. Speeds peak at around 100 megabits per second for mobile and one gigabit per second for stationary hotspots as per the ITU standard for 4G. 5G standards were just decided. And networks are clearing out frequency ranges and building new physical antennas to accommodate. The CDMA GSM fight is now over. And over the next year or two, 3G and 2G networks are going to start to be retired and turned off. You won't be able to use them at all because they just won't be there. Cell phones and Wi-Fi don't actually use a magical bit of the spectrum, just the regular old UHF radio band. It sits above the VHF used by FM and amateur radio operators, because there's only so much physical space in the spectrum. And there are only so many devices broadcasting in this part of the EM spectrum that we can use. The ITU decided on these three bands for 5G rollout, meaning some older spectrum needs to be cleared out. The newest band, while the super speeds are going to go, they're called millimeter waves or MM waves, because, yeah, they're small. As you probably know, the electromagnetic spectrum is a physical thing. So the waves of energy actually exist in real life. So we can't just keep packing more stuff into the spaces that we've reserved for other things, like, for example, your favorite radio station or your home Wi-Fi network. Each of these technology advances need a specific band of infrastructure that they can use to communicate even though it's invisible. Because while 2, 3 and 4G use lower power radio frequencies, 5G might use 26 gigahertz and 28 gigahertz. Noah and NASA have filed a complaint with the FCC, because the weather satellites ping water vapor in the atmosphere using 23.8 gigahertz frequencies. They bounce the signal off of the water to detect if it's there. The 5G is operating at 24 gigahertz. And that could interfere with the satellites making water vapor measurements for forecasting. And that could make weather forecasting not impossible. The FCC could set stricter limits for the networks. And that might solve the problem. But this is just one reason why these things tend to take so long. That's why the FCC licenses Spectrum after all to keep things wirelessly orderly, right? This is why 5G is going to have to ratchet up a bit to MM waves for the fastest speeds, which is going to make some things better-- some things worse. One problem is scattering. Think of these little MM waves, like blue light. Blue light is also little. So it scatters when it hits the air in the atmosphere. It's why the sky is blue. Red, on the other hand, has long waves, which make it through the atmosphere and turn sunsets orange. 5G's MM waves are going to be more like the blue light. They'll be able to move a lot of data really fast, unless they scatter. And concrete and bricks scatter frequencies in this range. So does your body because we're mostly water. And water is pretty dense, meaning when it's raining, 5G's services might be kind of crappy. But those are problems for future us's to solve, right? Once we got the network up and running-- and to do that, we're going to have to build lots of little small cells, because these waves don't travel as far. Maybe as far as a kilometer and probably more like 500 meters. So you're going to have little small cells within 500 meters of your house, your work, or your university, for example, to give you fast mobile internet at home. In the urban areas, they'll probably be out in the environment, as well. But once you get out of the cities, you'll end up on a different band. And you'll get slightly slower speeds. And if you're out in the country, you'll end up on an even lower frequency that will travel a lot farther. The peak speed near the cells will be something like 10 or 20 gigabits per second, they think, and will support more than 1,000 times more devices at a time than 4G does. And together, this network would mean that you could be connected to the internet so quickly with such low latency, so responsively that you could maybe drive a car remotely or do surgery from another spot with 5G. The thing is, we don't actually know what 5G is yet, really, after all this. You don't even know. We don't even know, because the ITU 2020 standards haven't come out yet. They won't come out till 2020. But again, this all comes back to marketing. We're hearing about this a lot, because we need public support. Like a new Marvel movie, the hype machine has to start early for something like a major tech update, especially since with 5G, these little cells have to be installed everywhere. And we'll broadcast as well as receive. So the networks need to know that it's worth their time. Sidebar, I know this is a concern. But MM waves are not dangerous. High frequencies do not mean high energies. They are drastically different energies and frequencies than anything like a gamma ray or an X-ray. In fact, they sit next to microwaves and infrared in the EM spectrum.

And sure-- microwave ovens are fun. But they need 1,000 watts or more just to get your leftover dusted wets to an edible temp in two minutes. This is about energy levels. And these are very low. MM waves are not dangerous at the energies we are talking about. If you're one of those people who has a really old cell phone and is worried about the 3G network, like if you're a Luddite, hello. Thanks for turning on your Nintendo Wii and for tuning into YouTube. To keep you connected, providers aren't going to just turn off their old networks right away. If you're far from a 5G antenna, you'll still get regular old 4 or maybe 4 and 1/2G-- maybe even 3G for a little while. But inevitably, it will get retired. Just like with any other technological advance, we had no idea what we would do with these tiny little internet connected pocket computers until we had them. But there's only so much physical space to have them communicate with each other. Using the small cells, 5G is going to enable a whole new explosion of mobile data access that will cause-- well, right now, we can only guess. We have no idea. It's going to be big, but so are 3G and 4G. But what we do know is the mobile internet is already huge. And it's not even getting to everyone yet. Only about half of everyone on earth use the internet within a 90-day rolling period. And 5G isn't going to connect more people necessarily. You just make the people already online get there faster. We still need equitable distribution of this utility, not to mention a bunch of other regulations on how companies can use the data once we have it. Fun fact--researchers had their very first meeting on a 6G. Yeah, we're already on to the next thing-- has science-- looks like we're going to see 62 by 2030, according to one of the first papers on it. We'll have a society that is, quote, "data driven" enabled by a near instant unlimited wireless connectivity with distributed computing-- the idea that every computer could work on any problem together, because they're networked with super fast data connections. And, of course, we will see artificial intelligence, like applications. 6G still a long way off. Really quick before we end-- security is going to be a problem in the future as much as it is now if not more. And the sooner we realize that humans are the least secure part of our system...