
With the advent of 4G, the world has seen greater technological and economical development than ever. Now mankind is taking another leap into cellular network technology and that is 5G. Although 5G is still under development, it has been deployed successfully in a number of countries with equipment supplied by popular names in technology such as Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, and ZTE. 5G is set to be deployed all across the world by 2020 alongside 4G and 3G providing blazing fast connections and placing that power in the hands of consumers. Let’s take a look at what 5G is, the technology behind it, how it is different from its predecessors 4G and 3G and its development in India.
Although the nomenclature of 5G suggests that is must have evolved from 4G, experts say that the 4G and its predecessors were built using the technology available whereas 5G has been developed based on specific requirements. Since this age is all about controlling even small devices with kilobyte-sized instructions with Internet of Things at one end and also about downloading gigabyte-sized videos, all of these at blazing fast speeds, 5G has been designed to cater to this entire spectrum of business requirements.
To achieve this a totally new radio access network and a new core network are required to provide the performance required.
- 5G New Radio, 5G NR: 5G new radio is the new name for the 5G radio access network. It consists of the different elements needed for the new radio access network. Using a far more flexible technology the system is able to respond to the different and changing needs of mobile users whether they be a small IoT node, or a high data user, stationary or mobile.
- 5G NextGen Core Network: Although initial deployments of 5G will utilize the core network of LTE or possibly even 3G networks, the ultimate aim is to have a new network that is able to handle the much higher data volumes whilst also being able to provide a much lower level of latency.
For 5G, spectrum of higher frequencies are planned to be allotted which widens the bandwidth and this poses new challenges in circuit design and also handset design since handsets are designed only for very small bandwidths compared to the ones planned for 5G. Technologies that solve these problems come under millimeter-wave communications. In addition to this, other waveforms are being explored that can be used in 5G communication such as Generalised Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM), Filter Bank Multi-Carrier (FBMC) and Universal Filtered MultiCarrier (UFMC).
One TechRadar report said that a speed of 1.385Gbps was achieved on Verizon 5G network in Chicago. That report also said that whereas it takes 1 hour 16 minutes to download the entire first season of Stranger Things on 4G, it takes only 38.78 seconds on 5G. That’s way to fast!
Now, why should you go out there and probably pay a higher price for 5G when you have 4G. The main selling point of 5G is its very low latency due to very high frequencies. Whereas 4G has latency around 20–30 ms, 5G’s latencies go down to as low as 1 ms. This means data reaches your device almost in realtime. While this may not matter to consumers a lot, but for IoT based devices, this will improve performances on a vast scale.
India has quickly risen to be one of the largest data consumers in the world and this raises demand for 5G more so in India than in any other country. With video appetite of consumers rising every day, 5G will be a revolutionary change in telecom in India. “5G will be the key driver for Digital India initiatives. 5G is set to overtake 4G in India by 2020, and the backhaul equipment makers and network carriers are already developing the next generation of mobile communication.”, according to 5G India Congress 2018 brochure. Allocation of 100MHz of blocks of contiguous spectrum is in the pipeline and hopefully, by 2020, India will be 5G-powered.
5G uses a completely different set of technologies than its predecessors and its advantages are far more beneficial to consumers as well as businesses. The only logistical roadblock facing its implementation is the pricing of the allocations for telecom companies. We can know the real power of 5G only once it is here, but till then 5G seems like a game-changer in mobile networks.
