Transition of 4G to 5G — What does it mean? and why we need 5G?

What is 4G or what is 5G?? and what does it mean for a common man. These buzz words are running around in every corner, but do we really understand what it means, or do we just reprint it.

There are several articles, blogs, news, regarding Telecom industry migrating towards 5G. To understand this, first we need to know what is 4G.

4G

This is just a terminology in continuation to the trend of names … 1G … 2G … 3G…. 4G. In simple terms, its called 4th generation technology. This technology gives you download speed in multiple of megabytes to giga bytes on the end user device. This makes you capable of surfing on net without any lag or downloading movies in couple of hours, no buffering or streaming..etc.

But if you observe the device market, device ecosystem was always more advanced and ahead of the backbone network, which means that devices are able to communicate in higher speeds, but the constraint is at the network side. Network was not able to provide sufficient bandwidth when the number of user increases, since the speed divide between the users that are connected to a particular antenna. 4G had helped to overcome this by creating Tera byte of backbone network with mesh architecture, providing seamless connectivity experience and increase in download speed by providing higher bandwidth.

So, if 4G is capable of overcoming all problems of speed and bandwidth then why do we need 5G ??

Why we need 5G ??

The main difference between 4G and 5G is the location of brain or the intelligence for decision making and where it is located. For 4G the intelligence lies in the backbone network and its components. Our handsets or end user devices are just interpreter of the decision that are taken by the network components.

5G is like adding an intelligence layer on 4G which will enable device to device communication. This is sometimes also said as machine to machine communication. So this will be human to machine and machine to machine communication technology. In some post, Huawei estimates that the download time for an eight gigabyte HD movie will be just six seconds, compared with seven minutes over 4G and over an hour with 3G

In 5G, the intelligence is distributed. Every device will have some sort of processing and decision making capabilities in them and they will be able to communicate to other devices. e.g. at home your fridge can communicate with grocery websites to place order of vegetables as predefined by user. Your coffee maker can sense the owner presence and accordingly start preparing coffee and as such many unlimited use cases.

But for this, the device ecosystem need to evolve and communicate on a common protocol which can ease the design and implementation. This is not a far vision. 4G has already done 50% of work of providing fast and affordable internet connectivity to everyone, now with just a second leap of 5G, which will bring the world more digitally closer and open unimaginable opportunities of human — machine — machine communication.

Hope this has given you a glimpse of understanding of 4G and 5G, but there are few more aspects of 5G, which need to be understood in some more detail:

1. IOT (Internet of Things) — How any machine can communicate to any other machine. Data sharing and decision making at the end device.
2. Big Data — Heavy data generated with each of the device and how its is used for creating more robust and predictable business decisions.
3. Security — This is the most important part. Since every individual has all its personal and professional information on its connected device in digital form, this data is very much venerable to hackers. So, stringent security measures and strong authentication process is very much required.

THANKS.