Get Ready for the Greatest Change in Our Digital World Since the Start of the Internet … Meet the 5G Game-changer

And Things Are Going To Get A Whole Lot Smaller … and Goodbye (Finally) To Copper Cables

I did my PhD on the propagation of electromagnetic waves using Maxwell’s equations in the time domain. My computer had 16MB of memory and I had four processors to run the simulation in parallel. These days, for a few dollars an hour, I could get 100s of thousand of processors with almost unlimited amounts of memory. So it shows how we have progressed over the years.

One thing I learnt in my PhD was that an antenna was half the length of the wavelength (𝜆/2). And so I modelled patch antennas and which were around half a wavelength long. From Physics, we know that v=f𝜆, and where v is the speed of the wave, f is its frequency, and 𝜆 is the wavelength of the wave. The frequencies I looked at were around 2.4GHz, and so the wavelength is (assuming that the speed of light is 300 million metres per second — 3ｘ10⁸):

𝜆 = 3ｘ10⁸/f = 0.125 m