We are already hearing about 5G on the Internet, on news channels, and all around us. There are lots of countries that have already started the service such as the United States, Europe etc. But still, most countries have not seen the deployment of 5G yet. But today we will be looking at how 5G benefits your life and is it worth it?
After using 4G for several years and experiencing the speed it provided over 3G, Everyone is excited to experience how 5G will be, which has already been expected to offer a major upgrade over 4G.
The other exciting thing is Markets are already getting flooded with 5G Mobiles. This also gives a little hint that we can expect 5G technology very soon.
But we as users never really thought about the actual meaning of 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G. Common people only relate it to Internet speed, i.e, Every next G will be faster than the previous one. Which is true but let’s try to understand this more precisely so that next time you hear about 5G or any other G you know what they mean.
What is 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G?
‘G’ stands for Generation and 1, 2,3… Are numbers that are used to denote these generations. Each generation is defined as a set of mobile network standards.
| 1G | 2G | 3G | 4G | 5G |
| 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020 |
| 2.4kb/s | 64kb/s | 2mb/s | 100mb/s | 1gb/s |
| Calling | Calling, Messages, Internet Access | — | — | — |
In the above table, we can see the launching year of each technology along with the data speed it offered over course of time.
Let’s try to understand some basic things.
1G was only used for calling.
While 2G was a breakthrough for mobile networks as it introduced some add-on features like Messages, Conference calling, etc along with normaL calling. Because of continued improvements in 2G, Internet access was also possible to some extent and the rest is history.
5G better than LTE, 4G
With upgraded technology, the speed is expected to increase. All the features that we used in the previous generation will definitely be present in 5G as well. 4G provides more stable, better speed than 3G LTE. While 4G LTE comes in between 5G and 4G. So it had some advantages over 4G. But if we talk about 5G then we can definitely say it provideS far more better experience than any previous generations of wireless mobile network.
Higher data speed means higher chances of improvement in the existing solutions. Better Streaming and Video calls, Evolution of more services that could be offered online eventually opening doors for features that couldn’t have been possible till now.
Key 5G Benefits
As we discussed that benefits can be much more than we can think of right now but here is the list of several benefits that we could imagine.
- Higher Bandwidth capacity – 5G has a higher bandwidth capacity up to 1 gb/s while 4g had somewhere around 150 mb/s to 200 mb/s.
- Improved dense connections – As compared to 4G, 5G can connect up to 10x devices that 4G could have been connected.
- Low latency connection – 4G network has a minimum response time of around 100 ms which means if you search anything on the browser over a 4G network, the minimum time it will take to show the result would be around 100 ms. While in the case of a 5G network it would be low as 1 ms making things real-time. Yes, you heard that right.
Applications of 5G Technology and Its benefits
As we know applications could be much more than we can think but as of now here are some of the lists of 5G Technology applications that we could soon witness.
- Remote medical surgery – With 5G, medical surgery that could be done remote will be widely performed. As one of the major concerns that arise with remote medical surgery nowadays is slow response time. Which is the major hurdle with such operations. But with 5G things are better to expect as we could expect the responses would be more real-time.
- IoT will be more seamless – Currently IoT is one of the major interests of people. Everyone wants to have their house to be more digitalised and can be operated using apps, voice commands and much more. Every device that we have today can be connected in future with 5G making the IoT (Internet of Things) cloud even faster.
- Human intervention will be reduced – Just like we talked about IoT, there could be much more sides that require human efforts to complete the tasks, with 5G that can provide faster and more reliable, human intervention could be reduced drastically as devices could also send signals automatically in no time.
- Autonomous Vehicle car collision – This is one of the hot features of modern cars, especially Tesla. Autonomous car collision helps to improve road safety and leads to lesser chances of road accidents. Road accidents are one of the most occurring accidents. And any improvement to it will eventually be beneficial for people.
- Sharing data could be much easier and faster than ever before.
Is 5G safe for health?
5G technology travels at a higher frequency of radio waves which leads all of us to question is it even safe? But the good news is Yes it is completely safe and does not usually damage our body cells just like any other radio gadget. Let’s try to understand it more deeply.
For radio wave to cause any damage to body cells it needs to be Ionizing. From the above picture, we can clearly see radiowaves with more than 1016 hertz are Ionizing which means they can cause damage if exposed for a longer duration. While 5G works at 1010 hertz and thus making it non-harmful.
Although there has always been a debate and confusion that radio frequency devices such as Mobile phones can cause cancer. But after several years studies, it is very much clear that it is not at all cancer-causing and the same is the case with 5G.
Conclusion
5G technology has already begun to impact our lives in a number of ways. Reliable connections, faster internet speeds, and a more digitalised world that’s real-time. Thus we can say that 5G is worth it.
Tech Big Giants such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft would eventually take the advantage of 5G once deployed worldwide, to improve their services and discover new possibilities. In the future, Just like other Gs, 5G will continue to evolve making things better for the world.
