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The next-generation wireless technology

Have you ever wondered what will the new 5G wireless technology bring to the table? And will its benefits be important enough to entice people to replace their phones with new, 5G-compatible models? We will try to give you educated answers to these questions – and many more – in this article.

The fifth generation of wireless tech has a very ambitious goal: to replace wired Internet connections with their wireless counterparts. To achieve that goal, 5G operators will need to use lots of small transmitters; some specialists state they they'll need 100x more than the number of transmitters used by the current 4G LTE technology.

As you can imagine, this will significantly increase costs, and cell phone carriers aren't 100% sure that their investments will pay off. There are several countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, who oppose this new technology, because their governments think that the increased 5G radiation levels can be dangerous for humans - especially for infants and children.

Despite all of this, 5G is supposedly going to fix many more problems than it will create. Here are just a few of the industries where the new wireless technology can be of great help.

NEXT-GEN VR AND AR

Unlike 4G, its successor will significantly increase download and upload speeds, while reducing latencies. This means that people and companies will be able to use 5G for latency-sensitive applications, such as remote surgery, self-driving vehicles, and so on. Developers may face serious challenges, though, because radio signals that use high frequencies are often limited to line-of-sight visibility. Therefore, large buildings and even moving vehicles may cause signal propagation problems.

INTERNET OF THINGS

5G has the potential to make IoT devices indispensable. According to Gartner, the number of connected "Things" will exceed 20 billion by 2020, and the 4G LTE infrastructure can't accommodate so many IoT devices.

Additionally, poor latency can cause serious problems in this industry as well, especially if we are talking about devices that are supposed to collect, process, and then send data in real time. Fortunately, the fifth wireless network has been designed with low power consumption in mind, by making data packet transfers much more efficient. Field tests show that low-power IoT devices can easily have battery lives of 5 to 10 years.

SMART CITIES

Let's face it: 5G has the potential to speed up technological advancements. Governments can use the new tech to build the infrastructure for smart cities, automating large portions of logistics, water management, transportation, traffic monitoring, and so on.

What about us, regular mobile data users? The good news is that we will be able to download large files much faster, so 4K video streaming won't cause any problems in the future. The same thing goes for MMORPGs and any other Internet-related applications and services that you can think of.

It is important to understand that carriers don't ever offer "unlimited" mobile plans, though; if their users exceed a few tens of GB of traffic, connection speed will be reduced significantly. So, if carriers implement 5G networks, but limit the data cap of their "unlimited" packages to only 20 GB or so, they will make us run out of data much faster and/or hit us with huge overage charges.

So, we can say that 5G is already here, and its benefits are numerous. However, we will have to wait for a few more years until we'll be able to connect to fully functional, robust, inexpensive 5G networks.