5G Everything You Need To Know

It’s fast. really fast. But speedier mobile downloads are only part of why 5G will change everything.

- Alex Cox

As you might have guessed from the name, 5G – the fifth generation of mobile technology – is the successor to 4G. It’s due to start arriving (lightly) this year, and the difference between the abilities of 4G and 5G is stark. On paper, 5G is faster than any currently available Wi-Fi tech, and faster even than any home broadband available anywhere outside South Korea. 4G LTE, the fastest standard currently available in the UK, is around 100 times slower than 5G when considering theoretical lab maximums. That’s huge. It’s also not entirely realistic; in real-world applications, 5G may introduce a 50 times increase in speed, though we’d wager it’ll be less than that when all is said and done.

Those numbers, even if they’re not wholly likely to be what we end up getting, are still impressive, and it’s important to see them in context. They’re easily enough to pull in entertainment content; the BBC requires 2.75Mbps to stream high-definition content from iPlayer, while Netflix asks for around 25Mbps for streaming its Ultra HD video. Even if new colour technology, frame rates or the move to 8K bumps those requirements up still further, there’s cavernous headroom in the top-end 1,000Mbps bandwidth of the 5G spec to cope with it. If we only see speeds of 200 or 300Mbps, that’s still comparable to the best home broadband connections available today.

5G reaches those speeds in a few ways. First, it uses multiple antennas, allowing it to take advantage of Massive MIMO, which is similar to the tech used in modern Wi-Fi routers. Put simply, MIMO involves opening up multiple data streams from and to your device simultaneously, for a theoretically faster and more consistent connection.

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