THE 5G UI REVOLUTION

Tris Tolliday describes his vision of a web UI catapulted forwards by 5G

- Tris Tolliday

5G is a data revolution about to change every aspect of modern life, connecting everyone in real-time with unparalleled flows of data. For web developers, 5G UI is set to revolutionise the web GUI equilibrium… as soon as it has the national coverage we see with 4G.

The web has been stuck in a 2D world with the same top nav, hero and boxes of content, but what if there was another way? What if the client didn’t have to rely on the users’ hardware to deliver the experience, and instead we hoisted it up to the cloud?

WHY IS 5G ANY DIFFERENT?

5G has two benefits over 4G. The first is latency small enough for everything to feel responsive, with early tests from Verizon hitting the 30ms mark (10x quicker than the mobile browser touch delay), and that figure is expected to come down to around 10ms. Second is its insane bandwidth, which at 2gbits per second, is large enough to push the heavy lifting away from the client and onto the server.