Living Life In The Fast Lane

There’s no faster network on earth, wired or not. Here’s why 5G will change everything – eventually.

- Alex Cox

You have heard about 5G. You can’t have missed it. But beyond the marketing hype, and outside of its broad position as a next-generation mobile phone technology, it’s not entirely clear what 5G actually is from the outside. Realistically, it’s not entirely clear on the inside, either. ‘5G’ is something of a blanket term, one that has so far covered a whole bunch of disparate technologies and frequencies, and a term that could mean radically different things depending on who’s using it and for what purpose. It could even be a lie, if the actions of US network AT&T are anything to go by: the company has branded its experimental 4G LTE services as ‘5G E’ – despite them very definitely not being 5G services. What we do know is this: 5G, proper 5G, is revolutionary. It’s astonishingly fast, high capacity, and it’s likely the most important communications upgrade since the invention of the internet.

That’s the headline. On paper, 5G New Radio (or 5G NR, intended to be the worldwide standard) is able to move data around faster than any currently available Wi-Fi tech. It tops virtually every home broadband connection in the world in terms of speed. It has the potential to be 100 times faster than 4G LTE, the current mobile standard. Its latency, that is the time for data to be passed between devices, is fast approaching 1ms – meaning we’ll soon have to start measuring in microseconds. That’s incredible, but those numbers are based on theory, or ideal conditions in the lab. In the real world, things move closer to a quarter of that speed, and sometimes a lot less, depending on environmental conditions and the particular facets of 5G NR supported either by networks or endpoint hardware. But even at real-world speeds, 5G is an astonishing upgrade over any over-the-air comms tech.

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