Phone and telecommunication networks have gotten significantly faster and better with time, and 5G is the latest generation in that line-up. Essentially 5G promises to be quicker and better at download and upload speeds, and from the minimal amount of testing that people have done, it certainly does seem like it is the case. The reason why the testing is minimal is that only the best phone operators are utilizing this new technology and the ones who do only enable it in certain areas. 5G is also notably popular and gets way more attention in the past few years.

1. Function and components

So the way 5G functions differently from 4G and all the other generations is simple; it uses something that the operators marketing it called millimeter wave. Millimeter-wave is a higher frequency connection than 4G that uses 10 to 19 GHz, 5G uses 25 upwards to even 65 GHz, and it does show in practice. The catch with using such technology is that the higher the frequency of connection is, the more vulnerable it becomes. That means that when connecting to an operator like Verizon’s 5G network, it will be able to download an entire movie within two minutes. The same thing goes for a whole season on Netflix, but the drawback of this speed is that the range of the nodes used to broadcast this high frequency is less than two hundred meters, and it can be intercepted or even shut down in some cases by walls or trees. There have been reports about rain lowering the signal in cities like Road Island USA.

2. Possible solutions

After many trials and errors done by T-Mobile, they came up with a brand new version of 5G that they called 600 Mhrz 5G. And what they did differently is using a lower density frequency than millimeter-wave and use the highest speed they can get out of it and fill in the blanks that that leaves with millimeter-wave. So instead of 1GB download speeds that people reached with the original concept, this one would deliver a higher speed than the best ordinary 4G download speeds consistently. With the bonus of having the ability to go miles from the nearest node in the area. Other networking companies and developers are working on figuring out a better solution, or even attempting to deliver those higher speeds on a broader range.While the creation and development of 5G is not the credit to a single company or person, but perhaps one of the available most effective factors in the development of the Areal interface technology that is G is the contribution that Qualcomm had in the design of nodes and latency issues. At the same time, 3GPP helped to discover new methods to solve the problem with the obstacles that can weaken the signal. They already found a solution to the main problem, which is rain. However, other range and efficiency in upload times still take place, so there will not be any high definition streams from a mobile device on a social media account anytime soon.The other key point to be made about 5G technology is that the signal and the output of the signal will only be as good as the receiving end. So to mitigate latency issues and networking problems, the devices that the developers make for the process of 5G have to be optimized to handle that amount of data transfer in that short amount of time.Related: the new age of connectivity

3. Device optimization

Smartphones and hardware makers in recent months have been trying to integrate the 5G technology into their devices. And for the most part, their attempts at creating this strong communication system been experiments to learn and gather enough data to know the specific hardware to build for their 5G capacity. And the phones that got that technology and ended up being successful with it had some slight shared issues to note. One of them was the battery because operating under such pressure and speed to deliver such high fidelity consistently brings down the battery performance substantially for smartphone and laptop users. But eventually, smartphones with 5G capability upgraded their battery capacity, and their processing chips grew faster and more capable of time. As of recent smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S10+ 5G edition suffered from heat and battery performance whenever using 5G, but the One+ 7T Pro quickly fixed that with software and hardware updates.

4. 5G in the future

It is worth mentioning that 5G technology is far from the finished product and that while some phone operators have succeeded in harnessing the idea to achieve slightly faster speeds than ordinary 3G+ and 4G technology, the inability to accomplish those incredibly high speeds that people have been dreaming about; the same speeds reach with millimeter-wave. If those types of network and communication speeds enable the worldwide connection on that level, the scope of what humans will be capable of in various fields with such technology is limitless. Estimates show that 22.4 million jobs will be open, and the education can improve further beyond the reaches for online teaching of today. In the medical field, doctors can perform operations form separate cotenants and control a robot to do so via internet connection. Broadcasting and entertainment will have a different way of communicating to the audience, and television could be discarded for good, especially considering that we live in the streaming era where everything is preserved on the cloud. Essentially, what 5G technology is setting-up to do is to transfer data in a more seamless and faster manner without having the limitations that 4G had. The millimeter frequency idea was the closest solution that had those promising results, which is why the main operator is contemplating the idea of putting as many nodes of that network in the world to have an adequately covered area.5G technology is still far from complete, but companies are making efforts to integrate this technology into our lives. And the reliability and security of such technology is dependent on time and learning from previous mistakes, as well as spreading this technology so that it is accessible to the entire world.

Originally published on Live Positively.