5G, The Road to The Future
5G is the world’s fifth-generation mobile network. Compared to the fourth-generation network, 4G, its speeds are up to 20 times faster and can allow 50 times less latency and transmission. It’s fast enough to download a 4K high-definition movie in about 25 seconds, or to stream several simultaneously!
But beyond just the speed improvement, this new technology is expected to unleash an enormous 5G IoT ecosystem. This is where networks can serve and power millions of devices, with the perfect tradeoffs.
According to Ericsson’s recent mobility report, 52 percent of every cellular IoT connections are expected to be apart of a massive IoT connection by 2025.
On December 1st, 2018, South Korea became the first country to offer 5G, and four months later, they were also the first to launch mobile 5G services on April 3, 2019; just an hour before Verizon’s 5G launch in the US.
But 5G isn’t an entirely new technology. It builds off of the mobile networks that are already in place around the world.
From 1G to 5G
The very first generation of mobile wireless networks built in the late 1970s and early 1980s was analog. Messages were carried over radio waves that were unencrypted, meaning anyone could take a listen if they tuned into the right frequency.
The second generation, 2G was built in the 1990s, making it possible to encrypt digital voice calls, allow text messaging for more efficient use of the wireless span. 2G networks also allowed us to transfer bits of data from one device to another, enabling access to media content on the devices.
3G was introduced in the 2000s and it gave digital networks a mobile bandwidth boost and announced the smartphone revolution. Deployed for the public in Japan, 2001; it had and has speed capabilities of up to 3 Mbps. Users could now access data from anywhere, allowing international roaming services to begin.
First introduced in Norway near the end of 2009, 4G is offered for today’s standardized services. This fourth generation of mobile networks provided high-quality video streaming + chat, fast mobile internet access, while improving security and lowering the cost of data services.
Newer generations of phones are designed to be backward-compatible, so technically, a 4G phone can communicate through a 3G or even 2G network!
Also known as the “The Internet of Things Era”, 5G Designed to conquer the 2020s. It’s known to act as a route towards better connectivity than ever before in terms of internet, video calls, cloud computing, and IoT networks. As 5G also has a larger bandwidth size (between 30 GHz and 300 GHz), it successfully supports more highly-developed software. 5G is an essential requirement for mass IoT deployments, playing a crucial role for smart cities and other industries.
5G Technology is Driven by 8 Requirements:
Characteristics
Immediate Responses
As mentioned earlier, 5G brings much lower levels of latency compared to previous generation mobile networks. While 4G networks took just under 50 milliseconds to respond to commands, 5G networks can do the same, but in only one millisecond — 400 times faster than the blink of the eye! Essential for IoT smart devices, ultra-low latency helps with instant responses (eg. drones, autonomous vehicles, security scanning)
Remarkable Speeds
Throughput is the rate of the speed that data on your network travels in. It's usually measured in megabits per second (Mbps), or gigabytes per second (GBps) which are both units of data for digital information.
Enhanced mobile broadbands (eMBB) can deliver connection speeds that are 50 times faster than current LTE networks, and they’ll be crucial to applications such as video surveillance with AI analysis to contribute to emergency services.
Connections. A lot of them.
The utmost amount of data that could be transferred, either through a wired connection or a wireless network can determine how many connections it could potentially handle. When 5G is fully operational, the networks will have the capacity to connect 500 times more than devices that are regulated with traditional 4G. This will increasingly become more beneficial in terms of delivering
Current IoT → Massive IoT
Most IoT solutions and devices today are served by 4.5G LTE and Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks. We’re soon approaching a digital future with over a million connected devices per square kilometer. With this, we will be requiring high-bandwidth connections, which 5G networks will be essential for.
So in terms of a Massive IoT approach, it has the potential to not only benefit existing processes, but also create an impact for innovation.
Let’s take fossil fuels for example. We as a society are trying our best to move forward and shift our world to electric. Our demand for electricity grows, and so does the need for a reliable power source.
To empower our transition towards renewable energy sources such as hydro, wind, or solar, investing in smart grids and systems is ideal. To be feasible, these alternative renewable energy sources will need secure connectivity in order to counter the increased risk of network disturbances, due to their predictability.
Massive IoT connectivity will play a crucial role when it comes to enabling the need for fast and accurate power grid balancing, or just any system in general.
By enabling unconventional smart monitoring, Massive IoT can give energy companies real-time information that they might need to balance and predict consumption and generation, over a period of time.
Our future power grids will be digital infrastructures; with highly connected and automated sensors, integrating and exchanging data/analytics over a 5G network.
Similar to infrastructure, smart cities are another huge opportunity for the extreme amounts of coverage of Massive IoT. Connected smart devices such as water sensors, thermometers, street lights, and even security devices require some sort of connectivity in a variety of conditions.
5G networks can handle a massive deployment of IoT devices with minimal network capacity impact. Innovation hubs such as Toronto, New York, London, and Beijing are in the process of launching a multitude of connected devices, that are capable to transmit data at intervals! This allows huge potential in terms of improved efficiency, sustainability, and safety for various industries and society as a whole.
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