What is 5G?

Remember the old cell phones back in the 80s? If you are too young and have never seen one they were a big bulky brick-shaped phone that was virtually indestructible. You could literally drive over it (by accident of course) and it would still work. This was the beginning of cellular networks and used 1G or 1^st generation technology and it only included making phone calls to limited areas. When 2G came along the additional bandwidth enable users to start transmitting and receiving data, text messages and pictures. As the systems became more advanced these could eventually access the internet, enter the iPhone. 3G brought about better access and faster speeds and then 4G LTE enabled the downloading of larger files bringing on music and movies and whole programs into your phone which is now a small computer.

So what is 5G? The 5^th generation of phones and internet are being touted as a major advance in speed and access and purports to enable connectivity across the technology world via the IoT or Internet of things. All of these technologies are based on the same science which accesses the EM spectrum or electromagnetic spectrum sometimes called Maxwell’s Rainbow. In the low end of the spectrum or wavelength, we have radio waves and this stretches through microwaves, infrared into visible light and beyond into x-rays, gamma rays and the unknown cosmic rays. AM radio for example operates between 540 and 1600 kilohertz. This is a low energy wave but can travel for great distances. FM transmits between 88 and 108 megahertz with more bandwidth and better quality but with decreased range.

Cell phone transmission has evolved using increasing bandwidth but the systems follow the same pattern. With more bandwidth you need an increase in power to achieve strong signal transmission. The 1^st generation cell phones introduced in 1987 operated on the 800 MHz bandwidth, an analog system that was a voice-only network. 2G brought digital transmission in 1993 and operated on the 900 MHz spectrum, later adding the 1800 MHz band. #G came along in 2005 and combined 2100 MHz with 900 MHz to achieve more coverage since the 2100 MHz band suffered far more attenuation. 4G LTE or Long Term Evolution operates between 700 MHz and 2500 MHz using the same type of combination frequency carrying technology in order to achieve broad coverage.

5G will use a higher frequency range than previous networks and will operate on up to three frequency bands, low, medium and high. There will be up to three different types of cells, each requiring specific antenna designs and providing different download speeds. The low bands will operate at 600 to 850 MHz giving downloads of 30-250 megabits per second, about the same as 4G cellphones. Mid-band 5G will use microwaves of 2.5-3.7 GHz allowing speeds of 100-900 Mbit/s. High-band will use frequencies of 25-39 GHz and will achieve downloads in the gigabit per second range.

Learn more coming soon.