5G: Are we ready?

5G: Are we ready?

Barcelona was the great test laboratory during the MWC to demonstrate that our day to day will change in the near future

  There is no doubt that 5G is necessary. You only need to go around any city and see people hunched over looking at their smartphone , the same way it is done in public transport or in a terrace at the moment of good weather. And now ask your acquaintances how many of them have virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri or Cortana. They are the commercial war of the moment and the big brands already have theirs. Technologists want all the devices we have at home to live in a connection ecosystem that works with just a few words.

  And for that the new connectivity is necessary, which will solve coverage problemsand it will considerably reduce the latency , the response time of the network since an order is given to a device until it is executed.

   Barcelona was during the Mobile World Congress a large testing laboratory for the new technology . There they could see very varied advances as in the health with a tele-assisted surgical intervention , in the mobility with the connected cars or the next revolution of the mobile phones . In short, a technology that hopes to revolutionize the industry, security and entertainment. Of course, despite good intentions, it is not expected that the infrastructure that supports this connection is ready until 2020 and users will still take to really take advantage of this technology in full.

Entelgy, accelerator of digital transformation , gathers some of the main keys of this technology. First, a little context. 5G is a commercial term that refers to the fifth generation of mobile telephony networks , understanding by generation each of the stages that mobile telephony has been experiencing since its inception , each with its own specific features. And we talked about 5G because first there was an analog 1G that only allowed to talk on the phone , a 2G that introduced SMS , a 3G that brought mobile internet and a 4G with which mobile broadband came, with use cases such as streaming video or virtual reality on the mobile.

What improvements will it imply? In the first place, it will multiply the speed of mobile communications until reaching peaks of 1 to 10 Gbps, expanding what fiber optic currently offers. And what is that for? For example, a 1GB movie can be downloaded in less than ten seconds, so the 5G will revolutionize the way you view content.

The initial coverage will depend on the deployment of the operators , but something very new is that the 5G will allow, in an easy and economical way, many more access points .

The second great improvement consists of a reduction in latency . The improvements of the 4G network have reduced that time to 30 milliseconds, but the 5G will take it to the environment of 1 to 5 milliseconds, practically real time . This improvement is key in cases of use such as autonomous driving or surgical operations carried out remotely.

Third, multiply by a hundred the number of devices connected with the same number of antennas. This would solve the problems of coverage in large events, congresses, agglomerations, etc.

Other benefits of the 5G are the reduction in network power consumption by 90% and allows the batteries of the machines such as alarms or sensors to last up to 10 years , something fundamental for what is known as the Internet of Things (IoT), which they currently access the Internet with WiFi connection. These networks will have sufficient capacity for domestic cable connections to disappear .