Overcoming Challenges with 5G
Dilhara Thathsarani Rathnayake
Faculty of Engineering
University of Peradeniya
Overcoming Challenges with 5G
In an age where technology is developing faster than ever before, there is not a single sector that has not been evolved with time. Out of all, the field that shows a massive change over time is telecommunication. Starting from the latter half of the 20th century, telecommunication has achieved numerous developments while passing across several generations like 1G, 2G, 3G etc. and currently it has arrived at a place where a mobile connectivity is vital for almost everyone. But the journey has not come to an end yet! The world is now approaching at the newest phase of telecommunication; the 5th Generation.
Why 5G?
4G, which is the most common technology today has started to show some drawbacks over the last years. With the increased no. of connections it has become difficult to provide enough coverage for a particular set of people within an area due to low bandwidth. Normally a 4G cell can give up to about 1000 connections per cell but now with the developing technology it has become necessary to have more and more person-to-person, person-to-thing as well as thing-to-thing connections. This deficiency in number of connections is solved by 5G! A 5G cell has an increased bandwidth that can provide up to about 1 million connections per square kilometer.
Another big issue noticed today is the speed of connectivity which has of course been solved by 5G. Usually a 4G connection has a download speed of about 100Mbps. Imagine you are downloading an 8GB HD TV series from internet. A 4G connection would take at least about 7mins to download your file while a 5G connection will take only 6 seconds to download everything! Very exciting isn’t it?
Meanwhile use of Virtual Reality (VR) has been increased over the past years. It is preferred by most of the global industries for their marketing purposes as it is capable of giving an immersive experience to their customers about the products. Other than the business field and the mostly known VR gaming, use of this technology is now becoming popular in education, healthcare, medical field and many more. Still the use of VR is restricted with 4G as it requires a higher bandwidth and speed. All these problems are solved with 5G.
Latency is another issue that arises with 4G. It is clear that telecommunication is not going to be limited to phone calls in the future. With the advancement in technology, telecommunication can be used as a tool to integrate the services that are currently taking a lot of manual effort, money and time. Yet there comes the condition of latency that is needed to accomplish a particular task with minimum risk and efficiency. For an example, imagine an automatically driven vehicle. It has to stop to a barrier once brakes are applied on it within a minimum time causing least damage to the passengers and the vehicle itself. If the vehicle is driven using 4G technology, it is proven that it takes about 50ms for the vehicle to stop once the brakes are applied dragging the vehicle to a distance of about 167cm. But when it comes to 5G, the vehicle could be stopped within 1ms and with a reaction distance of 3.3cm! It is very clear that 5G solves the problem.
Even so, experts point out that the improved 5G technology causes higher emission of radiation thus increasing the rate of cancers within the population. This fact is disproven by some scientists at the same time. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) has made several statements regarding the emission of radiation from 5G devices and its impact on human body. Yet leaving all those controversies aside, 5G is now becoming the trend in modern technology, creating the foundation for a revolutionized world.
References:
https://www.qualcomm.com/research/5g/what-is-5g
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326141#What-is-the-controversy?