What Is 5G?
5G is the industry standard that will supersede the current widespread 4G LTE standard, just as 4G supplanted 3G. 5G just stands for “fifth generation”—it’s the fifth generation of this standard.
This standard is designed to be much faste
r than current 4G LTE technology. It’s not just about speeding up smartphone internet connections, though. It’s about enabling faster wireless internet everywhere for everything from connected cars to smart home and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
In the future, your smartphone and all the other devices you have with cellular connectivity will use 5G instead of the 4G LTE technology they likely use today.
How Fast Will 5G Be?
Tech companies are promising a lot from 5G. While 4G tops out at a theoretical 100 megabits per second, 5G tops out at 10 gigabits per second. That means 5G is a hundred times faster than the current 4G technology—at its theoretical maximum speed, anyway.
For example, the Consumer Technology Association pointed out that, at this speed, you could download a two-hour movie in just 3.6 seconds on 5G, versus 6 minutes on 4G or 26 hours on 3G.
It’s not just throughput, either. 5G promises to significantly reduce latency, which means faster load times and improved responsiveness when doing just about anything on the internet. Specifically, the specification promises a maximum latency of 4ms on 5G versus 20ms on 4G LTE today.
At these speeds, 5G beats current home cable internet connections and is more comparable to fiber. Landline internet companies like Comcast, Cox, and others may face serious competition—especially when they’re the only option for speedy home internet in a certain area. Wireless carriers can deliver an alternative without laying down physical wires to every home.
Presenters wanted us to think of 5G as enabling super-fast, practically unlimited internet everywhere, and to all devices. Of course, in the real world, internet service providers impose data caps. For example, even if your wireless carrier gave you a 100 GB data cap—which is much larger than most plans today—you could blow through that in a minute and 20 seconds at the maximum theoretical speed of 10 Gbps. It’s unclear what caps carriers will ultimately impose and how much that will affect usage.
