To cater to the demands of the future – like smart homes, traffic safety, critical infrastructure, advanced industry processes and very-high-speed media delivery – we need stronger, more reliable networks for mobile connectivity – says Zoran Lazarevic, CTO at Ericsson MEA.
That’s where 5G comes in. 5G offers wireless speeds comparable to today’s wired broadband while delivering better energy efficiency than modern 4G networks.
5G improves significantly on 4G in these three key areas:
1. Faster speeds
In comparison to 4G, peak speeds on 5G will increase significantly. 5G will enable fibre-like speeds using the mobile network. This will be extremely useful to download media content like 4K and even 8K movies in seconds.
2. Lower latency & better reliability
Latency is the time it takes for devices to send and receive signals between each other. And it is very important for applications which require near real-time responses, for example, between the user device and a cloud server used in gaming.
In comparison to 4G where latencies are typically between 20-30 milliseconds, 5G can support latencies as low as 1 millisecond.
The lower latency from 5G will also enable entirely new applications in future such as remote robotic surgery, where decisions must be made by the remote surgeon and sent back to the surgery robot in near real-time.
3. More capacity
5G networks can also provide much more capacity for data. 5G uses spectrum in a much more efficient manner than 4G technology and is able to fit more data into the same amount of spectrum.
5G devices can connect many more “things” to the network at the same time, enabling the realisation of new applications such as smart homes and smart cities. 5G is also more efficient than 4G in terms of the energy required per bit of data which is transmitted or received.
Source: itnewsafrica
