In my last article I discussed how the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way we work and live, with record numbers of users on Zoom and other video conferencing services, virtual tours of homes on the market are almost required now, and the sheer amount of e-commerce is mind blowing. I am happy to say our communication infrastructure held up during probably the highest demand for service to date. In my article, I discussed the fact that many of the changes made due to the virus have now become a normal function in life as many had their technology skills upgraded; your grandparents on Zoom, who would have thought?

What a great lead in to discuss 5G and how the need is becoming greater for speed, capacity and latency. Not sure what all that means? Here is a review:

Speed

This is a big one all the phone carriers will be talking about because we as consumers can relate to how long it takes to download to and use our mobile devices. True, 5G is billed as 100 times faster than 4G, which means, as an example if you want to download a full-length movie, 4G would take about 48 minutes whereas with 5Git would take about 7 minutes. As you can see, the time saving would be 41 minutes. Think about how much time you currently spend on your phone using apps, visiting websites and email; a few seconds saved every minute will add up!

Capacity

This one you might have experienced and will love the change. 5G will give us more capacity, which can be called bandwidth. Here’s a visual: taking your busy road you drive on and moving from 2 lanes to 100 lanes. In the real world, you are attending a sporting event or concert and try to share a Facebook Live or Instagram video to brag about where you are but there is no service or it’s very slow. 5G will be very noticeable when you have thousands of people trying to use the internet. Today even smaller groups can tax the network depending on the bandwidth.

Latency

The word latency you will be hearing a lot as being one of the biggest advantages to 5G. With 5G some of us might notice a slight difference when it comes to latency, but if you are a gamer or use Virtual Reality, oh, your world will change with 5G. Latency is the time between your request for data to a server and the amount of time the data is returned to you. Before I share facts, you need to understand what a millisecond is: 1/1000 of a second. To give you a reference, a blink of an eye is 100-150 milliseconds. Let’s start with 3G, which was introduced in 2003. 3G latency was 100-500 milliseconds, then 4G was released in 2010 with latency of 50-100 milliseconds, and finally 5G with 1-10 milliseconds.

To you and I these improvements will be noticed, but really won’t change the way we use our mobile devices. When we are away from Wi-Fi most of the time the difference can hardly be noticed, so when we enter a 5G area we might see the benefits of speed, capacity and latency if we plan on downloading a full-length movie in 7 minutes.  The biggest benefit to 5G is Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Vehicles and many changes in the way we live and work. It is predicted that by 2035 5G will be responsible for over 3.5 trillion dollars in economic output and more than 22 million jobs.

Remember since December I have been advising to hold off buying anything? Turns out, due to a recent merger, some phone users who bought a 5G phone will not work on the new merged system – told you so!

I found a complicated rating system done by an independent resource that grades the carriers based on three factors: coverage, speed and devices, all weighted equally with a perfect score of 100%. Not naming names, as of May we have 40%, 49% and 60%.  What does all this mean?  JUST WAIT!

For the geeks in the room and those wanting more details, I will attempt to explain the three bands, low, middle and high, next month – now there is exciting news!