5G technology is an effort to create a supportable industry around the wireless consumption of data for all the world’s telecoms. One key goal of 5G is to affectedly improve quality of service, and extend that quality over a wider geographic area, in order for the wireless industry to remain competitive against the onset of gigabit fiber service coupled with Wi-Fi.
The 5G transition plan, once complete, would constitute arenovation of communications infrastructure unlike any other in history. Imagine if, at the close of the 19th century, the telegraph industry had come together in a joint decision to implement a presented transition to fax. That’s basically the scale of the shift from 4G to 5G. The real reason for this shift is not so much to get faster as to make the wireless industry bearable over the long term, as the 4G transmission scheme is approaching unsustainability faster than the industry experts predicted.
The initial costs of these infrastructure improvements may be remarkable, and consumers have already demonstrated their intolerance for rate hikes. So to recover those costs, telecoms will essential to offer new classes of service to new customer segments, for which 5G technology has made provisions like:
o Fixed wireless
o Edge computing
o Machine-to-machine communications
o Video delivery services
Analogue mobile phones first appeared in the early 1980s, and were used for voice calls only. Second-generation (2G) digital mobiles made their first appearance a decade later with GSM, offering text messaging (SMS) as the ‘killer application’ on top of voice services, becoming the leading technology worldwide. A roughly 10-year cycle has continued ever since, with each generation adding more data bandwidth and so enabling a richer set of services: around the turn of the millennium, 3G (UMTS or CDMA 2000) offered data rates of around 1Mbps and could be designated as ‘mobile broadband’, while 2010 saw 4G (LTE) reaching 100Mbps.
Of course, as in any evolutionary process, there have been midway stages: GPRS and EDGE were ‘2.5G’ packet-switching technologies that made internet connections possible as, while HSPA and HSPA+ brought ‘3.5G’ data rates up to 2Mbps. More recently, ‘4.5G’ LTE-Advanced and LTE-Advanced Pro have paved the way from 4G to 5G, taking data rates up to 1Gbps.
As we approach 2020 it is likely that there will be more than 50 billion connected devices worldwide and The Internet of Things (IoT) will no longer be something we think about but will be all around us. Everything from home applications to our cars will be connected to the network, and 5G technology market is being implemented and built with this in mind. 5G technology market is not just a mobile technology market, its universal access to high & low data rate services. The technology is still a long way from becoming a reality, but it has the potential to completely change the way we cooperate with wireless devices, from the smartphones.
5G technology market is an investment for the next decade, and in previous mobile transitions, we have seen most of the big changes happening years after the first publication. Take 4G, as. The first 4G phones in the US appeared in 2010. But the sorts of 4G applications that changed our world did not appear until later. Snapchat came in 2012, and Uber became widespread in 2013. Video calls over LTE networks also became extensive in the US around 2013.
Who is launching 5G and when?
AT&T launched 5G technology market in 12 cities on December 21, 2018 with one mobile internet hotspot, the Netgear Nighthawk 5G technology market. It raised its city count to 19 in April. AT&T seems to be only giving out a few hotspots per city, and covering a few areas in each city. It’s offering service for free right now. It is expected that AT&T will have retail service plans and coverage maps, along with its first 5G phone, the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, in mid-June.
T-Mobile is building a countrywide 5G network on the 600MHz and 28GHz bands starting some point in 2019, with full national coverage by 2020. It may also get the Galaxy S10 5G in June.
Many other companies, including Huawei, OnePlus, ZTE, Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi, have pledged to produce phones in5G technology market in 2019. But none of those phones seems to be destined for the US, and none of them will be compatible with US networks. It’s a big world out there.