Gadgetory

last time I took you for a look at 5g wireless technology was May of 2014 and back then nobody expected it in the wild until 2020 since then the goal line got moved up quite a bit as Verizon recently announced they will be doing field trials in the US by fall of 2016 and have some degree of market availability in this country by 2017 that's even ahead of Mobil ambitious South Korea in 2018 and Japan in 2020 let's look at the reasons why we should once again take a look at 5g including the fact that it's coming a lot sooner than we thought your first thought I'm sure is around speed that 5g will be faster than 4G as it was faster than 3G yes correct and in fact verizon says it could be 30 to 50 times faster than your current 4G LTE but take that with a grain of salt because in the real world we know the delivered speeds are different than the possible speeds but speed to me is actually the least interesting of 5 G's promised benefits here are a few I think are maybe a little more subtle but more interesting the first is low latency that means when you create an input or request something on your mobile over 5g it'll take very little time before the other end receives that request if you will now this is measured in milliseconds so it doesn't sound like a big gap but it's a big part of why your phone can feel sluggish a recent study by open signal and fierce Wireless found that the average latency on the big four carriers in the US right now is between 75 and 100 milliseconds the folks over at the 5g development teams will tell you the goal is to get latency on that network at one millisecond that is dramatically different aside from just being a faster way to navigate the web which isn't really the point it will allow us to have applications like high performance very responsive gaming over wireless networks as well as professional applications like remote telemedicine and surgery without any goofs nothing that keeps cutting a half a second after the doctor stopped telling it to and also robotic applications for industry that require absolute precision and again come down to low latency then there's lower power consumption you often think a type of wireless is using less power than others but in fact the wireless radio inside your mobile device is one of the biggest consumers of power this is a big deal because it appears that any major battery breakthrough isn't going to arrive until flying cars so let's make the most of what we have now then there's traffic prioritization this is being baked into 5g from the beginning it's an idea that says look if you've got a car going down the road with a 5g connection it needs to know that signals from other cars to avoid collisions need to get through first and that's signal streaming of video to your kid in the backseat can wait a few milliseconds and 5g is being built from the ground up to have that kind of smarts and finally there's cutting the cord and I mean the entire cord right now your home or business very likely have Wireless inside them but what's feeding that is a cable twisted pair fiber or satellite connection getting to the curb as we say but 5g wireless promises to have so much bandwidth and be so stable in delivering it that you could actually use that to provision Internet to a premise which we don't really think of right now as a wireless technology that means we have a much greater flexibility of saying I need internet here or here or here without having to worry what kind of cable or wire is available so a lot of questions around 5g starting with a whole variety of competing standards and development players right now after that we hope to get a 5g that is a thing versus a bunch of things using the same name that's what 4G is really like today there's cost who knows how you price something like this when it comes to market what are the tiers what are the gotchas and what about data caps if you've got a pipeline this big and fast you're gonna blow through a lot more data than they provision for you today even on a generous plan finally you're gonna need a new device no device on the market today can talk to a 5g network what we're talking about a few years down the road and you never have a new device by then anyway so keep this in the back of your mind that said 5g is definitely shaping up sooner than we thought to be the biggest innovation in mobile networks since mobile data know what's next at cnet.com slash you