Eli5: What’s special/different about 5G?
In: Technology
Using a higher frequency of radio waves lets you pack more data into the signal. Imagine sending a message with beeps, but not like Morse code. Instead, there’s a constant one beep every second. You can *modulate* your beeps to send a beep every half second instead. So, “beep beep beep” would be 000 and “beep beepbeepbeepbeep” would be 011, and so on.
This limits your data speed to one bit (0 or 1) per second, since you have to wait a full second each time to know if it’s a 0 or 1. If you instead increase the speed to ten beeps per second for a 0 and twenty for a 1, you can obviously send data way faster!
Similarly, the radio signal is a wave that goes at a certain frequency, and you can modulate the frequency to increase it or decrease it slightly to indicate a 0 or 1. A higher frequency means more data.
One problem with this is that if your “beeps” are too rapid, and the difference between the two speeds is too small, you might not be able to hear the difference between them. Similarly, a higher frequency is a bit harder for the receiver to decipher. That’s not a big problem, though, and modern technology has advanced enough for devices to be able to figure it out.
The other big problem is that for physics reasons higher frequencies don’t travel as far. They get absorbed better by stuff, especially water, which the atmosphere is full of. Walls and trees aren’t helping, either.
To overcome that, you need more towers that are closer together. That becomes very expensive very quickly. Like the early days of cell phone coverage, some places just aren’t going to get 5G. And in fact, this is the same reason that some places even in the US *still* don’t have 4G or sometimes even 3G coverage.
The other way to solve this problem is to make the receiver more sensitive. That has its own problem – it will also pick up more radio noise, so it needs to be able to filter the noise and find the signal you’re trying to pick up.
As you’ve probably picked up by now, 5G uses a higher radio frequency so it has a higher bandwidth than 4G – *much* higher bandwidth. Phone technology is good enough now to be able to detect a weaker signal and filter out the noise. Service providers also have more existing infrastructure to add antennas and are willing to invest to build the additional infrastructure needed so there’s enough coverage.
With these advances, 5G could give the kind of internet speeds you normally only see with on a decent connection at home.
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