Chennai

With 5G, life as you know will not be the same again. All those fantasies of cars driving themselves around and making all your household gadgets respond to the touch of a button while you lounge…all of them could now come true!

Rollout of the much hyped 5G, that will make all these revolutionary changes to mobile technology, is under way in the US, China and Japan. India has unveiled its plans to go for 5G trials in the next 100 days. Indian telecom company, Jio has announced that it will launch the service by 2020 with its own handsets. 

What is 5G technology?

This new generation wireless technology can transfer data at lightning speed -- almost 1,000 times faster than the 4G technology, making network congestion a thing of the past. When all technologist elements are in place, you can download data almost instantaneously, a whole movie in a few minutes and an app on your phone in a few seconds. 

For gamers, the frustration of waiting for real-time action might well be over. All gadgets like television sets, refrigerators, air conditioners and washing machines can be connected to one device that can control them  remotely. 5G comes as a boon to companies working on Internet of Things (IoT) on which the concept of a `smart home’ is built. 

Robotics is another area where 5G technology can make a significant difference, in critical uses such as delicate rescue missions and so on where semi-autonomous robots will need to be monitored and guided at a good speed.

The one area that can see a huge revolution is healthcare as this technology will make the much hyped remote surgery possible. This means that a doctor sitting in the UK can guide an operation being performed in India. However, while becoming technologically possible, this is still some years away.

As technology is deployed, a whole new ecosystem will develop around it.  The new term World Wide Wireless Web (wwww) is being developed just for this. Similarly, the term New Radio is being used to describe radio technology being developed to support 5G technology.

Remote control everything you want and time it to perfection

• Lightning speed: The networks will operate within higher frequencies of the wireless spectrum. The new technology will use a large number of small antennae increasing both connection speed and capacity. With a low latency, spectrum efficiency, hardware and software advantages will make 5G working in a lightning speed. But it will arrive only gradually and in phases.
• High-end applications: Latency will have to be further reduced to below 4 milliseconds for high-end applications like remote surgery, driver-less driving and defence applications.
• Players: The entire spectrum of 5G will have a host of players — regulatory agency like ITU, telecom operators like AT&T, Vodafone, China Mobile, Jio, Airtel; network providers like Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei and server manufacturers, handset manufactures like Samsung, Huawei and Apple and a slew of software vendors. All these entities will work together to synchronise the technology to make to it perfect to attain high speed and efficiency
• Technology dominance: Wireless and internet technology is traditionally dominated by Western companies. When Chinese telecommunication giant, Huawei emerged in the wireless technology space in big a way challenging Western dominance, the US attempted to isolate it by alleging spying and influencing its allies to boycott it. India is yet to take a decision to allow Huawei to participate in the Indian 5G roll out.
• Equipment connection capacity: 4G technology can connect 10,000 equipment in a network area of one square km while 5G connects 10 million equipment in the same area.

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