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What is 5G? Wireless Engineer Explains What America’s Mobile Future Will Look Like

Posted to Technology September 06, 2016 by Giuseppe Macri

The next generation of wireless networks, 5G, will go far beyond speeding up your Netflix streams or immersing you in virtual reality on the go, according to wireless engineer and consultant Peter Rysavy, who talked with InsideSources to answer the question posed by average smartphone users to FCC commissioners: What is 5G, and what does it mean for the global mobile future?

If you asked the average smartphone user what 3 or 4G was, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. Can you explain what 5G is, and why it will be such a revolutionary leap forward?

It’s an entirely new wireless network platform, but it’ll coexist with previous generations in the same way that today’s 4G LTE network also supports 3G devices and 2G, which came out in the 1990s. 2G was the first digital network, 3G was the first broadband network and 4G made the first use of multiple smart antennas on transmitters and receivers, capable of bouncing off buildings and so forth — a way to become much more flexible in how we use spectrum. 4G is pretty good for our normal broadband applications, 5G is necessarily going to make it more efficient.

The goal with 5G is to accomplish two fundamental things: one is to make the radio much more efficient and responsive for new machine types of applications, or the internet of things (IoT). With 5G, the goal is to really address every kind of use case we can imagine for devices and machines connecting wirelessly. The other objective is to use smart antennas and advances in radio technology to access spectrum at very high frequency for the first time that were not previously practical for cellular systems. Those are bands that provide much more spectrum than we currently have in use today. Exploiting those bands is going to require entirely new architecture, and I don’t know if we have fully figured out business models to support them.

The expansion of the internet of things including ultra-reliable communications being able to support autonomous vehicles and smart cities, those types of applications — that’s one of the foundational elements. The other is to exploit these new bands to massively increase capacity and throughput performance. So that really is what 5G is.

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Source of extract above and entire article: http://www.insidesources.com/what-is-5g-wireless-engineer-explains-what-americas-mobile-future-will-look-like/