Home Industry News 5G is Around the Corner – What You Need to Know

5G is Around the Corner – What You Need to Know

October 19, 2017

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Verizon will be transforming the nation’s wireless service with the first adoption of 5G

Over the last several months, the company added significantly higher speed and responsiveness with LTE Advanced. By the year 2020, 5G will become the latest standard of wireless network technology using a high frequency spectrum known as millimeter waves. These waves can carry vast amounts of data and transmit signals with shorter latency. To prepare its infrastructure for 5G, Verizon, North America’s largest wireless carrier, is beginning field trials by 2017.

Currently 4G LTE ranges in frequencies from 700MHz to 2.5GHz.The lower frequencies are favored because the wavelengths penetrate objects like walls in comparison to higher frequencies. The FCC is proposing new rules for higher frequencies in the “28GHz, 37GHz, 39GHz, and 64-71GHz bands.”

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn stated

But industry engineers have now turned weaknesses into strengths by finding ways to use short wavelengths to build dynamic beam-forming antennas to support high-capacity networks that are small enough to fit into handsets. Many expect that these engineering advances will lead to 5G networks that will offer much higher data speeds and substantially lower latency than what commercial mobile services offer today.

Verizon is expecting to get the FCC’s green light to eventually use these frequencies for mobile services. Yet the official 5G standard, known as 5G New Radio, will not make any headway until 2018, or commercial until 2019. The difficulty is to overcome distance limitations and physical obstacles that can block the signals.

This is not a replacement of LTE, it’s an add on,” Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said. “Don’t think of this as a multi-billion dollar launch of new technology, it’s not that at all. This will ride over the current structure of the LTE network.

At this time no existing device will work on 5G networks. That will change, as Qualcomm just unveiled the first 5G wireless chip called the Snapdragon X50 modem. The technology behind it represents the first step toward 5G integration. The goal of 5G is using networks of small cells to have greater capacity and higher speeds with lower latency than 4G.

Consumers will experience gigabits-per-second throughputs and single-millisecond latencies,

according to Verizon. 5G is rated to be more power efficient, responsive, and Verizon will be the wireless carrier as the first major US carrier to roll it out.