It’s one small step in numeral, but a giant leap in communication,
writes COLIN CULLIS. But how we use it is critical
M
obile communication has
only improved up to now, but
5G is something different.
It would be hard to miss the
headlines about the advent
of 5G, from claims about how fast it is, to
concerns that one company's dominance may
pose a national security risk. There’s certainly
some truth to this but, like most things, there’s
a bit more to it than that.
Even if technology is not your preferred
subject there are some considerations for
everyone before simply accepting the coming
changes. Doing so might avoid a repeat of
privacy issues that now challenge us, after
handing over all our data to the likes of
Facebook and Google, in return for supposedly
free services.
First the good news. 5G is going to offer
much faster transfer speeds and almost no
delay (latency) in opening web pages. At its full
potential, videos will play at high resolution
with no buffering, and voice and video calls
will appear smooth and crystal clear. With
more than half the planet now connected to the
Internet, 5G also will better handle the volume
of connections.
And it’s not just humans that will be
connecting, machines will too. This is the
internet of things, where sensors, appliances,vehicles and cameras could outnumber humans
who use the net. However there’s also the
potential for a downside, but more on that later.
Mobile communications go back to the
invention of radio, but the form we typically
understand as mobile communication is
private, person-to-person calling. Motorola
made the first call in the early 70s, which might
surprise you given how much time passed
before it became commonplace. Besides its big
and power-hungry phones, the network was
expensive and time-consuming to build. This
made mobile phones off limits to everyone but
the richest executives, and then it was more
a status symbol than a communication tool.
South Africa issued the first licences to
Vodacom and MTN in 1994. By then, mobile
phones had improved and the cost to build
the network had reduced, but it was still only
available in the major cities, and over time
along the major highways and larger towns.
The ‘G’ in mobile tech refers to generation,
and is a large and complex set of standards that
phone makers, network operators and hardware
manufacturers agree on to allow the hundreds
of brands and systems to work on the new
networks.
When South Africans first connected it was
2G, with calls and SMS functions the extent
of its services. Sms volumes between peopleprobably peaked on New Year's Eve 1999.
Thanks, in part, to how much the Japanese
loved their phones, the mobile web became
popular in the early 2000s.
For those that don't remember, it was
basically a smarter SMS service, but it was
slow and text based. If you did load a regular
website it wouldn’t just take forever, it would
be expensive. This was 2.5G, which still has
hundreds of thousands of devices using it to
process card transactions. Those card payment
devices are basically old, mobile phones.
3G offered greater data speed and, thanks
to the launch of the smartphone in 2007,
demand grew rapidly. This demand signalled
the beginning of the end for the old mobile
network.
As data services grew, the ability to handle
all that traffic became a challenge. 4G offered
more improvements to speed and capacity,
but ultimately the capacity issue was going to
prove a real problem. Capacity is the number
of users that can be accommodated in an area
using the mobile base stations. It’s already
able to handle about 100 000 users per square
kilometre, but as other devices not just
mobile phones begin to connect, speeds drop
as do calls, degrading the experience.
5G can handle ten times the current capacity
but it needs new transmission frequencies toGood
Better
5G
September 2019 088 http://www.countrylife.co.za