The imminent transition to 5G technology
Just walking around any urban area will help illustrate the amazing importance of wireless communications. Everyone is on their smartphone and they are doing more and more sophisticated and demanding things than ever – including streaming HD video.
For Game of Thrones fans, some things, like winter (and apparently Dragons) are inevitably coming. Same for 5G. To recap, the leap from 2G to 3G helped enable at least rudimentary web browsing and other mobile data applications beyond email. While 3G helped illustrate some of the possibilities, many of them became practical realites with the coming of 4G.
Unlike some prior, more incremental advances in wireless, 5G is not just about more and faster, but more and faster is part of the story. eMBB – Enhanced Mobile Broadband captures much of the more and faster story, but it is here that the quantity of the more and faster bring about a different that started with earlier 4G deployments (remember WiMAX?) – wireless as a replacement for wired connections.
5G and the Internet of things
5G will also bring changes to the Internet of things (IoT). While now much of the IoT is hanging off wifi networks, mMTC – Massive Machine Type Communications with a focus on power efficiency and density, will facilitate an IoT with orders of magnitude more scale that what we have today. This will be both blessing and curse. Make no mistake, there will be much testing to be done. Make no further mistake, there are legions of hackers lurking in various basements and dark places eager to take advantage of huge fleets of IP enabled widgets, many of which will be unpatched and unprotected from documented threats.
5G will be a game changer in many ways, some of which we have not figured out yet. That’s ok, and that is part of the fun of rolling out new technology.
Source: Like winter, 5G is coming/Ixia
