Page 1 - 2003

March 2020 “Members Helping Members”
5G is Coming
By Jeff Wilkinson, President, Sun City Summerlin Com- er and longer to upgrade to new models.
puter Club
October 2019 issue, The Gigabyte Gazette
www.scscc.club
clearmeadows11 (at) gmail.com
5G is the designation for the upcoming fifth-
generation cellular network technology. This tech-
nology, which had the standards set at the end of
2017, promises to bring faster speeds than the cur-
rent 4G technology in use by most cell phones to-
day. This technology will not only affect your cell
phones, tablets, and laptops, but also the myriad of
other connected devices such as door locks, auton-
omous vehicles, security cameras, home applianc-
es, and many more devices included in the IoT
space – Internet of Things!
It’s estimated that over 20 billion devices will be
connected to the internet by the end of 2020 up
from the 6 Billion plus currently connected. The
promised latency (the delay in sending data from
one point to the next) reduction of 5G is critical to
the growth of driverless vehicles and many other
applications.
Shipments of 5G smartphones will surge to more
than 100 million units by the end of 2020 as the
coverage of 5G networks grows and the premium
prices of today's handsets come down, according
March 2020
Volume 37, Issue 12
to a report by International Data Corporation. IDC
said that next year 5G handsets could account for
close to 10% of global volumes, which have been
hammered in recent years by consumers taking long-
Driverless Cars and 5G Technology For autonomous
car technology to be unlocked, many experts agree
that large-scale adoption of 5G is required.
If you’ve been following the news about 5G, you
know that it has the potential to significantly boost
bandwidth up to 10 Gbits/sec. It also has sub-1-
millisecond system latency paired with a considera-
ble reduction in power consumption over existing
networks. 5G will enable a host of new applications
in the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), vehicle-to-
vehicle communication, virtual reality, and artificial
intelligence applications.
Said Nokia’s Jane Rygaard in a recent interview with
the BBC: “We need to look at how long it takes for
the message to be transmitted between sensors and
then get to the computer in each car, and then how
long it takes for the computer to make a decision,
and all of this has to be in less time than a human
would take to make a decision—2 milliseconds. We
need a network supporting this, and 5G is that net-
work.”
Still, with self-driving features already in widespread
use, it does appear that fully autonomous cars will
appear on our roads, and perhaps sooner than peo-
ple realize. Even more surprising, they will also be
considered much safer than human-controlled vehi-
cles. The current 4G network is fast enough to online
stream full HD content and play online games, but it
can’t support safer and smarter autonomous cars.
Autonomous cars, systems require incredible data
processing capabilities and speeds to mimic the tim-
ing of human reflexes.
The rollout of 5G technology is likely to begin in high
usage areas and will certainly experience some
growing pains but it is coming.
1