what’s the difference between 4G and 5G?

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what’s the difference between 4G and 5G?

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2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The main focus of 4G was to provide high speed internet connection for a consumer. As the consumer telecommunications market saturates, they wanted to design a system that would serve wider range of applications – such as self-driving cars, Internet-of-Things and others. These don’t necessarily need high speeds, bet they require high reliability or energy efficiency. You might ask then – why couldn’t 4G do all that? The answer is that 4G connections have long message round-trip-time (latency) and it’s radio requires a lot of power. 5G tries to improve on that. If all goes well, factories or warehouses that need wireless communications for their devices or robots can just rent communications system from the mobile operator instead of designing it themselves (which is an expensive endeavor). Of course, 5G will also improve the speed for us consumers, but that no longer is the only focus.

Anonymous 0 Comments

“G” stands for generation. 5G is the fifth generation of wireless Telecom service.

There are standards as to the bandwidth speeds required to be considered 3G/4G/5G etc.

From a technical standpoint, 4G networks use much much lower radio frequencies, and 5G networks use much much higher radio frequencies. In theory, the higher radio frequencies will allow for higher bandwidth, and lower latency, and will be much less susceptible to interface.

That said, it’s not yet widely implemented, so we really don’t know, and much of the layman-facing information about 5G will really be kinda hand-waved and over puffed by marketing lingo, as the term 5G is quite nebulous (ie it’s a marketing term, rather than a technical term)