5G and the Future of Mobile

four G. Yeah. You know, I remember back in the old days and when I was first getting into cell phones and you don't getting into them more like like I was like getting into baseball cards. Back when I think I had my first cell phone. I remember hearing about three G and and it was the heyday of three G when three G was a great thing, and had no idea what that meant. Well, you were not alone, Joe.

But recently I saw an interesting This was yet another topic I came across because of something I saw in Alexis madrigals Awesome Email, his Real Future email newsletter, which if you're not subscribed to that you should. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, but it's about five G. No, not not the newsletter the topic that we want to talk about today, right, Right, So we have a lot of ground to cover before we can get to five G, right, for four G is worth of material at least, right, Okay. So so

so all of this G business um has to do well. Okay, So so g G stands for generation. Let's get that out there right at the top end. Uh. And and what generation of of stuff we're talking about has to do with at its base level, how radio frequencies are allotted for broadcast and communication. Yeah, all right, because because

that is how your cell phone works. It transmits data back and forth to cellular towers via radio waves, as does a lot of other stuff, right, And and so bits of the radio spectrum are cordoned off for all of these different uses, for for television and for flight navigation, and for mobile data and for local data within your house and and etcetera, and etcetera. Uh. And of course, when organizations and governments started allocating these frequencies, no one

could have predicted the crush of mobile data. Uh, you know that the demand or the supply, And no one could have predicted the speed with which technology would be developed to attempt to meet that demand. It's all been really pretty haphazard, right, so this is going to make it even weirder when we're trying to predict what the next generation is going to look like. But there is

something maybe interesting to say about it. But I think before we get there, we need to do a sort of brief history of the g S and English and and Lauren to your point, I mean, keep in mind like this, this entire technology is just over a century old. I mean from the point of using radio waves. Yeah, so yeah, not not cellular phones that's much younger, but the radio in general, where we've been using that for

a little more than a hundred years. And obviously when it was first being used, no, there were no regulations because it hadn't been a thing before, right Yeah. Ever was just like so the regulations that came in place, they were developed in different parts of the world, so they're the allocations you will find in the United States are not necessarily the same as you would find in Europe, which may not be the same as you would find

in other parts of the world. So that also makes things a little more complicated, because you know, if the whole world we're working on one standard. This story would probably be a lot easier, but that's not the way things turned out. So let's start with the first generation, the original series the Captain Kirk of the Cellular World. Um, so that first generation was an analog cellular system, not digital. This is this is one one G. Yeah, they probably

didn't call it that at the time. No. No, it's like it's like you wouldn't say first annual. That's that's not that's just dumb say that. Well they shouldn't anyway, the the the unless they're of course talking about the second time they've held the event. That could be the first annual one at any rate. So one G stood for technologies including n M T C nets, amps and tax or A MPs and T A c s, which all began in the nineteen eighties. They had very limited bandwidth,

so they really were only suitable for voice transmission. You did get a few, um you know, radio modem type things, but they were extremely limited in what they could do. So this was really primarily for voice train smission and that was it. Uh. These would be the old cellular phones that you would remember if you're old enough, with the big brick cellular phones, the giant ones with a huge antenna. UM. That's that's this era we're talking about.

Then you get to two G. This is when we start moving into the ninety nineties, and this is where the two really big uh competing technologies came out of G S M and c d M A. UH, specifically c d M A one. There was also d AMPS at this time. But this is when we get into the first generation of digital cellular systems. So it's the second generation of cell systems overall, but the first generation of digital systems. Okay, you're saying a lot of acronyms.

What are what are all these about? So tell me about amps and get some at least tell you. I'll tell you about g S M and c d M A because those are the two really important ones. G s M stands for Global System for Mobiles and c d M A stands for code division multiple access. Both of these are technologies that allow for multiple access to a tower to allow for transmission of radio signals. Very important,

very basic technology that allows cell phones to work. Obviously, for a cell phone to work, you need to be able to have access a tower so that you can send your transmission to the tower to go onto the network and then receive information back from the network. And

you need a methodology for handshakes. That's the time where you are going between one tower and another, like you're you're you're starting to leave one tower's transmission area while you're entering another one, and there's a handshake here, I am yeah. That allows that to continue without any interruption. So that way, if Lauren and I are talking on a cell phone and she's driving uh, and she goes past one tower to another, there's not an interruption in

the conversation. So both of these technologies could do that. They were both the basics for digital cell phones. However, they're competing technologies. GS them phones won't work on a c d M A system and vice versa. You can get world phones, Like if you have a c d M A phone, you can get a world phone where it also has a G s M chip in it, but it will still primarily work on a c d

M A network. Now, why the reason why I call it world phones is that most of the world, the overwhelming population of the world, relies on G s M. The United States is one of the few places that also has c d M A, So we have two major carriers that use G s M. That would be a T and T and T mobile. And then we have two major carriers, maybe three if you include UH some of the other slightly smaller but growing ones, but two major ones in Verizon and Sprint that use c

d M A technology. And this is a problem obviously, because it means that if you have a C d M A phone, you are more limited in where you can take that phone and actually use it, unless again, you have a world phone. Most people in up either having a travel phone where it's a G s M M G s M phone just for travel, or you know, you can uh invest in a world phone, and maybe one day this will become moot, but for now it's still a thing. So the reason why most of the world uses G s M and stuff c d M

A is that in n European government's mandated it. They said you have to use g s M and they were specifically looking at that because they considered it an industry consortium that had produced the G s M standard. In other words, it was a partnership amongst several different companies. No one company laid claim to ownership of it. UH. That was not true with C d M A, which was kind of a qual calm thing, so uh so

they thought GSM better than this privately owned standard. The United States, however, looked at it as saying, hey, C d M A is allowing for faster data and voice transmission rates, clearer phone calls. You know that a better experience earlier on. And that's why in the United States you had some carriers pushing C d M A. Now G s M caught up, but it took some time. So at first C d M A was in the lead, and then the two were more or less comparable. Um. Now, if you have a G s M phone, it's very

easy to switch from one network to another. So if I have an A T and T phone and I want to switch to T Mobile, it's very easy to do. I go to T Mobile, I get a new simcard or uh and I just pop it into my my phone and it should work fine. And the other nice thing is if I want to switch phones within the same network, it's easy. So let's say I've got my Nexus four on T Mobile and I want to upgrade to a Nexus six. Then I can get the new phone, pop the simcard into my new phone, and it works

right out of the box like it's it's perfect. I don't have to do anything else to it. That is, of course, assuming that the sim card is the same size for the two phones, because recently we've received a lot of new types of sim card technology where they've been getting smaller and smaller. So sometimes you still have to go to a phone like carrier store in order to get a new size, or if you have a very steady hand, you can cut one down yourself. I didn't trust myself, so I went to the store to

get one, so um. The other thing about early G S M and C D M A was that C D M A could not handle simultaneous voice and data. So you might remember commercials, I think A T and T rent commercials about how specifically with the iPhone you could have both voice and data at the same time, because at one time A T and T in the United States was the only carrier that had the iPhone. It's no longer the case, but for for several years that was the case, and they said, hey, you can

use both on our phone. Because it happened to be a G S M phone. They didn't, you know, it sounded like they were saying that it was unique to the iPhone. It wasn't. It was that it was the network the technology they were using allowed for it. So that is your two G. Uh. You think we would immediately go to three G. But hold up a second, because there's two point five G. This is starting to sound like seasons of the New Battlestar Galactica. It feels

like that. It also it also feels like generations of the iPhone, where the number that is associated with the iPhone is not necessarily the actual generation of the iPhone. Or or Windows, like this is Windows ten. We went from Windows seven to Windows eight to Windows ten. I love Windows. Schmickery. Do when can I get cell phone emmy? All right, well let's let's go back to two point five G. So this is where we get even more confusing.

All right, so we've got these two competing technologies that you know in the in the G M S and c d um ah. Now we get to g p R S and c d M A two thousand one x. These were enhanced to G networks. So here's the deal. We're not just talking about generations here. It would be so much easier if we were talking generations except for the fact that since we have a branching technology tree, you would have different generations as technology is mature at

different rates. Right, So G S M would be maturing at at one and I think it's a g MS a second ago. But G s M would be maturing at one rate and C D M A would be maturing at another rate. So that would make that confusing.

But to to try and make it a little more streamlined, the various international organizations have come in to say, listen, we're going to say that that generation stands for the capability of your technology, not how many iterations there have been, but there is a bare basic limit of of how much data they have to be able to accept per second, and if they meet that, that means they fall into

this generation versus that generation. That's nice. Yeah, So two point five point five is two point five because it's faster than two but it doesn't quite meet the standards that were set for three G. So they had to pick where do you put them? Do you don't want to call it two G because as a carrier, you want to use this as a selling point to your customers, say our networks are faster than two G. But you can't go and say they're three G because the data

rates aren't there yet. They could have just gone with like awesome too, or three to two G plus or two G plus or three G minus a little bit. Uh. So that gives us to three G, where we have a whole bunch of different competing standards which I'm not even gonna go into. I mean edges in there. So if you've ever heard about being on the edge network, that's technically a three G network. They have even faster data rates than previous generations, at about kill a bits

per second. So when I say even faster, that's pretty slow, yeah, but faster than two G. So the u N International Telecommunications Union set the standard for three G at two megabets per second if the phone is stationary, and kill bits per second for a phone that's in motion. Obviously, phones that are in motion have to deal with this handshake, so that's what complicates matters. If you are stationary, you don't need to do that, and you can have a

faster download rate. Okay, so we're getting closer to the present day. Yeah, when we hit four G, okay, yeah, all right, tell me the story of four G. Four G is another complicated story. Send to me sing, so I can tell you what four G is supposed to be. Four G is supposed to be one gigabit per second when the phone is stationary or mobile device. It's not just a phone now, but four G you should be able to get a one gigabit per second download rate when that when the device is not in motion, and

one hundred megabets per second when it is in motion. However, none of the current standards that are touted as four G meet that specification. Yeah, so they're just they're just flipping the un off all the time. Yeah, they're essentially saying, listen, we're calling this four G because it is the next generation of our technology. It works in a completely different way from three G. It uses a different methodology for handling data. It's it's using brand new technology, so we

gotta call it something. We're not calling it three G plus or three point five G, so we're calling it four G. And you can take your standards and just pretend like they don't exist, because that's what we're gonna do. That's like if Star Trek the next generation had James do Hand in the engineering room. Yeah, so we're just we're just having him. It's no reason we're not explaining it. Um. Yeah, and it's so so we have this four gen name

that's a marketing term. It's not really they're not four G according to those UN standards, which by the way, even the U N now is like whatever, okay, fine, uh And the and the technologies that we're talking about that are called for g R U l T E, And then there's y max, and there's h s P A plus. Hsp A plus comes in a couple of

different flavors of forty two. Although forty two are the ones that are considered to be closer to four G speeds, none of these get close to that one gigabit per second uh LTE tops out of around a hundred megabits per second or so. Um, you can get. The fastest speed up scene for LT is three hundred megabits per second. That was like an ideal test. Um. There is l t A l t E Advanced, which could theoretically get much faster, but that's not rolled out very widely right now.

Y max is kind of dead in the water. Essentially, it's no longer really a thing. Everyone's looking at l T E hsp A plus some some carriers use that. T Mobile uses that, but they also use l T E. They roll out LT networks as well, so that is kind of leading us up to today. That's where we

are now, is with this mishmash of technologies. By the way, if we all by we, I mean like the carriers, if all the carriers adopted LTE, if they rolled out robust LT networks and phased out the older networks, then you could, in theory, have a phone that could work on any network as long as it was an LTE phone, because it's it's no longer this branching UH technology where you've got the G S N versus C D M A.

It would all be unified in theory. In practice not gonna happen because you've got companies putting in proprietary software that is required to run in order for you to do something like make a voice call, So you can't just take the phone you have on one network and pop onto another network and not have any problems. It's it's overall advantageous I would say for humanity, um for

everyone to be working within the same infrastructure. But it's it's honestly very advantageous from a business perspective to use your own proprietary to lock you in. Yeah, you can sell more stuff. Yeah, yeah, I love being locked in. So it's so cozy. It's like a hobbit hole that you can't leave. When I don't have to make choices, my life is so much easier. Actually, there's some truth

to that. We should talk about the science of choice sometimes. Yeah, I mean yeah, if you have, you know, unlimited choice, then you could be paralyzed by it. We've talked about that a couple of times on tech stuff. Yes, yes, okay, but so so shade aside. Um, let's let's look forward to this amazing future of five G. Okay, right, well, what inspired us to talk about this today was, again, like I said, uh, an article that I read about people predicting five G what the next generation of this

wireless technology would be. So five G is not a fixed standard yet, right, it's more of a kind of an ambiguous concept. What's going on now is people are debating and talking about what five G is going to be. Yeah, they're kind of blue skying it. I mean, you can make certain predictions saying that these are the sort of things we would consider necessary for us to call it five G. For example, we would expect even faster UH data rates that would be that would be an expectation

of the advancement of the generations of this technology. But there are other elements as well. So it's one of those things. Again, since since we don't have a hard and fast number, Ultimately, what might happen is the next technology that comes out, people will start calling five G and it may not come close to measuring up to

some of the things that people have proposed. Right, but already there have been some like politicians and industry leaders trying to set really ambitious goals for what should be done, incredibly ambitious, like sometimes like you hear it and you think,

wait what Yeah. So the topic of five G was addressed in March Mobile World Congress, and Bonnie Chop or Recode put together a good right up afterwards, including predictions made about speed, which came to the prediction was that five G would feature ideal speeds of ten gigabits per second And I just thought, w T some other letters. Are are they the generation? Are they for real? Because so the four Chop points out that the four G standard the ideal standard is one gigabit per second, but

it's never actually that fast, is it. No? And what prevents it from operating at that top speed, Well, there's just the basic limitation of the systems themselves. Like I said, with LTE, the regular LT you top out in around three d megabits per second even under ideal circumstances. But what goes into that speed is a whole bunch of factors. Um, it's it's going to be the distance between you and

the tower that your device is communicating with. It's gonna be um, the amount of other data that that tower is handling at the time, Um, the weather, the number of trees that are between you and the tower. Yeah, yeah, it's tons of stuff like that. Now, if you are talking about, you know, lab conditions, then that's where you

would probably get this ideal speed. But even in those lab conditions, no one has come close to the gigabits per second, although lt LTE Advanced has the theoretical peak performance of three gigabits per second download speed one point five gigabits per second upload speed. But as I said earlier, there are not very many ILT advanced UH networks rolled out yet, so it's we don't have a lot of

real world testing in that realm. Yeah, it should have added to that list to the physical capacity, the physical technological capacity of both your device and all of the computers at the other end of the network that it's talking to you. It's of like saying that you know, if you have if you have a hallway that's ten people wide, but your doorway is only one person wide, then and you think of the doorway being your device, then your device would be the bottleneck in that case.

Or or even you know, like I've got this really elegant software and a tricycle. Yeah, yeah, that that would not be helpful at home. Should have seen Laura gestu. She was pointing at the tricycle. I believe I believed there was a tricycle there. No, it's how how convincing. It was maybe ten gigabits per second, which again was the prediction here. Maybe that's not meaningful to you, So

think about it like this. It is one point to five gigabytes per second, so that you could, like if you wanted to download a video game, you could download a copy of sky Room in like five seconds, or or what about like a movie, Well, so like a tin a dp HD movie and compressed format would maybe take Also, like about five seconds are less. The computer I used in college, you could download its entire hard

drive in less than three seconds. And if you want another illustration of how fast this is, so ten gigabits per second. That's ten times faster than the speeds promised by Google Fiber and competing carriers. Wired connection, yeah, actual

optical cable going to your house. You know often, uh, Like Lauren and I are both video gamers, so you play some video games too, So we all are aware of the idea that if you're playing an online game, it's better to have that wired connection than it is to go with wireless because you can have lag and latency and all these other issues share any time that you add that extra step of having to beam the signal from your your your actual Yeah, it's better to

have that physical, dedicated line. And that's what I would think too until I hear ten gibits per second wireless transmission, because it's ten times faster than the optical fiber. I mean, that would make you wonder like, okay, so why would we even have optical fiber? What's the point of wires at that point. Yeah, right, if you could actually get to uh, that that point. We'll talk about this a

little bit more. I'm sure later if you can get to a point where ten gigabits per second, even even if that's the ideal and you never reached the ideal, okay, yeah, yeah, let's say it's you know, the real speed you get is four still, four times faster than fiber, is right. And even then, when you say one gigabit per second with Google Fiber that's the ideal for Google Fiber, you might you might top out at nine megabits per second. M that's not acceptable. So I'm going to get four

gigabits per second over over the air. You mentioned the difference between lab conditions and real conditions. In ideal conditions, what kind of things can we do now at the top end of speaking, So with the five G technology in the lab right now, uh, the average speed tends to be around one gigabit per second, which, if you remember, is the promise speed of four G. So it feels like we're just playing catch up. But there have been

some some demos of much faster speed. Samsung held a demo where they showed that they could hit seven point five gigabits per second when it was stationary, and one point two gigabits per second if the device was traveling at a speed of a hundred kilometers per hour or sixty two miles per hour. Pretty impressive. So at that speed, I mean you could you could end up being able to stream content without any problems. There's a ton of

stuff that you would be able to access. And you know, we were talking a lot about mobile devices, but honestly, this technology is working its way into a lot of other platforms, including cars. So there are a lot of potential uses and we'll talk a little bit about those in a little in a moment or two. Yeah, So another predicted standard of five G would be very very

low latency, like one mill the second latency. And if you ask what is latency, that's just the time of delay in delivering a packet from one device to another. So a packets a piece of data. Uh, the amount of data you can transmit in a certain period of time might change, you might have more bandwidth or throughput, um, but the latency is just the time lag in delivering one packet. Uh. The other thing would be connectedness, how much can a network support, Like how many things can

you wirelessly send data between at the same time? Yeah, and this was this was a real concern, especially earlier in cellular networks, where you would have towers that would get overwhelmed and you have by like three signals at the same time. Yea. And the old days yeah, in fact, yeah, the old old days there were you would look and you say, like, all right, this one city has a broadcast tower and it can handle like two simultaneous connections

and that's it. You know. Obviously that technology has improved over time. Yeah, and that is largely a software is shue, I mean, also a memory issue. But what you're really talking about is, uh, the capacity of a computer to multitasks. Yeah, essentially that that's what it boils down to, and that has improved significantly over time, and it would have to because we're also talking about the burgeoning era of the Internet of Things, when we're adding lots more devices to

various networks. So there it's not just your cell phone or not just your computer, your tablet, it's also all the devices in your house and your car and probably a bunch of sensors outside taking data on various stuff. Yeah, and now that you could have these things connecting into their own network, which then connects to an access point. Right, so you could have essentially a traffic manager in the form of a router that would take care of some

of that. But it's also potential if you have the capacity to handle billions of different devices at a time on a single tower, you could have them connecting directly to the network and not have to have a router. I don't know that you would necessarily want to do that, because you might want the router in order to do some traffic management on your end or to control access to things. Obviously, direct access to devices could pose a security risk as well. There are probably lots of considerations

to take their. Another consideration for the system as a whole is going to be the management of all of those those those yeah, yeah, are really really the management of the data flow, I suppose. Yeah, So this was really interesting to me. We've talked a lot about the other other elements of five G one of the proposed ones, and keep in mind, again this is an ongoing discussion, so some of these things we're talking about may become a reality, and whatever does become five G and some

of them maybe don't become a reality. But one of the things that was mentioned at a conference Ericson CEO Hans Vestberg said that the five G networks should be able to respond in real time to the various demands of devices that were on the network and be able to to to facilitate those devices so it delivers the best experience for whatever that device might be and whatever

the use case might be. So, for example, if you have a mobile device in your streaming a movie and HD, you would need to have that fast download rate to accommodate that huge amount of data that's streaming to your device. So the network would accommodate you and say, all right, we're going to give this data rate to that device because that's how much it needs in order to do

the thing that they've asked. Let's say, though, that you have a driverless car that connects back to the network, then you want extremely low latency because safety depends upon it. You can't have a lag between uh, the detection of something like a potential obstacle and its response. Yeah, I mean that's tragic when it happens in Halo, but but it's real tragic when it happens exactly so that this would be a case where you would need to have the least amount of latency possible. It also opens up

the possibility of something we've talked about before. Remember when we started talking about the early ideas of the autonomous car involved a system that cars would navigate through, and it would the cars would just be one part of the system. And how we have seen cars evolved so that they're more independent, right, they don't tend to work within a network. They're independent and they have all the

systems self enclosed in the car. This is kind of shifting back to the possibility of having a big, uh interdependent system which could have benefits over a bunch of independent vehicles. Um, but we talked about that extensively in our autonomous car episode, so I'll go back over it. Or you could have even the ability for the network too.

Sense when a gadget's batteries running low. So let's say that you've been using your phone all day and you're not home yet you want your phone to last a little longer, and your phone is aware that the battery is down to like, so now the network is a where that your phone's batteries down, and it starts to ping your phone less frequently to make sure that your

phone is still connected. And because it's pinging it less frequently, sending it updates less frequently, your phone is just sipping at that battery power instead of gulping it down, and it extends the battery life of your device, which is pretty cool. Yeah. Um. Other considerations would have to include cooperation with previous networks, because part of what five G would have to do to to be successful is leave room for older devices that are only capable of connecting

through three or four. Yeah. That's that's a big issue, right is you have to continue to support legacy devices that backwards compatibility issue, right yeah, because not everyone is able to. First of all, you never know when the system is going to fail and you need the backup systems there. Secondly, you never know when a system is

going to get overwhelmed. Like when I go to C E S, I will often switch my phone so that it uses a three G network and doesn't even look for four G because it helps save me time and effort and frustrationttery and battery exactly. Uh. And also, not everyone can upgrade at the same time, right, Like if we all were magically given five G phones as soon as it came out. It'd be awesome, and we say, oh, we don't need these other things. But that's not the

way the world works. I probably won't get a five G phone until six G comes out. You know. Another thing about this next generation generation in quotes is that people are talking about using different radio bandwidths, these high frequency bandwidths that could transmit a lot more data, right, sure, but they would also have drawbacks to write, yeah, yeah, this the more data can only be transferred across shorter distances due to the physical properties of these particular high

frequency radio waves. You would need a lot more towers and based stations and all of that and uh and better antenna technology would would have to be another development. Yeah, because I mean that that becomes sort of a a social barrier, not a technological barrier in a way, because then you've got people saying, I really don't want a cell phone tower erected in my neighborhood, right, I don't.

I don't want that here, um or or or or even you know the possibility of of like cellular desserts the way that we have some nutritional deserts and in large areas. Yes, so you could have really underserved areas, So you might have some parts that are just swimming in gigabits and other bits where other areas where you know, you just that service just immediately drops out and until you get to another densely populated area, you don't get that service across the county line and you can't stream

blue rays constantly. Well, what's what's the timeline we're looking at here? You know, we're talking a lot about the future. How far into the future are we you talking about? Well, two companies have talked about setting up temporary five gen networks as soon as twenty eighteen UM Samsung for the Winter Olympics in South Korea. And who a is that? Is that? How you say that? I'm gonna I'm gonna say yes because I hualei. That sounds too much like it came from Anchorman. Yes, that one for for the

World Cup in Moscow the same year. Both of those goals I think are ridiculously ambitious. I mean maybe, I mean it's it's really hard to say for sure how how this technology is going to develop over the next few years. Is the date that I've seen floated for commercial availability. And I know that Japan is hoping to have a permanent network available for the twenty Summer Olympics.

But you know, I mean, amazing things can happen. Maybe that could happen, But even if it does, I would I would guess that it's going to be a much longer period of time before five G completely overtakes the prior networks, right, And even even if they build out the network, you're still you still have to have the

technology to actually take advantage of that. So I imagine that that technology will largely be limited to things like broadcast stations that happened to have the capability of having commercial level technology that can tappen, Because I mean, if it's a temporary thing that's up for the Olympics, how do they sell that to consumers? Hey, this phone is going to be really fast for like two weeks, and then it's gonna be not so fast because we're shutting

down the network. Yeah, I'm sure that it's some kind of like promotional thing, uh, Sam Sung, Like, especially a creator like Samsung who also has a hardware side of the business, Um, would you know use that as a promotional opportunity to give journalists. Their fancy cell phones are five G burner phones. Yeah, yeah, I watched so much Netflix in such a short amount of time. So let's talk about how this stuff could really changed our lives.

We mentioned it a little bit with the idea of this being faster than than potentially faster than than fiber connections. Potentially could be way faster than fiber connections, assuming that a statistic we read was not in fact a typo, which is so hard for me to believe. Yeah. So the head of tech development project called the Innovation Center, which is out of the University of Surrey, a person by the name of him tough as Zoli. Yeah, oh,

I didn't look up any of these things. I'm usually so good at looking picks up before I come into the studio. I apologize if I just put you your name, human person. Um I told told the BBC that he thinks that five G could lend itself to eight hundred gigabits per second. What you need to put that in a phrase that I'm going to be able to comprehend. That's like downloading thirty three HD movies per second, thirty three HD movies per second per second, or like three

Peter Jackson movies. Um, and you know a lot of people like the first My first reaction to this is always like, what would I ever need with that speed? But I've said that throughout my entire life and managed to take advantage of it. And well, I said that the first time I looked at three and a quarter inch floppy does. Yeah. Well, it is one of those principles in computing is that where capability emerges, people will

find ways to use it well. And with the emerging technologies of four K and eight K resolution coming out, you could easily see this being a way of getting access to that kind of content so that you get this ultra high definition experience delivered over something that doesn't have a bottleneck to it. Uh. Now, obviously four K and eight K are also going to rely very heavily on sophisticated compression algorithms because otherwise the rest of us

would never be able to see it. But if you are, if you have the ability to through put eight hundred gigabits per second, action is not necessarily your your number one concern. Yeah, maybe over overtaking your data plan in like thirty seven minutes would be your major concern. You had data plans, what would they even look like? That's crazy.

I mean a lot of the potential for this that one of the easiest and most obvious things to point out is the potential for streaming media, like we've been saying, you know, streaming high definition movies and stuff. One of the things I thought is how it could change what could be done with like cloud computing and cloud gaming

for example. Um So, wouldn't this make cloud gaming basically unstoppable because why would you shell out for like a workhorse console like a PS four or an Xbox one or something that has strong hardware and computing power when really all you need is an internet connected display and a controller of some kind. Well yeah, especially if that if you can have a really working serve service, and we've seen services that try and take this model, succeeding

to various degrees or not succeeding to various degrees. But if you had this, this ability to transmit that much data that quickly, it would remove a lot of the barriers people have seen, especially things like latency and lag.

It would potentially remove those concerns so that you could have a really satisfying gaming experience without having to have that console in your home, and it sends this It creates this ability for you to have a service run where the service provider can make the investment to improve hardware as hardware advances come along. And then, you know, because of the the massive amount of revenue generated on a subscription service or even a pay to play per

game service, uh, you know, it's not a concern. Whereas if I'm a PC gamer, one of the big barriers to entry is just the investment to get a good like a really good gaming rig um, and then to keep it in really good shape because knowing that in six months to a year, a lot of my equipment is going to go from good to passable, and then another six months to a year it's going to go from passible to not acceptable, which means I constantly need to be upgrading my system. This way, the all the

upgrades happen on the back end, not on your console. Now, it might also mean that your subscription fee goes up. But yeah, well, I mean wouldn't you wouldn't you always need a system capable of parsing that gigabits per second turn into meaningful visual information. Yeah, depending on how Yeah, it would depend on how your your cloud gaming ones

and runs. If you're just doing the sort of like streaming media model, I mean, they're what's happening is that the game is running entirely on the server, and it's just it's the data it's taking from you is what button you're pushing, and the data it's giving to you is visual and auditory. It's essentially as if you're watching a movie. Yeah, it just has to be. So the

point you're making is is a valid one, Lauren. The device would have to be capable of accepting whatever that minimum amount of information is for that game system to work properly. Uh. And if you if you had a bottleneck there, then obviously you would have to upgrade whatever, like your smart TV or whatever it might be. Maybe it's like a little dumb set top box that connects to your TV that that just accepts the information and

sends the signals to the TV. But even that would have to have the capacity to accept this massive amount of information. Yeah, like we like we were saying before, there are two sides of this, right, there's the system, the back end side, and there's the consumer side, the device and having something capable of delivering huge amounts of data and having something capable of accepting huge amount of data are two different things. Yeah, and you gotta have

both of them otherwise it's a really one sided conversation. Yeah, exactly, Like my phone could download this movie in like point five seconds if it anyone would send, if anyone was sending a beautiful movie and wants to Another big implication of five G, of course, is going to be for the Internet of things, right right, And yeah, you were talking about that earlier because you know, right now a

lot of people have more than one wireless device. But by if you know, your fridge and your air conditioning in your coffee pot, and your car and your stoplights and your storm drains and whatever else are all connected to the web. People are predicting that there could be fifty to a hundred billion connected devices worldwide. Um, yeah, so you've gotta have some means of being able to

to facilitate that huge number of connections. Yeah. Yeah, like like we are going to need this more powerful generation of wireless connectivity if if that future is going to be possible, right Otherwise, you know, you might be cursing the fact that your neighbor's got a smart kitchen outfitted in their home because now you can't get a decent

phone signal. Yeah. And and and also also, like we were talking about, those self driving cars would be of particular benefit to the system because you know, having faster and less clogged communication across the network would allow for for smoother route mapping and better traffic control and that emergency response that we were talking about earlier, where where you know, if an accident does happen, then every car on the road could be told to break, preventing a

pile up. Yeah. Yeah, that These are all incredible applications of this technology or potential applications. Uh one, what one more is is remote activities. Um, so you know, imagine the best surgeon for your personal needs being able to uh not only teleconsult with you from anywhere the world, but also being able to operate a robotic surgical tool from anywhere. Yeah, definitely. I mean one of the big problems with telesurgery has been the latency problem. Yeah. Yeah.

There have been some examples of telesurgery that have been kind of a a scary proof of concept, you know, like people proving that this is a possible thing, but they were using very dedicated lines for a for a predetermined specific purpose. This would potentially open up the opportunity of using it on a more regular basis. Instead of it being this like we're we're proving that this is possible.

This would make it practical or at least a potential practical solution to what could otherwise be a life threatening problem. So yeah, I mean, these are all great examples of how five G could end up being a huge benefit to us, assuming that it all works out. I mean, we're still talking about something that's still in the kind of brainstorming phase. Yeah. I guess one of the main

questions is just how realistic is this? I mean, we're looking at these extremely crazy optimistic predictions and uh, and personally, I don't really know what to make of it. I mean, I guess I don't know enough about cellular and wireless technology to know what's actually plausible and what's just sort

of you know, people setting ambitious goals. Well, and if you were able to actually roll this out, I mean, there's there's going to be a lot of investment that's going to be necessary to make this reality, where the carriers will have to invest in upgrading their infrastructure. So in other words, either building new towers or adding antenna to existing towers, whatever however that might turn out. Um, And so it's not like everyone's going to get it

at the same time. It'll be like all the other networks rolled out where some some uh some networks got access to three G and four G speeds well before other ones did. So we're gonna price see that again. So that's to take some time. But once that does happen, and once five G becomes more widely adopted, Uh, the question I have is what happens to all the wired infrastructure, Like do we keep it? I mean, it makes sense to keep it as a backup anyway in case in

case something happens to the wireless network. But at the same time, if you're talking about having wireless transmission rates that dwarf you know, wired rates to the point where it's it's a factor of ten or more, then you start to question why do we even have these like wires up? Should we take them down? Will it become like the wired telephone in your house where you're like, oh, don't answer any email from the wired internet connection. We just know that's a yeah, I mean, it's it's an

interesting question. I expect that we will have for a long time, will have all of these various infrastructures running concurrently, because again, not every is going to magically get upgraded and be able to take advantage of this kind of stuff. So it's going to be one of those things that if it's a transition, it will be a gradual transition. Maybe we're talking ten or twenty years down the road before enough people have gotten off the legacy systems for

those to be shut down. I mean, sometimes you just have to pull the plug and you just say listen, at X date this change is going to happen. Uh, here are some programs to help you get caught up if you are left behind. But we still have to do this because, uh, it's it only makes sense for us to to concentrate on these existing infrastructures and not

continue to support something that is technically obsolete. Okay, well, I still be able to use all those promotional CDs I got for a O L and Prodigy back And if you had said compu Serve, I would have had

good news for you, Joe. But sadly, I'm going to leave that question an answer to yes one more thing before we leave real quick though, UHH And I do want to mention that all of this also ties into the infrastructural use of air waves, of radio waves, and what the future holds for for various forms of communication will have an impact on all of these systems that we're trying to create exactly. Yeah, I mean, we have to we have to make space available for this stuff.

And the question is do we take it away from something else? Do we just go with the small gaps that still exist between certain bandwidths? Uh? You know, there's certain bandwidths that that stopped being used and the FCC started auctioning them off here in the United States. Is that potentially a use for this kind of technology? Uh?

There are a lot of questions that we don't have the answers to, like practical questions, and uh, and some of them are going to have some tough answers, because eventually we're going to get to a point where we said, all right, we've used all the frequencies that can we can expect to usefully deliver data. Right beyond this, we can't really either the data transmission is going to be so low or the distance is going to be so short,

that's not a practical use anymore. At that point, we have to start saying, all right, why do we get rid of so that we can have this new shiny thing the that's gonna be tough. Uh So, maybe that's an excuse not to connect our toasters to the internet. Maybe maybe you know, we can't let fear dictate our our pathway to the future, and gosh darn it, I want Internet connected toast all right. So, guys, if you have any suggestions for future topics that we can talk

about here on forward Thinking. Maybe there's something you've always wondered about, like how is that going to work in the future, or you just have questions or comments about stuff we've said, Get in touch with us. Send us an email the addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Twitter, Google Plus or Facebook. At Twitter and Google Plus, we are f W Thinking on Facebook US search f W Thinking. We'll pop right up, leave us a message

and we'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, I'll visit forward Thinking dot com. H brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places