What is 5G?

bit about five G technology as of late. Back in January two thousand nineteen, some of the buzz around five G was all about how computer manufacturers are starting to build in five G technology into the next generation of smartphones and laptops and other devices, and both A T and T and Verizon had marketing pushes already that mentioned five G in recent products and services, despite the fact that these technologies aren't actually fully five G. But we'll

get to that. And then you had the President of the United States saying that the US companies should really be rolling out five G technology faster, and that we should already be looking into six G, which isn't even a thing. Heck, five G isn't really a thing yet, at least not practically. Wireless technology can be confusing on a good day, so I figured it's high time I tackled this subject. So, what the heck is five G

and why does it matter. I'm going to try and cover a bit about how five G works as well, but it gets super complicated, so I'm gonna save that for the end, and I'm not going to get too technical because one it would require eight episodes, and two I don't fully understand all the ins and outs myself, so just being fully transparent there. Anyway, let's get the relatively easy part out of the way. First. Five G

refers to the fifth generation of wireless standards. Now that by itself sounds pretty straightforward, but in reality, things get really messy when you start looking into details. While each G refers to a different generation, there were different standards within each generation, making it a bit more complicated, and generations would overlap one another. While we would be rolling out four G, you still had companies investing and improving

three G. So this isn't very clear cut. It's not like you can just look at one span of years and say this represents two G and in the next band this represents three G. It's a little more wibbly wobbly timey whymy than that. But this is also easier to think about if I use an analogy, something that we're all familiar with. So I'm going to talk about computers. I'm going to arbitrarily divide up personal computers into different

generations for the purposes of this example. But please keep in mind this is really just to illustrate a point, and I'm going to be skipping over a lot of stuff. So I am going to say that in the first generation of mainstream personal computers, once you get out of the hobbyist level, we have the Apple two computers and the I b MPC computers. Now I'm ignoring all the other models out there, like the Common sixty four really in just to simplify things. So we're talking about Apple

and IBM computers. So these two types of computers were in the first generation, but they each operated on their own chip sets and operating systems, so they were not compatible with each other. They're both first generation, but they're both proprietary in their own approach. In the second generation, we then have the Macintosh computer and the IBM Clone computers. Now these computers were more advanced than their predecessors, but

still were incompatible with each other. Then in the third generation, you have Mac computers, so no longer just Macintosh. Now we call them Max and all the different Windows based machines, so each generation had more than one standard in it, and the same can be said for wireless technologies. I've covered the different generations of wireless tech and other episodes, but I'm going to give a cliffs notes version of

what it was all about on this episode. So we could say that each generation is marked by two major features.

First that each generation improved upon the data transfer rates of its preceding generation, and second that each generation changed the encoding methods for data, which not only enabled these improved data transfer rates, but also made each succeeding generation incompatible with the previous ones, meaning that if you had an old cellular phone or device with cellular wireless capabilities, it wouldn't be able to take advantage of these newer

wireless communications technologies. If you had a two G cell phone, you could not use the three G cell phone network. Typically, newer devices would have some compatibility with older standards, usually because it takes time to roll out these new systems, so you want to have built in backwards compatibility so that if you can't get access to the new network,

you can at least still use the older network. This sometimes would even require the user to make the switch on uh the actual device they were using to go to an older wireless network. But even just saying that each generation is faster than the previous one isn't really accurate. I mentioned just a minute ago these generations can overlap.

So when each generation first emerged out of the development phase into the deployment phase, so it's becoming a real world thing, it wasn't really capable of delivering its full potential right away. Nearly every generation saw improvements and data rates over time, and sometimes you're in a situation in which the network or your device can't manage the ideal

transfer rates. So you've got a device that maybe runs on let's say the three G network, and you've got a three G network, but there could be other elements at play that mean you can't get the ideal speeds of the three G network even though you're using the proper technologies. I'll talk more about that in a second to actually we can cover it now. So I'm specifically thinking about situations like the one I would find myself in when I would attend c e S a few

years ago, maybe a decade ago. So CEES the Consumer Electronics Show is heavily attended by people all using multiple devices that are tapping into the local mobile networks. So there are phones, their tablets, their computers. There's tons of interference. There's just there's a lot of trying to connect to the network at c E S And it doesn't really

matter which carrier you have. The fact that there's so many people there and so many devices, all the carriers are hit with requests to tap into the networks at the same time, so it tends to over tax those networks. And even if your phone indicates that you have a strong signal, I can look at my phone it says, oh, I've got full bars of signal. I can easily connect to the network. You would end up with a terrible data transfer rate where you couldn't even send a text

message out. There were times when I would switch my phone to an older wireless standard and pop onto a less congested network. Even though the top data transfer rate of the older generation was less impressive than the current generation, I would get better results due to the lack of traffic. So, yeah, this gets really messy. It's not so clear cut. Now, let's talk about the generations themselves and keep in mind Like I said, these generations had a lot of overlap.

Some regions like Asia would roll out new generations faster than other parts of the world, like North America. So there's no hard and fast dates that we can use for this, because the deployment of each generation took a long time and didn't start everywhere all at the same time. Now you could argue that there is a U O G generation of wireless communications before we even get the one G. The zero G generation would include radio telephones.

This is before there were cellular networks, before there were cell towers, so this is pure radio transmission. The following generations would move to cell tower technology and there would be this new technology that would allow a handoff or a handshake from one cell tower to another to allow a call to transfer from one tower to another tower without interrupting the actual call. The first generation of wireless

communication standards only carried voice signals. There was no data beyond voice, and it included a lot of different standards like A MPs or AMPS in North America and in MT in Eastern Europe, or T A C S TAX in the UK, and several more UH and it was analog that was the analog generation of wireless community cation standards. The second generation, or two G, was able to carry not just voice, but data signals. This was the first

digital way of carrying cell phone conversations. Also, this allowed for encryption. You could encrypt the signal. In the analog days, you could technically tap in and listen to people talking

on wireless communications because it was unencrypted. That changed with two G. So this is our switch from analog to digital cellular phones, and it also introduced us to the era of text messaging that was suddenly possible with two G. And the standards in this generation included G S M C, d M A, and T d M A. Then, depending upon whom you ask, we get a bit of a cheat.

This happens in between lots of the different generations. So there's some people who say there's a generation two point five G or enhanced two G. This was not a total departure from the two G standards and methods of operation, but it allowed for better data transfer rates. So G, p R S and EDGE would be considered two point

five G technologies, at least by some people. Other people say, no, you don't split out two point five G. Those are all two G standards, so it should all belong in the same family, and because no one really agrees with this, it makes matters even more confusing than they already were. Then we get the three G that allowed enough data

throughput for video signals to come through. I would argue the three G advances are what allowed truly useful applications of smartphone technology, although interestingly some companies like Apple took their time actually embracing three G. Standards included U T M S C D M A, two thousand H S P D A, and E V D O, and like two G, some people split that generation out to be three and three point five or even three three point five and three point seven five G. The real purpose

of that, again is to single out advances that allowed for better data transfer rates. By the end of the three G development cycle, some standards could support data transfer rates of a few megabits per second, whereas the two G technologies maxed out at a couple of hundred kilobits per second. So I'll talk a little bit about what these data transfer rates mean in a second so that we get a better understanding of it. But essentially it meant that you could send more information in the same

amount of time as older devices could do. Right now, the latest tech we can use belongs to four G, or you could argue four point five if you wanted to. This is the enhanced protocol. The standards would be Y MAX and Long Term Evolution or LTE. Now these days you'd be more likely to talk about LTE Advanced. To be a four G system, it first has to meet requirements that were established in the International Mobile Telecommunication Advanced

Set of Standards. The International Telecommunication Union is a department in the United Nations and it's responsible for creating those standards. This technology is still scaling up today with data transfer rates and the hundreds of megabits per second in some of the implementations. Some of them are even hitting up to a gigabit per second at least in theory. Now, again, that doesn't mean you're actually going to see data transfer rates at that level, even if you have a compatible

device and service. But in general, if you do have those things, you'll be able to download or stream content more effectively than those of us who do not have access to those services and products. So what does this all mean for us? Well, it mostly boils down to two really big things per generation, where do our phones work? And how much data can we access per given unit

of time. So back during the two G days, the United States was split between using the G s M standard, which was also used in Europe and Asia, or the c d M A standard, which was primarily just used in the United States. There were a couple of other places that also used it, but US was the primary uh place where you would find c d M A technology. So if you happen to have service with a T and T or T Mobile, you had a G s M phone which at least had the potential to work

on European networks. That wasn't a guarantee, by the way. You actually had to have a special band of antenna and chip in your phone in order to be able to use European networks even if you had a G s M phone, but at least in theory it was compatible if you were on Verizon or Sprint in those days, and that meant you were using a c d M A phone, which was not compatible with Europe's systems at all. So you would have to get a different phone if you wanted to travel to Europe and and call somebody.

Now that's just one example of one ACE where you had a standard that works in certain parts of the world and not in others. This is still true for a lot of different wireless communications technologies. All right, we've set the ground. We're gonna go into a little more detail about data transfer rates and talk about five G in just a moment. But first let's take a quick break.

More recent generations of wireless communications technologies generally provide better data transfer speeds, and we often refer to them as being faster, that the four G network is faster than the three G network, But really what we mean is that the more recent generations have a higher capacity to deliver information on our devices, because ultimately, all this information is traveling at the speed of light more or less, well less, you can't go more, so no transmission is

really faster than any other. It's not like the signals of two G traveled more slowly than the signals of three G. They all travel at the same speed. It's just that the later generations were able to carry more data in that same amount of speed. So let's go with another analogy. I love using analogies to explain this kind of stuff, and we're going to talk about cars.

I think that makes it fairly clear. So in this analogy, let's say you've got a smart car and you've got a semitruck, and they're both on the same stretch of road, and the road's speed limit is thirty miles per hour. And for the sake of this example, we're going to assume both drivers are following that speed limit, which I admit is pretty low, but they're both following it. So in the world telecommunications, we don't have any choice but to follow the universal speed limit. You cannot go faster

than light. But here we're just saying that the drivers will not go above the speed limits. So the smart car in the semi truck are moving at the same speed. However, you can fit a whole lot more stuff inside that semi truck than you could in the little smart car, So you can deliver a huge amount of material in one trip in the semi truck, and the smart car would have to take lots of trips to deliver the

same amount of stuff. So, while both vehicles or protocols are going at the same speed, one can finish a given job faster than the other one because it can carry more. So in my description of c E S earlier, we could say that I actually jumped into a smart car because it could take advantage of a special smart car lane on the road and travel at the full

blistering speed of thirty miles per hour. Meanwhile, the semi truck was stuck in the normal traffic lane, and that one was getting backed up because there were just too many people trying to get on that same road and it was making traffic slow down. But because I was in the less used older lane, I had switched from three G t two G. Let's say I could go

pretty fast because there wasn't anyone in my way. That's one of the things that we talked about when we're looking at relying upon earlier generations of wireless communications technologies. The official name for the five G radio system is five G in R And as you may have guessed in our stands for new radio and this new radio

standard will be incompatible with older standards. So if you had a pure five G device, one that was only connected to five G networks, the chip set, the antenna, all of it is just tuned to five G, you would probably have a pretty lousy experience. Initially because carriers would still be building out their networks. You would have very spotty coverage. In fact, you might even live someplace where you'd have no coverage whatsoever because don't live within

range of a five G tower. You'd find that your device only works in a few locations with service, and for that reason, manufacturers are more likely to roll out five G phones, laptops, and other devices that also contain four G technology in them to avoid that problem, so that your device will rely on four G networks unless a five G network is available, in which case it will ramp up, it'll switch on over to five G, and otherwise they'll they'll lean very heavily on four G

in places where five G is of limited availability or reliability. These types of networks, which continues to support these older standards while rolling out new ones, have a name. They're called n s A networks. Now in this case, the n essay does not refer to the spy agency in the United States that's looking at all electronic communications. Instead, it means non stand alone, meaning the network must pair

one wireless technology with at least one other wireless technology. Eventually, as these networks become more robust, they can sunset the older wireless communications standards and become standalone or s A networks. We're starting to see this happen right now. In fact, some companies have already shut down their two G networks and sunset them. Those are no longer supported. Others are still supporting the two G networks but planned to shut

them down in the near future. I believe T Mobile has extended operations until twenty twenty, but then is going to shut down it's two G network. For example, there are three main goals for five G technology. One is to have even greater data transfer rates, and like previous generations, will likely see a range of data transfer rates rollout

in various networks. The actual experience will depend upon lots of different factors, such as the design of the network, the actual device or using the number of other devices that are on that network, the communications frequency that the network is relying upon and your device is relying upon, and so on. So it's really hard to give a solid number to what five G speeds will mean. That being said, let's at least get some ballpark figures in

here or else it's no use whatsoever. In February two eighteen, at the Mobile World Congress, Qualcom released the results of some five G simulation tests it had conducted in an effort to see what we might expect from five G in the early early days in areas like Frankfurt or in San Francisco, California. The simulation took into account cell tower locations that are already in those cities and the

frequency allocations that would be allowed in those cities. In other words, what parts of the radio spectrum would carriers be allowed to use. Because five G technology doesn't work across the entire radio spectrum. They're specific bands frequency bands that five G is focused on. And it also accounted for differences in connectivity strength and geography. So the simulation focused on what Qualcom considered to be a reasonable expectation of a five gene network rollout in the short term.

So we're talking like they're saying, well, a year from now, assuming we roll these these uh systems out, here's what we could expect at the end of that year. So with all of that said, Qualcom found that the Frankfurt simulation saw an increase from fifty six megabits per second on a four G network to four hundred ninety megabits per second for five G, which is a big jump, but it's lagging behind some of the more advanced LTE four G systems that are deploying today in other parts

of the world. So, in other words, we already have four G systems that deliver data at that rate or even higher. So you say, you could say, yes, the five G and Frankfort would be an improvement, but it's still lagging behind other four G tech. The San Francisco simulation saw browsing speed go from seventy one megabits per second on four G to one point four gigabits per second for five G, so it's on even greater increase

on data transfer rates. In the simulation, median five G users could watch streaming video at eight K resolution running at one hundred twenty frames per second, which is pretty darn impressive. But just to get a bigger picture of everything. While all this is going on, while we're seeing this five G rollout happening, we're also seeing the four G networks continue to get enhancements. Qual Calm is rolling out the X twenty four modem, which is going to be

in several smartphones in twenty nineteen. That is a four G technology, but it has the ability to support data transfer rates of up to two gigabits per second. Keep in mind, the simulation for five G maxed out at one point four gigabits per second, so this older four G technology would have an even better data transfer rate,

at least in an ideal implementation. Now, in the real world, we're probably not going to see anyone actually experienced that kind of speed, but at least in theory, the devices could support them. This is another example of how the late phase for one generation of wireless communication can sometimes outperform the early phase of the succeeding generation. Now, over time, the five G system will leave four G in the dust.

It's not uncommon to see predictions of data transfer rates hitting ten gigabits per second or faster, which is hard for me to imagine, but that's always the case early on, before these technologies become part of our daily lives. And besides, we might never actually see our own experience match that predicted result. But if we do, what would that mean. Well, at ten gigabits per second, you can download a full four K definition feature length film in about twenty five seconds.

I'm not talking about streaming. I'm talking about downloading Yawza. The second big feature of five G is a reduction in response time or reduction in latency. Latency refers to the lag you experience between when you activate something and when that's something actually happens. In video games, we would say something like the lag between pushing a jump button

and having Mario actually jump is latency. In the equal Calm San Francisco simulation I mentioned earlier, the company observed a response time that was twenty three times faster than the median four G experience, which means latency would be reduced dramatically. That means five G could become the technology

we rely upon for time critical applications. So, for example, autonomous cars that might rely at least in part on a networked system could run on five G. When the information you're requesting is needed to operate a vehicle that's driving at driving speed in traffic, latency is something you really have to eliminate as quickly as you possibly can. Now.

I don't expect we're going to see driverless cars switch entirely to some sort of cloud based operating system where you have a centralized data center that's making all the decisions for all the cars that are on the road. But I do imagine the driverless cars of the future will balance on board systems that process information right there inside the car itself with support systems that live in the cloud. So we've got better data transfer rates and

we've got faster response times. As the first two big features of five G. The third one is that the five G systems will be able to handle many more devices connected to an individual system at the same time, and this is absolutely necessary as the Internet of things trends shows no sign of slowing down. I'll explain more in just a second, but first let's take another quick break. It's pretty hard to get a reckoning on the number of devices that are connected to the Internet, but it's

a lot. According to Statista, by the end of two thousand eighteen, there were twenty three point fourteen billion Internet of Things devices connected to the network of networks in some fashion. That same site estimates that by five there will be more than seventy five billion IoT gadgets connected to the Internet. But that's just one estimation and other

sources have different numbers. There is something that's in common with all those different numbers, they're all real, real big, So they may not all specifically agree on how many billion devices are connected to the Internet, but they all agree that it is many billion, and it's just gonna get bigger. To support all those devices, providers have to build out network capacity. Otherwise you would find it impossible to use your phone because is there too many doorbells, cameras, thermostats,

and refrigerators connected to the networks. Actually, to be fair, that's a bit of an oversimplification because the way we tend to connect devices to the Internet through stuff like local area networks and routers, and it ignores stuff like the specific frequency bands that the devices and systems are using. But the point is pretty valid. You get to a point where networks, whether they are local or wide area,

or the Internet itself, end up getting congested. Now you've likely heard about Verizon or A T and T talking up some of their technologies as five G, but five G as a fully mature technology has not really rolled out yet as I'm recording this podcast in February two, nineteen, and we're probably not going to see any real serious,

widespread deployment until twenty twenty. There'll be some in twenty nineteen some pilot programs, but as far as national coverage, we may be looking at twenty maybe twin twenty one. Even then, it's going to be a gradual rollout, and it's going to take time to reach a lot of different service areas. Dense urban environments will get it first most likely, but the further out you are from one of those, the longer it may take before you get

this coverage. So it's going to be a few years before most of us can regularly take advantage of five G. And on top of that, it's going to take another few years for developers to create the apps and services that will give value to the five G technology. I say this pretty confidently because that's how it's unrolled in

previous generations. When four G came out in it took about three years for services like video calls to really mature and take advantage of four G technology, which makes sense, you know, it takes a few years for developers to figure out how they can best leverage the platform. So what is going on with these five G claims from A T and T and Verizon, Well, it's largely marketing speak, specifically more so with A T and T than Verizon.

But I'll explain. I think, as this episode is making clear, the whole wireless generation thing is super confusing to the average person. On the one hand, these companies are offering up technologies and services that push beyond the median experience of four G on their networks. On the other hand, they're doing so with technologies that are not completely five G. So you can think of it as saying that the tech gives users access to five G speeds but isn't

actually fully five G itself. So let's start with a T and T. The company is marketing some of its advanced four G phones as five G E, and the E stands for evolution. But these five G E phones won't actually support five G wireless communication, and that's what has some folks upset. The implication is that these phones will run on frequencies and networks that enable really strong data transfer rates, but that's not the same thing as running on actual five G technology. Instead, five G E

is really LTE advanced. It is capable of supporting data transfer speeds of around forty megabits per second. To be fair to a T and T, this isn't an unprecedented marketing move. T Mobile did the same thing when it

rolled out an h s P A plus technology. This was a three G technology that it rolled out, but it was much faster than the older three G technology T Mobile had previously deployed, so the company decided to market it as four G, even though the technical specification meant it was still three G. A T and T, by the way, back in those days criticized T Mobile for doing this and saying that they made things less

transparent and less understandable to customers. But then A T and T did the same thing with its own hsp A plus network and said that that was also four G. So yeah, and people wonder why these topics are so difficult to explain. Even without this marketing misinformation, it's hard to talk about this stuff. Verizon, by the way, their five G offering isn't for phones. It's instead for home networks, So this is a home network solution instead of getting

say fiber to your house or copper. In many cases, I'm still running on copper. I don't have fiber optics at my house yet. Verizon's five G offering is also not true five G, but it's a lot closer to it than a T and T is it's using some of the technologies that are part of the five G approach, so it has lower latency, it has pretty good data transfer rates, but it does not use the five G

in OUR communications standard. Instead, it relies upon a communication standard that Verizon itself made called five G t F. Eventually, Verizon plans to switch over to the industry agreed upon upon standard of in OUR. That's going to require a Verizon to actually switch out physical equipment at different stations around its service area. So it's going to be a big investment on the part of the company. So I

guess Verizon was weighing decisions. Does it go forward rolling out this sort of temporary patch knowing that it's going to have to undo that work in the future to upgrade to in OUR standards, or does it wait and try to just move with the industry to adopt in our. The benefit of going forward is that you get an early hit at those consumers who want to have those five G features as soon as they possibly can. But the danger is you're going to have to spend a

lot of money to change out all that equipment. Verizon, for its part, is said they're not going to pass those costs down to customers. They're gonna see a big bump in their subscription uh fees in order for Verizon to go in and change out all this equipment once it's once the company has decided that the in our standard is established enough for them to make this change. There's also no guarantee of when that will happen, so

a lot of unanswered questions still. Alright, well, I put it off as long as I possibly could, but it is time to talk about what actually will make five G work. I'm going to do this from a very very high level bird's eye view is probably too low of an altitude, let's say a satellite view of the technology. So, like earlier generations of cellular technology, five GEN networks have cell sites that cover a territory. The territory is divided

up into sectors. Moving through sectors needs to be seamless for the end user. So for me and you, whenever we're moving around, we want to make sure that we don't notice when we pass them one sector to the next. If I'm on a phone call with you and I happen to be riding in the back of a car and I'm not really concerned with how irritating it might be for me to be on a phone conversation while

someone else is driving. I'm chatting with you. I don't want there to be any interruption in our phone call as the car travels from one side of a city to the other, and while it's doing that, it's going to be passing through these sectors. This was sort of the basis of the cellular technology approach, this idea that there needs to be this this handshake in between cell towers that allows the seamless transition of a call from

one tower to the next. And it's a pretty complicated technology I've talked about in previous episodes of tech Stuff, so we're not gonna go into more detail, but just to say that five G is built on that same sort of foundation, this idea of cells that represent a certain area of service and that those cells can hand off service to neighboring cells as a person is moving through the different set There's so an important part of the technology. The cells sites have to connect to a

network backbone. They themselves aren't just magical conversation, you know, telecommunications points. They have to connect to a a larger communications network. That connection can be wired, or it can be wireless. Five G will use wider bandwidths of frequencies than four G did, but the encoding for data across the five G networks is similar to that of four G. It's called O F d M. But there's really no

need for us to get into that too deeply. It gets way too technical and it becomes nearly impossible to talk about without visual aids. It's just important to remember this is the methodology by which five G will convert data into signals and then from signals back into data. I know that signals are kind of a kind of data, but you don't understand what I mean. It's for the

trend mission of that data. Five G is going to run on two bands of frequencies that are on either side of six giga hurts um, but by other either side, I mean significantly on either side of six gig hurts. Six gig hurts is kind of the dividing line between them. So it hurts is one wave cycle per second, So if you have a wave that's going at one hurts, it means it takes a full second for one wave

length to pass through a given point. You've identified a point you're measuring how many radio waves passed that point in one second. You count one, that's one hurts. Six giga hurts would be a frequency in which six billion wave cycles pass a given point every second. The low frequency networks will operate within existing WiFi and cellular bands, so at that wavelength, signals can travel the same distance

as what we use today. The nice thing about that means you don't have to build out a ton of new cells to get the same coverage. You could actually add equipment to existing cell towers to support five G because you can transmit just as far as you could with the four G methodology. However, those frequencies aren't able to carry quite as much data on them as the high frequencies ones can, so you won't get crazy fast

or a crazy huge data transfer rates. They would still probably be better than four G, but not the enormous, incredible potential ones we've heard about, but we would still probably see data transfer rates that are better than LTE. However, the high frequency five G tech is a different story. It will rely on millimeter wave frequencies around the twenty eight and thirty nine giga hurts bands because that's where there's a whole lot of space for big communications channels

that can carry huge amounts of data very quickly. These radio waves can't travel as far with enough power to be as reliable as the lower frequency variant can, so in other words, they don't have as great a range of transmission, which means companies wouldn't have to probably build out a lot more five G cells to make their network have enough coverage. On the flip side, these cells wouldn't have to be nearly as powerful as the cell

towers we rely upon today. They could actually require much less power to operate, so instead of using a few high powered cellular antenna towers to cover a given region, you would have a whole bunch of low power, high

frequency transmitters. For some regions, like densely populated urban areas, many of the carriers out there have already built out the infrastructure that could support this type of five G. They're already these additional cell towers that could just have five G tacked onto them and the infrastructure is good to go. However, in other areas, like in suburbs, once you move out of these densely populated areas, it can get harder to get the permission necessary to build out

the infrastructure. There are a lot of communities that don't want to have these these transmission towers erected in their community. It's sort of that not in my backyard, the Nimbigi principle. I don't want that to be on the top of this building. It's too close to my house. That kind of thing. So this isn't a technical challenge. This is a social or political challenge that companies are going to have to overcome to have a good five G deployment

if they want to use these high frequencies. Now, as I record this, a T and T is pre prepping. It's a true five G rollout in a few select cities, and it will be of modest size and will likely only see a few phones in two thousand nineteen that actually support five G technology. But at least we could say those phones and services will be true five G rather than four G that happens to be marketed as if it were five G, and five G could really

transform how we get internet at home. If carriers can get permission to build out those five G networks and provide coverage, they can run fiber to specific cell sites to those cell towers, they could connect those by fiber to the network backbone, and then they can use wireless transmissions to deliver internet service to customer homes, so there's no need to run fiber out to the actual customer homes. This cuts way down on cost. Uh. It also speeds

things up significantly. You don't have to dig up the ground and bury cables and all that kind of stuff and disrupt traffic. It could be a much faster deployment. Assuming that the carriers get that permission to erect the the cell towers or to add the technology to existing cell towers, so you can get true broadband speed delivered wirelessly to your home. You wouldn't have to have some technician come out and hook up cable. You would just

get a wireless modem from your carrier. The other nice thing about this is that if it does in fact happen, it should mean that more people in the United States in particular, will get more choices for their broadband provider. Right now, a lot of people, myself included, if you want true broadband speeds, if you want the faster speeds

in your area, you're limited to one provider. There's not really a choice there so at my house, there's one provider that can deliver the speeds I want to my house. The next closest one is slower than the one I have, so that's not really acceptable to me. And there's not a lot of incentive for the other carriers to spend the huge amount of money you would take to roll fiber out to my house and compete with the one

provider or that is delivering that kind of service. By going the wireless route, you've reduced the cost of deployment significantly, and in theory, you could have a lot more competition in those same areas, and competition is fantastic. We want

competition because when there's competition, the consumer benefits. Companies will try to be competitive and pricing and features, and you can pick whichever package best suits your needs instead of just being stuck with whatever happens to be available in your area. This is my dream that we get to that that future. I'm hoping that that actually happens. Now. I would advise folks to hold off on jumping onto

the five G bandwagon for a little bit. The deployment is going to take some time and initial results might be a little disappointing. At first, I suspect it's going to be twenty or maybe even before we start seeing any really impelling implementations of five G. Now I say that, but I also imagine I'll probably ignore my own advice and jump into the five G world earlier rather than later.

So what the heck do I know? But I know that at least for the first year, I'll likely be somewhat disappointed, which is crazy because I already know this going into it. Why would I be disappointed if I know it's already gonna happen, because I'm in a rational human being. I think that's a good time to wrap up. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of

tech Stuff, why don't you send me a message. The email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or hop on over to our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of all of our episodes there. You also find links to find us on social media like Twitter and Facebook, and you'll find

a link to our store. And so we're at t public dot com slash tech stuff, where every purchase you make in our store goes to help with the show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works. Dot com