How 5G Works ?? The Pros And cons .

5g internet we've been talking about it for a while and now it's finally starting to arrive it's a revolutionary kind of Internet that promises to change everything from your phone to home Internet to more futuristic fields like self-driving cars and even remote surgery but 5 G's also been in the headlines lately for a lot of bad reasons with bizarre conspiracy theories and rumors so to help clear things up we're gonna explain to you what exactly 5g is how we got here what the technology behind it is and any real concerns that might

exist around the new technology .

so what is 5g  ?

well 5g or fifth-generation is the

next step in mobile internet technology so what all of the next wave of phones and tablets are going to use for speeds that are even faster than the LTE networks that we already have now our news editor and reviewer Chris Welch

has actually been testing all these networks for a while already so he can actually tell you what it's like to use these speeds today ok so all the big US carriers are well underway with rolling out 5g and by the end of this year you should be able to get it wherever you live in the US but what a 5g means on

each carrier is different speeds are different coverage is different so for

the last year I've been testing out all the networks Verizon AT&T t-mobile and

Sprint is now part of that just to see how fast it is and what a difference it

makes in your day-to-day life so let me try and explain now Verizon's 5g is

blazing fast you can get download speeds of over 1 gigabyte per second that's up

to 10 times faster than most home Wi-Fi connections and download a whole season

of a TV show in just minutes but the problem is coverage Verizon's 5g

is very very spotty it's there on one street and gone the next and indoor

coverage is pretty much non-existent that's because Verizon faces its whole

5g plan for now on what's called highbband millimeter-wave technology you've

seen it in those commercials as ultra wideband 5g but the issue is the signal

can travel very far so an ad City where it wants to roll out 5g rising this

gotta put up all these nodes all over the city and that's not really practical

to do nationwide so later on this year Bresson's also going to turn on its low

band 5g network but they're the speeds aren't that much faster than what your

LTE phone can do too so for now Verizon's 5g network isn't really worth upgrading to a new phone

for unless you've got a node like right outside your apartment or your house

t-mobile has the most comprehensive 5g plan of all the US carriers it's also

using millimeter wave on high-end plus Sprint's mid band spectrum in the middle

and its own low band 5g at the base now Sprint's mid band spectrum is much 

faster than LTE is today I was in Texas testing their 5g network and I got

speeds of 300 megabytes per second and unlike with Verizon I could count on

keeping that 5g signal wherever I went think of mid band as the sweet spot for

5g it's much faster than phones today it's not quite a specialist millimeter

wave but it makes a big difference day to day and last is AT&T which has a

similar strategy to Verizon in that you get the high band millimeter wave and

low band sub 6 5g but they're missing that middle part of the cake that mid

band spectrum so you'll have really fast speeds in the small parts of some cities

and somewhat faster speeds than your phone today everywhere else

now none of this is to be confused witha EMTs fake 5g which is called 5 GE you

probably seen it in your phone status fire times that's just fast LTE it's got

nothing to do with the real 5 G that's rolling out right now these are still

the early days of 5g we've seen less than a dozen the phones hit the market

that offer these new faster speeds and some of the early ones were very buggy

and would overheat in the summer now those concerns along with battery

life have largely been overcome with Qualcomm latest chips we've seen those

chips in the galaxy s 20 the LG v 60 and the 1+8 all really great phones but

we're still waiting for that first iPhone from Apple it has 5g and that's

rumored to come later on this fall in 2020 so when we talk about 5g we're not

really talking about anything that's radically different than our current and

past mobile technology let's put that inperspective the earliest generation

 of mobile technology 1g networks were launched back in the 80s unlike the

other generations 1g networks used analog signals and could really only do

voice calls you've probably seen phones that use 1g networks like the Motorola

DynaTAC that classic oversized cell phone from 80s movies 2g networks kick

things up a notch more bandwidth meant that in addition to calls users could

start sending data enabling textmessages SMS and even pictures and

later versions of tucci phones could even access basic internet like the most

famous 2g device ever sold the original iPhone 3G networks offered even more

bandwidth and faster speeds and 4G LTE which is what most of our current phon

esuse made truly fast wireless internet a possibility and 5g as Chris mentioned

earlier takes things a step beyond even fad with speeds that are faster in some

cases than home Wi-Fi but the key thing is that all these technologies aren't

fundamentally different they're all based on the same science which means

that it's time to talk about the electromagnetic spectrum this is the e/m spectrum the diagram of

the different types of electromagnetic radiation that exists eeehm radiation is

what we call wave of photons traveling through space and all eeehm radiation be

it AM radio waves x-rays infrared or even visible light full somewhere on the

electromagnetic spectrum the difference between harmful x-ray radiation and

benign AM radio is simply the amount of energy it has now on the right end of

the spectrum our low energy radio and microwaves which are characterized by

low frequency and long wavelengths as we travel up the spectrum wavelengths get

smaller frequencies get higher and the amount of energy being transmitted gets

higher to aim radio for example broadcast between 540 and 1600 kilohertz

it's low energy but those low wavelengths can travel incredibly far up

to 100 miles and depending on atmospheric conditions they can

potentially span the globe by bouncing off the atmosphere but again

quality suffers we hear soundoriginating at that very moment 

hundreds or even thousands of miles away go upbthe spectrum though to the FM radio

which broadcasts at between 88 and 108 megahertz and you've got more bandwidth

which allows for higher quality broadcasts but your usable range decreases it's the same basic idea with

cellular data new generations allow us to improve our transmission technology

which leads to increased bandwidth and higher frequencies which in turn leads

to faster speeds but at the core it's all the same basic technology and the

different types of 5g actually illustrate this really well for example

take 18 TMT mobiles Loeb and networks which Chris referred to there

the 600 megahertz and 850 megahert bands effectively the same area of spectrum is existing LTE but the fact

that they're new bands of spectrum that aren't already clogged up with existing

customers combined with new transmission technologies means that these low band

5g networks can offer faster speeds than LTE even though they're basically using

the same spectrum bands as LTE and that low band nature also means that they can

transmit over a much wider range than other types of 5g it's why t-mobile for

example can claim to have nationwide 5g coverage while Verizon is stuck to just

a few street corners next is mid band 5g which is basically just used by sprintin

now t-mobile which owns Sprint located at the 2.5 gigahertz range of the

spectrum it offers faster speeds than low band 5g

but it has more limited range for comparison 2.5 gigahertz is about the

same area of the electromagnetic spectrum as your home Wi-Fi now mid band

is middle the road in almost every respect it's higher frequency and more

bandwidth than low band 5g but it's not gonna be quite the speeds and frequency

that you'll get from millimeter wavebwhich is the ultra-fast 5g now these are

located around 30 gigahertz much highernfrequency than any of the other types of

5g and they offer blazing fast speeds the ones Chris mentioned earlier from

Verizon and in limited areas t-mobile and AT&T but those radio waves are also

really small between 1 and 10 millimeters hence the name which are

actually really bad at passing throughnobjects like walls or buildings which

means that the range is incredibly limited so even though it offers the

fastest 5g speeds it's also the 5g that you'll probably end up using the least

because that rollout is just gonna be really small but those increases in

bandwidth are only part of the story a lot of that improvements in 5g come from

new transmission technology things like carrier aggregation which combine

multiple LTE bands into one data stream for faster speeds or MIMO antennas or

multiple-input multiple-output where we use antenna arrays made up of

lots of little antennas to improve connectivity but it's 5g or really any seller

radiation safe well there's been a lot of inaccuracies going around about 5g

some are completely absurd like the idea that 5g somehow caused the coronavirus

but the simple answer is that 5g is basically the same as any other type of

cellular radio technology and we already have a pretty good idea that cellular

radiation is not harmful so of course people concerned about possible effects

on the formation of cancer if you use a mobile phone a lot or it's been exposed

continuously to radiation from cell towers but there's a lot of studies

available on that that sort of effect but it has never been proven that indeed

there is a carcinogenic effects of exposure to radiofrequency radiation and

there's also concern that exposure to radiofrequency fields for instance the

the higher fields the higher frequencies 5g is going to use that that may result

in an adverse effect on the immune system and that people may be more susceptible

for the for infection by the cope at 19 fires well there there's no proof no

indication whatsoever that there's any effect on the immune system from exposed

to radio frequency fields now I know that cellular radiation falls into the

non ionizing portion of the spectrum can chocolate more about the differences

between non ionizing and non-ionizing radiation ionizing radiation has a very

high energy content and because of that it is possible that if you're exposed to

this sort of radiation that the chemical bonds in the body that they are damaged

and broken and that may result in uncontrolled cell growth which which may

result in the formation of cancer that sort of effect breakage of chemical

bonds is something that is not possible that long ionizing radiation with the

type of radiation that that cell at cellular technology uses because the

energy content of dead type of radiation is not enough to result in such chemical

breakage the entire spectrum of nonionizing radiation up to UV radiation is

something that that has no energy content that is high enough to break

chemical bonds heating is the only proven effect of exposure to

radiofrequency radiation well 5g doesn't pose any health risks

there are going to be practical issues with the transition to 5g some of the

growing pains are just switching to new generation of technology things like

more expensive plans that faster data speed means that you can burn through

your data cap really quickly and that's something that we're gonna have to

figure out the first wave of 5g phones were more expensive although prices are

starting to come down and of course there's just building out the networks

the low range of mid band and millimeter wave networks me if it'll take longer

and cost more to build more towers to get that kind of coverage that people

expect the good news is is that we've already started Qualcomm for example has

made 5g the default in all of its new chips and flagship phones in 2020 from

companies like Samsung Apple oneplus are either already shipping with 5g or

expected to have it by the end of the year and that's to say nothing of the

big advances that carriers like Verizon t-mobile and AT&T have made in building

out the actual networks and more importantly none of these issues are

really new the transition from 2g to 3Gnor from 3G LTE soft similar problems and

the tech industry was able to solve them the only difference is that we're a lot

more reliant on our phones than we were 10 to 15 years ago and that's why these

issues seems so much more important now but the key thing to remember is that 5g

and the technologies around it aren't really new it's just our perspective on

them and our reliance on our phones that's really changed thanks so much for

watching we've been really working on a 5g explainer for a while so we're really

glad to have put this together if you have any other question is about 5g or

technology in general let us know