With 5G wireless service operating at peak speeds, you could theoretically download a full-length HD movie in the time it takes you to read this sentence.
OK, it might take through this paragraph or the next one—many of the details and realities of how the next generation of cell service will actually perform aren’t known yet. What is clear is that the wireless industries and the various sectors that work alongside them have staked a lot in 5G being exponentially faster than what’s currently available, probably by a factor of 10 to 100.
The implications of that type of speed go far beyond movies. Experts tout it as an answer to everything from real-time driverless car coordination and remote healthcare to mixed-reality streaming and in-stadium sports replay broadcasts.
But there’s still a long road ahead for this superspeed datatopia of cell companies’ dreams. While all four of the country’s biggest carriers have vowed to roll out some form of 5G service by the end of this year, analysts say it will likely take until at least 2020 for it to develop to the point where it fully lives up to the hype.
When that time comes, though, it could open a number of new tech markets around web-connected devices, infrastructure projects and media, among many other areas. Some industry watchers have suggested that whichever country achieves 5G first will have a good chance of owning all that business activity.
Thus, 5G deployment has turned into something of a global arms race, one that various reports say the U.S. is losing to China and South Korea. President Donald Trump’s administration has indicated that catching up is a national priority, and telecoms are happy to latch on to this idea.
In any case, the advent of 5G could prove to be a turning point for the wireless industry unlike any previous generation has been. It could pave the way for smart cities with traffic lights that talk to your car or power grids administered through wireless service. That, and fully connected homes where your refrigerator’s internet won’t lag and Netflix comes in ultra-HD 3D. People may even start actually using virtual reality.
Wait, but what is it?
The “G” in 5G—or 4G or 3G—indicates a generation of wireless technology. That is, every decade or so, a bunch of wireless trade groups and standards agencies get together to agree on a new set of rules for a faster, more advanced type of cell network. Then wireless companies go out and upgrade their cell towers and install new phone chips to make it happen.
Those groups haven’t finalized 5G standards yet, but they took a big step toward doing so last summer when a major international consortium signed off on the last piece of a tentative framework. The rules vary depending on cell frequencies, tower construction and the types of devices in use. Unsurprisingly, there’s also a lot of variation in the levels of service carriers are currently calling 5G.
The authority ultimately responsible for coordinating standards, the U.N.’s International Telecom Union, or ITU, has said that by 2020, each 5G cell should be able to deliver download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second (mbps) to at least 1 million devices per square kilometer. (By comparison, Verizon says its 4G LTE network offers download speeds of between five and 12 mbps).
Another critical consideration is latency, or the time it takes the network to respond after a request to open a webpage or a video is sent. Current networks take around 20 milliseconds, but the ITU says 5G should take no longer than one millisecond.
How did we get here?
Here’s a brief history of cell phones:
Throughout the 1800s, various inventors began to notice instances of electric sparks causing strange behavior in nearby conductors. By the turn of the 20th century, they had identified this invisible force as electromagnetic radiation—which travels in waves—and transmitted it over short distances. A system was devised to toggle the strength of the waves up and down to encode sound waves, and the AM radio was born.
Radio phones and other mobile communications devices followed shortly afterwards—a generation retroactively labelled 0G—but, like radios, they were confined to a limited set of wave frequencies and not viable for mass use. In 1947, engineers at Bell Labs formulated an plan to fix that problem that would eventually evolve into modern cellular networks. Land would be divided into hexagonal cells, each with its own short-range radio tower assigned to a different set of frequencies from neighboring cells. The towers would be connected to one another with landlines to form a network.
It took a few decades for the technology and market resources to catch up with the idea, but the first official 1G cellular network debuted in Japan in 1979. The technology made its way to Europe and the United States in the early 1980s.
The second generation took the technology digital for the first time. That means that instead of encoding sound waves in radio signals, the broadcasts now carried the strings of 1s and 0s used to digitally reassemble the input sound, making for crisper quality. The switch to digital allowed for data of any kind, including SMS texts, picture messages and other multimedia communications, to be transferred in the same manner for the first time. But with data speeds averaging about four kilobytes per second, the network was still a far cry from high-speed internet access.
The first 3G networks, which debuted in 1998, eventually boosted data speeds 100-fold and allowed phones to offer internet access, video calls and streaming video. The upgrade to 4G and LTE came not long after the first smartphones in 2008 and brought cell networks to what we know them as today.
When is 5G coming?
AT&T rolled out a form of 5G at the end of 2018, but with no compatible smartphones on the market yet, it requires a separate hotspot device to use. The carrier has also caused industry consternation over its misleading rebranding of some parts of its 4G LTE network as “5G-Evolution,” which is supposed to denote a step toward 5G. Verizon has already begun to roll out residential, or fixed, 5G networks in select U.S. cities and plans to expand to a hotspot-based mobile 5G sometime early this year. Sprint and T-Mobile have also promised mobile 5G networks by the first half of the year.
Despite this breakneck pace, however, the first 5G networks may not live up to the full potential of the technology, and there’s no guarantee carriers will be able to follow through on their ambitious goals.
What will it take to switch to 5G?
The process of rewiring systems for a new set of rules every 10 years or so is expensive. Phone companies have to pay governments for new spectrum rights—that is, licenses to broadcast over specific ranges of frequencies—and reconfigure or replace equipment in tens of thousands of cells. Chipmakers like Qualcomm and Intel need to create new hardware for phones to pick up the signals, which are in turn licensed to phone manufacturers like Apple and Nokia. All of that new equipment requires new or updated software.
The upgrade to 5G is set to cost much more than any previous generational transition. That’s in part because much of it is being built to transmit super high-frequency waves less than 10 millimeters in length. Wavelengths that short don’t fare well through buildings, bad weather or any number of other obstacles and were thus considered impractical for mass commercial use until very recently.
Carriers will have to divide up land into much smaller cells and rig them with enough small antenna boxes to essentially beam a signal in a straight shot to each and every device. Many of these assemblages will be smaller than a shoebox and fitted on building roofs, telephone poles and other structures.
That means wireless carriers are now installing more equipment in more conspicuous places than ever before, raising local concerns over everything from radiation risks to urban aesthetics. The construction has already pitted carriers against municipalities in places like Lincoln, Neb., and Oakland, Calif., in bitter fights over the fees associated with building new cells. But the Federal Communications Commission, at the urging of telecom lobbyists, put its foot down on these municipal demands last September with a ruling that limited how much cities can charge and how long they can take for the review process of small cells.
All told, Bloomberg reports, 5G could cost as much as $200 billion per year to fully realize.
Millimeter-wave tech still has its skeptics, too. But Verizon and AT&T have reportedly been pleasantly surprised with field tests so far, and Facebook has also had promising results transmitting on millimeter waves in various capacities. The FCC will accelerate progress when it starts auctioning off rights to broadcast in this range for the first time in November.
So why bother?
There’s no ironclad rule that telecoms must upgrade to a new generation every decade. Their willingness to foot the enormous bill for 5G is a sign of just how much promise the industry sees in the technology.
The most important feature of 5G will be its incredible speed, which could hit a threshold where all online communication, downloading and streaming is more or less instantaneous. It could also help provide the capacity needed to accommodate the roughly 1 billion people forecast to gain mobile internet access in the next four years.
Beyond that, nobody really knows exactly what types of new tech markets service of this speed will create, but there are plenty of ideas.
One of the more ambitious is a total revamp of urban infrastructure. Autonomous cars could exchange real-time traffic alerts and communicate with stoplights. Power grids would be able to receive information from buildings and streetlights to better apportion electricity. And stadium and concert venues could stream live high-quality video content to audiences of thousands.
A 2017 report from Accenture claimed a city the size of Chicago could reap a windfall of as much as $5 billion in savings and added economic activity by implementing a smart energy grid and connected transportation systems. A midsize city of a little over 100,000 would see $70 million, and a 30,000-person city would see $10 million.
Proponents also imagine 5G streamlining and expanding healthcare services. Faster connections will make it easier to reach far-flung patients with limited hospital access through telehealth video services and remote-controlled equipment. Ambulances will be able to transmit real-time information on patients’ vital signs so hospitals can prepare for their arrival.
Meanwhile, the hyperspeed connections could help realize years of internet of things promises. Appliances could communicate to save money on utility bills. Surveillance cameras will be able to stream directly to home-security companies, and streamable virtual reality and HD video could revamp household entertainment.
By some estimates, full-length HD movies will download in just a few seconds under perfect conditions—a task that takes about an hour at best on a 4G network. Trials in arenas around the world have demonstrated how this will make HD video streaming possible on a large scale. Telecoms and entertainment companies are also banking on it doing the same for VR, AR and 3D video streaming, formats that haven’t yet lived up to the lofty promises on which technologists have sold them.
AT&T demonstrated the importance of this aspect of 5G when it inked an exclusive deal with AR headset startup Magic Leap to distribute its devices at its retail stores. Verizon is also working with the NBA to explore ways 5G could change game-viewing experiences, from VR streaming to personalization of commentators.
In short, 5G is being sold as the missing piece that will bring to life many of the technological promises futurists have been talking about for years.
Great, but how does 5G affect the media business?
Analysts tend to talk about the media possibilities of 5G in terms of convergences.
For one, fixed wireless access to homes and offices could reach speeds at which it’s interchangeable with connections through landlines. Assuming carriers overcome the short-wave obstacles, providing internet wirelessly would be dramatically cheaper than terrestrial connections. That’s why you see cable giants like Comcast and Charter now conducting their own tests of 5G technology.
If and when that happens, the differences between traditional TV and streaming will also become less meaningful.
That logic is part of what’s driving the most recent wave of telecom and media consolidation from AT&T’s deals to acquire Time Warner and AppNexus to Verizon’s melding of Yahoo and AOL in its Oath subsidiary. AT&T in particular is hoping to use its vast trove of consumer data to make TV advertising much more targeted and build an exchange that merges TV and streaming ad buying with web formats of all kinds.
Is America winning the race to 5g?
No. The U.S. is trailing China and South Korea in 5G implementation, according to various studies. But there is some debate over whether that actually matters in the long run.
On the one hand, trade groups, policymakers and industry leaders have warned it could cause the country to cede the 5G-enabled tech market to overseas competitors. A 2016 report from Accenture found that as many as 3 million jobs and a $500 billion GDP boost could hang in the balance.
Sprint and T-Mobile have also appealed to these sentiments to sell their merger to antitrust regulators. The two companies say they can jointly build a more robust 5G network than either AT&T or Verizon that will put the country on more equal footing with Asia.
“If we don’t take decisive, positive action, we risk ceding global leadership in both 5G and the entire next wave of technology to a country other than America,” T-Mobile CEO John Legere said in a recent statement.
Others are less convinced of the economic impact of winning or losing the race. Some analysts have argued that the whole notion of a 5G arms race is simply a marketing push on behalf of the telecom industry to secure favorable legislation and support. It’s worth noting that Europe and Japan were first to land 2G and 3G networks respectively, yet America still managed to dominate the smartphone revolution.
In any case, the Trump administration seems to be fully onboard with the race. The White House has twice floated the idea of nationalizing 5G tech to speed adoption, according to reported leaks. That idea never got much traction, but Trump did later block Singapore-based Broadcom’s takeover of American telecom equipment maker Qualcomm on “national security” grounds, widely interpreted to mean it could hurt the country’s position in the race to 5G.
The administration has also attempted to rally ally countries to block Chinese telecom and consumer electronics giant Huawei from building out their 5G infrastructure, arguing the hardware could provide a means for the Chinese state to spy on sensitive communications. Huawei has denied it has or would work with government security and accused the U.S. of hypocrisy. The fight escalated in December when Canadian authorities arrested Huawei chief financial officer and daughter of its founder Meng Wanzhou at the request of the United States, for allegedly breaking U.S. sanctions against Iran.
Is there any reason to doubt the promise of 5G?
Not everyone buys into the hype around 5G. Some argue that while the technology will be a step up for consumers, it’s not going to be as revolutionary as it’s currently billed. Eric Xu, a rotating chairman of Huawei, said at an industry conference last April that consumers wouldn’t notice a “material difference” between 5G and LTE networks, despite his company’s continued investment in building it. He also claimed many of the use cases that have been laid out for the next generation would be just as possible with existing network speeds.
In any case, it will probably take some time for the technology to evolve to a place where it lives up to its highest expectations. A T-Mobile exec reportedly said at a recent industry conference that its first 5G network would only be 25-50 percent faster than its 4G LTE service, and other carriers are building 5G networks that are essentially just a faster version of LTE.
