5G Made Possible By Millimeter Waves Radio Waves

The radio waves are chattering about 5G NR and MMWaves. What????

“Where 3G brought the internet everywhere and 4G LTE made it faster, 5G NR is meant to vastly boost both the capacity and speed of networks, bringing you your high-res cat videos and 4K VR livestreams without delay.”-Cherlynn Low of engadget.com

5G is going to be sustained through the use of radio bands via the you guessed it radio spectrum. These highly specialized bands are known as millimeter waves. s

To put in prospective where this new wave is headed.

Qualcomm said you can expect “typical speeds” of 1.4 Gbps — that’s twenty times faster than the average US home broadband connection. At peak rates, think 5 Gbps, it’s enough to stream more than 50 4K movies from Netflix at the same time. 

Imagine watching a show on your iPad, iPhone, iMac, and Macbook all in 4K at the same time! Binge watching is about to become  a hobby of mine. 

For you skeptics out there the mmwaves aren’t prefect yet. They are actually very delicate putting points A and B on opposite sides of a room means in order for max efficiency there can be no object obstructing the flow data transfer. 

That’s problematic obviously.

Optimists this one is for you.  The answer is a two processes called beamforming and beamtracking.

But honestly, it isn’t that simple. We beam-forming is where the receiver is facing the transmitter. Where beam tracking is where the receiving device, your precious $1,000 phone,  determine which signal is the strongest and picks it up.

The real-life application isn’t there just yet. Materials such as metal and concrete pose challenges for the success of the mmwave’s. Metal bounces the signal while concrete absorbs signals.

Make more beams, don’t cover your phones antenna ray which receives the signal. Qualcomm wants to place multiple antenna rays throughout the phone- one experiment in the works. 

For the time being, don’t worry about it. Do pay attention. Samsung’s Galaxy S10+ S10 and S10 are ready to go as 5G enabled phones on the market.

My advice, start paying as much attention to your phone connectivity as one does space, graphic, camera.