How many G's until we catch up the world?
On April 9, 2013, Tony Abbott made a broad statement referencing the NBN. "[We] are absolutely confident that 25 megs is going to be enough, more than enough, for the average household."
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We know that our NBN is not keeping pace (early pun this week) with the rest of the world having dropped to number 62 but our mobile networks are in the top five. This week Telstra launched their $8 billion 5G network meaning we are just the third country to have 5G.
What is 5G and why is there so much hype? The 5G name is the simple part. It stands for fifth generation. 4G launched in Australia in 2011. 3G started in 2003.
The name is the easy part. The technology is a little more complicated. It all comes down to the frequencies used. 4G networks in Australia range from 700MHz up to 2.6GHz. 5G uses extremely high frequencies - 30GHz up to 300GHz. These high frequencies deliver one huge advantage and a small disadvantage. The length of a wave is calculated as the speed of light divided by the frequency. Therefore, a higher frequency has a shorter wavelength. 300GHz translates to a wavelength of 1mm whereas 700MHz equates to 428mm. The higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths deliver higher bandwidth over shorter distances with the possibility of more interference from...just about everything.
The theoretical speed of 5G is 20Gbps (that is not a typo - that is Gigabits) compared to the best 4G can offer being 1Gbps. That is 800 times faster than Tony told us was the acceptable speed. On top of the faster speeds, 5G will enable more simultaneous connections. Fantastic when you are at a concert along with tens of thousands of others trying to upload photos, but also required as the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices grows. The estimation is that we will have 22 billion connected devices by 2025. 5G can support up to one million devices per square kilometre compared to 60,000 in the same area with 4G. The limitation of distance is not a trivial one - but that will be solved by more antennas on towers and increasingly on buildings. These antenna arrays are much 'smarter' than 4G antennas.
In summary, 5G will allow more connections at faster speeds with lower latency - but it will need more antennas to deliver the same coverage. Is this the death of the NBN? Not quite - but the number of NBN enabled households that will choose mobile will double from 15 to 30 per cent.
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