What Is 5G? How Does It Work, And Is It Dangerous?

The next big leap in speed for wireless devices is the fifth generation of cellular technology, 5G. This pace encompasses both the rate on which smartphone users can transfer data to their smartphones, and the delay or lag they face in transmitting and receiving data.

5G promises to offer 10 to 100 times higher service speeds than existing 4G networks. Users should plan to see data rates in the range of gigabits per second (Gb/s), much higher than 4G rates in the tens of megabits per second (Mb/s).
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That's interesting because it would require new technologies that are just not feasible today, "said Harish Krishnaswamy, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University in New York." You might actually download a video to your phone or tablet in a matter of seconds just for example at gigabits per second data levels. These data levels may allow for applications in augmented reality or autonomous driving vehicles.

Besides requiring high data levels, new technologies such as virtual reality or self-driving vehicles that communicate with the user's surroundings would often need incredibly low latency. 5G's target is to reach latencies below the 1-millisecond level for that purpose. Ios apps will be able to transmit and retrieve information within less than one-thousandth of a second which will appear to the user immediately. The rollout of 5G needs new hardware and facilities to reach such speeds.

The Brand New Network

Wireless networks have functioned on the same electromagnetic spectrum radio-frequency bands from the first generation of cell phones. Yet with more users crowding the network and seeking more data than ever before, wireless traffic becomes rapidly congested on these radio-wave highways. To account for this, telecommunications networks intend to extend to higher millimeter wave frequencies.

Millimeter waves use frequencies from 30 to 300 gigahertz and are 10 to 100 times greater than today's 4G and WiFi radio waves. They are called millimeters because their wavelengths range between 1 and 10 millimeters, so they are on the order of centimeters like radio waves.

The higher frequency of waves of millimeter will generate new lanes on the road, but there is one difficulty: Millimeter waves are quickly absorbed by leafy and buildings and require several closely-distance stations known as small cells. Fortunately, these stations are much smaller and have a lower power output than the conventional cell-towers.

MIMO stands for multiple-input multi-outgo, and it means a design that takes advantage of the smaller antennas required for millimeter waves by significantly raising the number of antenna pports at each base station. The miniaturization of base stations also allows a revolutionary technological advancement for MIMO.

With a huge number of antennas tens to hundreds of antennas at each base station you will support several different users at the same time, raising the data rate, "Krishnaswamy said. Krishnaswamy and his team have built chips at the Columbia High-Speed and Millimeter-Wave IC (COSMIC) laboratory that allow both millimeter wave and MIMO technologies." Millimeter wave and large MIMO are the two main tees.

How Fast Is 5G Ultra Wideband?

5G Ultra Wideband is a major improvement in network capacity. It offers data transfer speeds quicker than a flick of the eye, high latency and greater networking opportunities.

The disparity in absolute speed is one way to measure the disparity. Our 5G Super Wideband network delivers speeds five times higher than our current 4G network. The data travels so rapidly on 5G Ultra Widband that the technical advance would lead to the 4th industrial revolution was claimed by Ronan Dunne, Executive Vice President and Company Chairman Verizon Consumer Group.

5G Super Wideband isn't yet another broadband tech version,' he says. The fifth wave of wireless technology's success allows one to understand fundamentally what is feasible in the digital network, much like the next wave of the broadcasting industry reinvented programming based on the inherent property of the medium itself.

Thanks to its faster data processing speeds, 5G Ultra Wideband would potentially allow much more users to communicate, allowing a truly vast scale of the Internet of Things. Around 14.2 billion linked "things" are in operation today, and that figure is projected to rise to over 55 billion by 2025. The goal of the 5G Super Wideband is to help meet staggering network bandwidth demands.

Is 5G Dangerous?

Although 5G may enhance our daily lives, some customers have expressed concern about possible health hazards. Many of these issues was the use of the higher intensity millimeter-wave radiation by more than 5G.

Sometimes there is ambiguity between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation because the word radiation is used for both, "said Kenneth Foster, a Pennsylvania State University professor of bioengineering." All light is radiation because it is actually energy passing through space. It is radiation ionizing that is harmful because it can sever chemical bonds.

Ionic radiation is all we wear beyond the sunscreen and small rays of the heavenly ultraviolet light provide ability to smash electrons, destroy skin cells and DNA from their atoms. At the other hand, millimeter waves are non ionizing because they are slower and not strong enough to actively destroy cells.

A high exposure threshold radiation frequency (RF) intensity can be dangerous, leading to burns and other heat injuries, but exposure is typically only found in industrial environments near high-powered radio frequency transmitters, but the only chance of radiation non-ionizing is to be underestimated," says the author, who has been researching the health effects of radio waters for almost 50 years.

Many of the outcries from the public regarding the adoption of 5 G echo concerns about cellular technology of previous generations. Skeptics claim that non-ionizing radiation toxicity will also be responsible for a number of illnesses, from brain cancer to chronic headaches. Thousands of researchers have been exploring those issues over the years.

In 2018, a long study was released in the National Toxicology Program, which found signs of an uptick in brain and surrender tumors in male rats exposed to RF radiation from 2G and 3G mobile phones, but not from mice and woman rats. Four times the average permissible dose of radiation was given to animals with human consumption.

Foster said that often critics of RF waves cherry-picking experiments endorsing their claim and mostly overlooked the efficiency of their study procedures or the outcome inconsistency. Although he does not agree with many of the observations that skeptics have on past wireless network generations, Foster acknowledges that we need further studies on the future effects of 5G networks in terms of health.

The supporters of 5G claim that 5G's advantages will greatly outweigh the risks to society.

I assume 5G will change our life and make basically new things possible, "Krishnaswamy said." Right now, we can not know for sure what those kinds of apps will be and what their effect is. It might be something that surprises us and truly changes society. If experience has taught us something, 5G would be another reminder of what broadband networks will do for us.

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