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If you own a smartphone, you are probably used to streaming youtube videos, or reading the latest soccer news to reduce the drudgery of your daily commute. Such tasks, often taken for granted, would not be possible without 3G technology. Now, imagine what 4G can do, and what lies in the horizon of wireless technology.
Everyone who owns a smartphone has probably heard of ‘3G’ technology, but if your knowledge of 3G and 4G technology is at best, a nebulous and indistinct collection of terms like ‘digital’ and ‘GPRS’, allow me to elucidate you on the different generations of wireless mobile technology. |
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First and foremost, let’s start with the basics - the differences between 2G, 3G and 4G technology. I will try to keep technical terms to a minimum so that it is understandable to the laymen like you and I. Wireless telephone technology, starting with 1G in the 1980s, allowed network carriers to operate fully automated networks without any human operator intervention. In those days, internet usage had not permeated society to the extent we see today. Needless to say, 1G wasn’t equipped to handle any form of mobile data service but rather, to handle basic voice calls among subscribers.
2G technology arrived in the 1990s and it allowed networks to cope with the increasing number of users to the network. More importantly, 2G heralded the age of sending data in addition to voice. In other words, the age of text messages was born. (In case you didn’t know, SMS stands for short message service)
Then, 3G technology came with all its various permutations (3.5G, 3.75G) which we shall not elaborate upon for the sake of preserving our sanity. The 3rd generation granted us higher data speed, greater voice capacity and most importantly, mobile broadband which allows us to be always connected.
4G is an upgraded form of 3G technology with even higher data speeds of up to 1GB/s for low mobility communication such as pedestrians and stationary users. It should be noted that 4G technology is relatively new and at this point of time, is not a standardised, unified technology like its predecessors. The effectiveness of such high data speeds can also be debated because the bottleneck now lies not in the data speed of the network provider but the ability of web hosting servers in matching that data speed in terms of their rate of data upload.
With already so much on offer, what more could there be after 4G technology? |
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No prizes for guessing what the next generation of wireless technology will be called; 5G is the name being used to denote the next major phase of mobile telecommunications beyond 4G. It has been prognosticated that 5G technology will be implemented at around 2020 given that a new generation of wireless mobile technology has been implemented every 10th year since the inception of 1G in 1981. Unlike previous mobile generations (which have increased bandwidth allocation), sceptics argue that there is little room for larger channel bandwidths in 5G technology. Indeed, current research papers have focused on the following concepts:
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Pervasive networks for users to simultaneously connect to several wireless access technologies and seamless move between them.
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Group cooperative relay to better propagate wireless signals to users
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Real wireless world with no more limitation with access and zone issues
This list is not exhaustive, but the other technologies will be too difficult to explain to non-experts like most of us. To sum it up, the main differences users can expect between 4G and 5G (due to the new technologies mentioned above) would be better wireless coverage, higher data speeds in larger portions of coverage area and cheaper or no traffic fees due to lower infrastructure costs.
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