I kinda understand it has to do with frequencies and the speed they can send information but I don’t know enough to have a productive conversation with those that think it’s mind altering cancer rays. Thats also what i keep running into online when I’m trying to find a dummy version for how it all works. I know I’ll probably never be able to have a truly productive conversation with those types but i would like to have a better understanding myself.
It would be helpful to explain and frame it with radio and public broadcasting as well. to me, these are all happy information rays that send me thing i like but i don’t full understand the technology behind it.
Thanks everyone this has been super helpful! Might try and make an info graph for to hang in my post box since I’ve gotten some crazy anti 5g flyers recently
Lots of fancy math to fit more information into the same amount of radio waves.
One of the biggest changes in 5g is the separation of the control and data planes, this means downloading pix of kitties doesn’t interfere with phone control signals and gets everyone better bandwidth and responsiveness.
This also facilitates “edge computing”, which is like a tiny clouds at the base of cell phone towers, this tech is used for super fast facial recognition and things like that where sending the data all the way to the cloud and back is a few milliseconds too slow.
When you say clouds are these like little mini servers? Just super localised so they don’t have to go as far and can respond quicker?
Was 4g on the same plane as usual talk/text? Does it have to go all the way to a bigger cloud through the tower instead of just to the tower?
Also this all sounds really good i really don’t understand the hate. Is it just because it’s new? Tbf, it seems to be the same people who believe in chemtrails and a few who believe in 2 suns but they are getting into politics now which is worrisome
When you say clouds are these like little mini servers? Just super localised so they don’t have to go as far and can respond quicker?
Exactly
Was 4g on the same plane as usual talk/text? Does it have to go all the way to a bigger cloud through the tower instead of just to the tower?
Yep, well data that needs to go to the cloud does. Facial recognition happens quickly and in small devices, but the computing power comes from a cloud or edge computing back end, and the edge is much faster. Voice traffic doesn’t go to the cloud AFAIK.
There are also differences in the frequency, I know much less about this, but different frequency ranges have different properties as far as ability to penetrate walls, etc. The 5G signal doesn’t travel as far or as effectively through walls so there must be more cell towers to cover a given area. This may be where the conspiracy people are getting it from, only I think they have it backwards, pretty sure 4G would penetrate your skull better than 5G (actually not sure what they believe).
Thank you!
Lots of people getting hung up on specific details… but the actual practical benefit of 5G over 4G is simple:
5G can have an order of magnitude more devices connected at once. This will allow us to have more things connected to the network.
4G ran up against the limit to how many devices per square mile can be connected a long time ago in densely populated areas. The transition to 5G has solved the issue. It’s even solved it for 4G users, since there are now less 4G users.
As you grow up and learn new words, you can say more with fewer of them.
“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?”
I see a lot of people talking about specific parts of 5G but honestly most of them are optional and only some of them will be active at once.
“Regular” 5G uses the same frequencies as 2G, 3G, etc. The carriers will be moving more frequency ranges of older Gs to 5G as time goes on.
In general, we can send more data at once because we have better math for sending data. There’s not really an ELI5 that can explain that part besides more math.
Another part is there’s also more math so that the phones can take turns talking better or split up frequencies better, so they don’t have to re-transmit as much.
If you’re in hyper-crowded areas, they made a new frequency range that cannot go through walls, but is way faster than the regular ones that we’ve been using. It’s only good for like sports stadiums and stuff, and you almost never use this. It’s called mmwave (millimeter-wave) and you can safely ignore any marketing around it. Not many phones support it yet because it’s useless 99% of the time.
Range Speed 5g - + 4g + -
