What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know About 5G
5G fundamentals
One of the fundamental misconceptions about 5G is that 5G is a new cellular band. This is fundamentally wrong. The name for 5G was set by the specification setting organization, the 3GPP. The 3GPP is comprised of the different companies involved in the building of 5G hardware and software. The organization has been around since 3G, and helped to create the 4G specification that we now know as LTE.
This 5G New Radio can operate at pretty much any frequency from 600 MHz to 40 GHz today, including the current ones that we already use for cellular communications. Companies like Sprint and T-Mobile already do this with some of their 5G spectrum, so some consumers can already see the benefits of 5G without any new spectrum. Using 5G in this spectrum is generally referred to as ‘Sub-6GHz’ because it behaves in a very different manner than the higher bands people seem to associate with 5G. Ironically, the majority of 5G deployments will primarily utilize spectrum in the Sub-6GHz bands. This means that some of the fears around 5G are unfounded—these cellular base stations operate at the same frequencies as 4G networks, and possibly even more efficiently and safely.
5G NSA versus SA
Part of the 3GPP Release 15 specification allows for the creation of a NSA and SA network architecture. What does this mean?...
5G reality versus 5G hype
There is a lot of hype around 5G, which is to be expected of any big technology inflection point. The specifications for 5G in Release 16, Release 17 and beyond, call for a lot of new features that will enable a lot of new use cases. The expected richness of these upcoming releases is in large part responsible for 5G’s hype. The reality is that it is hard to predict next-generation use cases beyond what we have today. Very few could have predicted that 4G would result in services like Uber, GrubHub or Apple Pay....
5G mmWave health concerns
There has been a certain amount of fearmongering around 5G, particularly when it comes to the mmWave bands, 28GHz and 39GHz (future bands include 24GHz, 27GHz, and possibly 70Ghz). A lot of the fear comes from groups that have little to no knowledge about the technology itself. Some claim mmWave signals can cause cancer and other ailments. Most recently, some are attempting to tie the spread of coronavirus to the launch of 5G networks—which is quite the stretch, even for conspiracy theorists. ...
That system had a 0.1% chance of injury and did not penetrate beyond 1/64th of an inch under the skin. This fact throws into doubt the claim that 5G could cause brain cancer or other cancers. ...