Demystifying 5G: Not just better network speeds, but opportunities for a wide variety of new services as well

The 5G era is round the corner. This new technology is seen as an enabler for AR, VR, telemedicine, smart cities, smart agriculture, smart factories, and autonomous driving, among other things. Even though 5G is referred to by many as a monolithic technology, in reality it is a combination of several of them, each of which serves as an enabler for a specific set of use cases.

As the government has finalised the timelines for 5G spectrum auctions, it is important to decode the jargon associated with 5G and understand its many aspects. In any wireless technology, information between handsets and the network is exchanged over airwaves that are subject to several phenomena. The cumulative effects of everything that happens between a transmitter and a receiver can be imagined as an invisible pipe connecting the two. The amount of data that can be pushed over a wireless channel is primarily dependent on the size of the wireless pipe. Until 4G, only a limited part of the radio spectrum was suitable for wireless mobile communication. But with digital adoption increasing in the country, the capacity offered by the existing pipes is not enough.