Last year, 5G was officially announced in India in October 2023; 5G is the future of the Internet, just like AI! The biggest thing in 5G will be latency. This means that the response time for your device to communicate with the server will be very low. So let’s try to understand precisely what 5G is and what’s so special about it.
First question! What is 5G?
5G means 5th generation wireless network technology. And all major network providers, such as Jio and Airtel, are working on it. Each new generation is faster and more capable than the previous one. Right now, we all have 4G. Maybe you remember how slow 2G and 3G were and how much better 4G is. Similarly, the primary focus of 5G is speed, and it will be a major upgrade. 5G is built on mmwaves, which are part of a high-frequency electromagnetic spectrum.
But there is a problem if anything like a building or even simple rain happens; your 5G signal can be blocked and disturbed. Therefore, even if you go long-distance with 5G, it won’t work over long distances. The higher the frequency, the shorter the range. You must have noticed that the range of 5 GHz Wi-Fi is less than that of 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi. So if you are close by, you will get good speed, but if you are far away, you will get less speed. In short, lower frequency means more coverage area and higher frequency means more speed.
For this, you will need a 5G phone and a 5G network, and for those who have a daily limit of 1/2GB, their daily limit will be exhausted very quickly. It’s so fast that YouTube videos play without buffering, web browsers load very quickly, and you can download an entire season of games and Netflix in just a few minutes. Uh-hmmmm, it’s not as fast as blinking an eye, but it’s still much better than LTE. But you will only get all this when you are in direct line of sight of 5G. As soon as you move away, the speed will instantly drop by almost 50%, and if you move a little further away, it will switch straight to 4G. So how will you get 5G? There are currently two solutions to this.
The first solution is True mmWave, which means installing 5G nodes. But this will be very expensive, and it’s not known how long it will take to cover all of India. So let’s move on to the second solution, which is called Sub-6GHz Network and will involve upgrading existing towers. What will happen is that it will solve some of the problems with 5G mmWave and cost less. The speed will be faster than 4G, but not exactly as fast as 5G. Listen, this isn’t wrong; okay, there’s no chance of installing mmWave everywhere in India.
To simplify it for you, mmWave is called SA, meaning Standalone 5G, and Sub-6GHz is called NSA, meaning Non-Standalone 5G. Both are 5G networks. Hold on, now don’t rush to buy a 5G phone because right now, for most people, 4G is sufficient if you just give them a stable connection because there isn’t anything yet that only 5G can solve for you. So yes, upgrade to 5G at your leisure.
“Don’t get confused about which 5G phone to buy. In India, there are a total of nine bands, of which eight are important. The low band will focus on rural areas, the high-end ones on Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, and the last one on high-end industries. So don’t just buy a phone in the name of 5G; check the bands in the specifications. The more bands there are, the better! Some people will be very fast and already have a 5G phone! They won’t need a new SIM for 5G to work, but they will need to enable it. By default, it is enabled for 4G. If you have 4G in your area, then you will see a 5G icon in your network bar.”
And to check if you have 5G in your area or not, you can check it on My Jio for Jio and the Airtel Thank app for Airtel. And if you have doubts about whether your mobile is 5G or not, you can also check that. Coverage is still quite limited, and it’s being rolled out in phases. Jio has promised that the complete 5G rollout will be done by the end of this year, and Airtel will do it by early 2024.
The future of 5G in India is very bright, and it will unlock many possibilities! Real 5G opportunities include live-streaming virtual reality, cloud gaming, advanced IoT, Metaverse, anonymous cars, remote surgery, smart cities, and who knows what else! I don’t know what’s possible. Okay, before leaving a bonus, 5G technology was ready in 2013! And 6G technology is also ready, and companies are working on it, which you might see around 2030. It’s not for now but for the future! And everything doesn’t happen overnight. That’s enough. Thank you for watching. Stay Greek with AndroidGreek! Bye!