Mobile gadgets may have changed the way people live and work, but today’s once-groundbreaking ability to stream live video to a smartphone will seem pretty blasé compared with what the next generation of wireless technology promises. The tech’s so-called fifth generation, or 5G, is expected to connect billions of machines—kitchen appliances, medical devices and automobiles, to name a few—to one another and the Web, creating the much-hyped Internet of Things. And 5G touts speeds up to 100 times faster than current networks, which could mean downloading a full-length high-definition movie onto a smartphone in seconds rather than minutes. Plans for tomorrow’s wireless networks likewise include the ability to stream online virtual reality content without disorienting interruptions cased by data bottlenecks.
The main shortcoming of 5G? It does not yet exist. That has gadget makers, wireless network providers and government agencies scrambling to create a road map for the wireless future they have been promising by the early 2020s. Some progress is being made but there is a long way to go. In July the Federal Communications Commission opened up new, higher-frequency areas of the radio spectrum for wireless communications to accommodate predicted increases in data traffic from 5G mobile devices. The previous generation of wireless—4G—has prompted a 4,000-fold increase in data traffic in the past decade with no signs of slowing. The part of spectrum between 30 megahertz and 3 gigahertz (in which much wireless communications currently takes place) offers little room for the coming 5G explosion, clogged as it is with radio and TV broadcasts as well as 3G and 4G cellular communications, radar, satellites and radios used by public safety workers.
Proponents of 5G are pushing for a further widening of the legally available spectrum, which would let companies shift wireless traffic to less-crowded, higher-frequency ranges. Those spectrum bands would enable the use of millimeter waves that could deliver faster, higher-quality video and multimedia content. This “greenfield” spectrum was previously thought to be unusable for mobile devices because their antennas were not made to not pick up those high-frequency signals, says Doug Brake, a telecom policy analyst at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a public policy think tank.
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