5G Disruption
While sitting on a plane at Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta, our CEO, Kemper Brown Jr., ran a speed test on his 5G phone and saw the above image.
Why should you care about this?
Kemper’s phone using 5G was downloading at 1,851 megabits per second (Mbps) OR 1.851 GB/sec and used 1,941 megabits just to run a speed test.
To put those numbers in context, watching YouTube TV on a large screen television requires less than 5 Mbps of bandwidth… So what the heck do we need 1,800 Mbps for?
For further mind-boggling comparison: Your laptop cannot even process that much inflow of internet bandwidth. Standard home or office networks cannot transfer data speeds this fast. Wi-Fi can’t transmit data at speeds that fast. A standard fiber internet connection typically maxes out at 500Gb (you can get up to 1Tb if you buy specialty cables…). Pretty much any business you work with or for cannot access internet bandwidth at these speeds. But, the bandwidth that incited this article happened on an iPhone phone using a cellular connection…
And, why is this a big deal?
The point here is that your “pocket computer” is officially able to access data over the internet faster than your desktop…
What to do with this information? Start with your imagination and watch the news—the ramifications will be far-reaching. In a basic example: How does this affect our ability to provide internet connectivity to people who don’t have broadband access? According to the FCC, “approximately 19 million Americans—6 percent of the population—still lack access to fixed broadband service at threshold speeds.”
In another example, 5G capabilities are what will allow “the internet of things” (IoT) to functionally work, and do things like allow cars on the road to communicate with each other and share wide-ranging data such as speeds, destinations, and other variables that would allow for traffic optimizations.
Connectivity is the foundation of technological advances, which ultimately facilitates the improvements and efficiencies that we soon consider commonplace.
