5G mmWave: Speeds of up to 10 Gbps? Discover it now!

5G mmWave technology is the fastest we have in mobile networks, reaching speeds of up to 10 Gbps in real life. Let's find out what it really is and learn how cellular networks work along the way! 🕵️‍♂️ Although some parts may sound like a physics lesson, I promise this will help us understand the subject better.

What Exactly Is a Wave?

We've all seen waves in water when it's disturbed. Suppose there's a buoy in that choppy water (or anything that floats); you'd notice it just goes up and down, not going anywhere. Why doesn't it move forward or backward like waves seem to? 🤔 Also, all that motion must require energy. Where did that energy come from?

The answer is that it moved outward from the original source of the disturbance. Imagine someone dropping a stone into still water, which creates a wave. The expanding waves carry the energy of that stone to the buoy.

So why didn't that energy move the buoy forward? That's because, although it gives the illusion of expanding outward, the water doesn't actually move any further. It just bounces up and down. To summarize, the wave's energy is transferred farther, but the wave itself stays in place. Just like when people create a wave in a stadium by standing up and sitting down.

Every wave follows the same principles. For example, a wave would behave the same way if you created a disturbance in the air instead of the water (that's what sound is!). 🎶

Scientifically speaking, there's a term for each of these behaviors and a way to quantify them. If you count how many times the buoy bounces up and down in one second, that's its frequency. The distance the buoy travels up and down each time is the wave's amplitude. And if you take a ruler and measure the distance between the ripples, that would be its wavelength.

When waves are closer together, the wavelength is shorter and the frequency is higher. When waves are farther apart, the frequency is lower and the wavelength is longer. In general, higher frequencies mean more energy, and vice versa.

5G Is A Special Type Of Wave

Waves are all around us. The light we see can behave just like water waves. ☀️ Unlike water or air waves, however, there is a special type of wave that doesn't need a material to propagate. It can simply travel through empty space. This special type of wave is called an electromagnetic wave.

It's made up of a full spectrum of different wavelengths, and a narrow band of that spectrum is what we perceive as visible light. All the colors we see are just different wavelengths of this spectrum. In other words, we only see a tiny portion of electromagnetic waves, and the rest is invisible. 🌈

When an electromagnetic wave has a very short wavelength, it can be a gamma ray, an X-ray, or an ultraviolet wave (the same UV rays we should avoid when we're in the sun!). At the opposite extreme, when it has the longest possible wavelength, it is a radio wave.

Radio waves can travel incredible distances because they have the longest wavelengths and very low frequencies. That's why we use them for wireless communication. Wi-Fi and cellular networks, including 5G, are actually radio waves. 📡

Waves Can Carry a Lot of Information, Very Fast

How can a wave carry a message or internet data packets? It sounds puzzling, but the key lies in the simplicity of the language of the message itself. 💬

You've probably heard of Morse code. It's a language made entirely of dots and dashes. Then there's binary, the language of ones and zeros, which computers read and understand.

Remember the buoy that rises and falls when you drop a stone into the water? You could create a language from it to send a message. The height to which the buoy rises could be the code: the highest height could be 1, and the lowest height could be zero. You could drop a large stone to “code” a 1 and a small one to “code” a 0. It wouldn't be very efficient or fast, but in principle, someone far away could observe the buoy and interpret the message you sent through the waves.

This is basically how radio communication works. A transmitting device encodes ones and zeros by changing the frequency, amplitude (just like our buoy), or phase of the wave. Technically, this is called modulation.

A pattern of ones and zeros can be mapped or "encoded" into a wave because the transmitter can create extremely precise disturbances, which the receiving hardware interprets and "decodes" into ones and zeros. You can see how a wave with a higher frequency (more vibrations per second) and a shorter wavelength will allow more information to be encoded, since there are more options for modulating the bits of the wave.

We already know that cellular networks operate using radio waves, and these can have wavelengths as small as a millimeter or as long as several kilometers. That's the key point.

5G mmWave Explained

With this, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to illustrate what 5G mmWave is.

The first generations of cell phones (1G and 2G) used radio waves that vibrated between 1 and 2 billion times per second (1 and 2 GHz) and had wavelengths about 1 foot across. That sounds fast, but the first generation couldn't even send text messages. The third generation (3G) increased the frequency to 2.5 GHz and cut the wavelength in half. With 3G, you can surf the internet and stream in SD quality. With the fourth generation (4G), the frequency went up to 8 GHz and the wavelength shortened to 1.5 inches, enabling HD streaming and fast browsing, reaching between 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps in the real world.

5G is a breakthrough because it operates at the astonishing frequency of 100 GHz (one hundred billion times per second!). Its wavelength can be as short as a millimeter (mm), hence the name. So, that's what 5G mmWave is: a cellular network that operates at an exceptionally high frequency and wavelengths of 1 mm, achieving an average download speed of 2.5 Gbps.

What Does This Mean For Us?

5G isn't just faster than 4G; it's also much more responsive. Latency can be as low as 1 millisecond, which is almost instantaneous. That means no lag in online gaming and 4K or 8K streaming without interruptions or buffering. 🎮 The near-instant response time is also perfect for IoT devices, augmented reality, self-driving cars, and technology that requires low latency.

In addition to ultra-fast data transmission and incredibly low latency, 5G mmWave also supports more capacity compared to traditional networks (many more devices can connect without experiencing network congestion).

Limitations of 5G mmWave

Every cellular technology before 5G, including 4G, used a single frequency band. 5G uses many. 5G mmWave is just one of those many bands. There's also 5G Sub-6 GHz, which operates around the same frequencies as 4G. Then there's Sub-1 GHz, which uses even lower frequencies. 🌐 5G frequency bands can be high frequency, mid frequency, and low frequency. What's going on here?

Because 5G waves are so close together (compared to traditional radio waves), they can't propagate far. Buildings, trees, and even rain or snow can obstruct 5G mmWave. 🌧️

That's why this technology isn't very common. It requires a dense network of small cells to cover even a few city blocks, unlike 4G, which relies on large cell towers that typically cover several kilometers.

5G mmWave is our latest and most advanced step toward seamless wireless communication, but it may not have the mass adoption we've seen with previous generations. Still, achieving gigabit speeds in the data connection from your phone will always make you feel like the future is already here. 🚀