Living Life In The Fast Lane

There’s no faster network on earth, wired or not. Here’s why 5G will change everything – eventually.

- Alex Cox

You have heard about 5G. You can’t have missed it. But beyond the marketing hype, and outside of its broad position as a next-generation mobile phone technology, it’s not entirely clear what 5G actually is from the outside. Realistically, it’s not entirely clear on the inside, either. ‘5G’ is something of a blanket term, one that has so far covered a whole bunch of disparate technologies and frequencies, and a term that could mean radically different things depending on who’s using it and for what purpose. It could even be a lie, if the actions of US network AT&T are anything to go by: the company has branded its experimental 4G LTE services as ‘5G E’ – despite them very definitely not being 5G services. What we do know is this: 5G, proper 5G, is revolutionary. It’s astonishingly fast, high capacity, and it’s likely the most important communications upgrade since the invention of the internet.