The Dark Side Of The Moon

The fifth-gen telecom technology is exciting and it’s here. But are we ready for the security-threat tail that accompanies the arrival of 5G?

- Pratima Harigunani

Laws help us understand our world better, like tea leaves that predict patterns way before they catch us off-guard. In the world of telecommunications, there are two such intriguing tarot cards. One is Butter's Law which states that the amount of data coming out of an optical fibre is doubling every nine months. Second is Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth which extrapolates that network connection speeds for high-end home users would double every 21 months. But this growth rate can be slower than the changes in processors, as pointed out by Moore's Law. This leads us to the fact that user experience would remain constrained by the bandwidth.

It helped to gauge why users would need a lot more to see the gains of Butter's law and experience fiber-to-the-curb as a reality.

Interestingly, after a lot of Gs, the intersection between these two ideas seems to be transpiring into a last-mile delight for users. With ultra-low latency, high bandwidth, high reliability, high network capacity, super-fast relay of information, and multi-GBPS data speed, 5G promises a new experience for both individual and enterprise end users.

But does it promise a better level of security too? If more information travels through these new pipes, and if more taps are drinking out of these pipes, should we be worried about how safe the 5G plumbing is?

OLD SECURITY FEARS, NEW QUESTIONS