To Imagine The ‘5G' Future, Revisit Our Recent Wireless Past

The mobile industry is cranking up its hype machine for sleek new “5G” networks that it says will make your phone and everything else faster and wonderful. If you believe the marketing.

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But no one can really say how 5G will change your life; many of the apps and services that will exploit its speed haven’t been created yet. Look back at the last big wireless upgrade, though, and you can get a sense of how profound that change might be. Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, and it quickly become obvious that the era’s 3G wireless networks couldn’t handle millions of people uploading photos of their kid’s playdate to Facebook or obsessing over “Words with Friends.”

Not to mention managing their finances, health care and shopping for everything from shoes to homes.

“When the smartphone came out it brought the 3G network to its knees,” Stanford engineering professor Andrea Goldsmith said. “The success of smartphones was because of 4G.”

4G speeds, the ones we’re used to today, made possible many of the things we now take for granted on our phones — Instagram, cloud storage, Netflix streaming. Or, for instance, that ride you got home from the bar.