5G Networking

Every previous cellular generation answered the same question: how can phones talk faster? 5G asks a different question entirely: how can everything talk?

Previous cellular generations connected people to the Internet. 5G connects everything else—factory robots, autonomous vehicles, surgical instruments, millions of sensors monitoring everything from soil moisture to structural integrity. The speed improvements matter, but they're not the revolution. The revolution is that cellular networks are no longer just for humans.

The Numbers That Matter

5G specifications read like science fiction compared to 4G:

• Speed: Peak rates of 20 Gbps down, 10 Gbps up. Real-world speeds range from 100 Mbps to several gigabits depending on conditions.
• Latency: As low as 1 millisecond for critical applications, compared to 30-50ms typical for 4G.
• Density: Up to 1 million devices per square kilometer.

That latency number is the one that changes everything. At 30 milliseconds, you can stream video. At 1 millisecond, you can perform surgery from across the country. The difference isn't incremental—it's categorical.

Three Flavors of 5G

5G isn't one thing. It's three different technologies sharing a name:

Low-band (below 1 GHz) behaves like 4G with better efficiency. Wide coverage, penetrates buildings, modest speed improvements. This is what most people experience as "5G" today.

Mid-band (1-6 GHz) is the sweet spot—significant speed improvements with reasonable coverage. Most urban 5G deployments focus here.

High-band millimeter wave (24-100 GHz) is the exotic one. Extraordinary speeds but terrible range—signals struggle to pass through walls, leaves, rain, or human bodies. Requires small cells every few hundred meters. Practical only for dense urban hotspots and venues.

When carriers advertise "5G," they might mean any of these. A phone showing the 5G icon could be getting 4G-like speeds on low-band or multi-gigabit speeds on millimeter wave. Same name, vastly different experiences.

Network Slicing: One Network, Many Realities

Here's where 5G gets genuinely strange: network slicing lets one physical network pretend to be many.

Imagine a hospital, a factory, and a stadium sharing the same cell towers. The hospital's slice guarantees ultra-low latency for remote patient monitoring—nothing can interrupt those packets. The factory's slice provides ironclad reliability for robot control, even if throughput is modest. The stadium's slice prioritizes raw bandwidth for 50,000 people streaming simultaneously.

Each slice has its own personality. A surgeon's data and a teenager's TikTok might travel the same physical wires but exist in completely isolated realities, each with different guarantees about speed, latency, and reliability.

This is possible because 5G cores are software running on cloud infrastructure, not fixed hardware. Creating a new slice means spinning up new virtual network functions, not installing new equipment.

Edge Computing: Bringing the Cloud Closer

Low latency requires short distances. Light itself only travels about 300 kilometers in a millisecond. If your application needs single-digit millisecond response times, the server can't be in a distant data center.

Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) puts servers at cell towers and central offices—close enough that the speed of light stops being a problem. An autonomous vehicle doesn't wait for round trips to cloud servers hundreds of miles away. It talks to an edge server that might be on the cell tower it's connected to.

This changes where applications live. Traditional cloud computing concentrates compute in a few massive data centers. 5G edge computing distributes it across thousands of locations at the network periphery.

What 5G Makes Possible

Industrial automation: Factories traditionally require wired Ethernet for robot control—wireless was too unreliable and laggy. 5G changes this. Flexible manufacturing with robots that can be repositioned without rewiring becomes practical.

Autonomous vehicles: Self-driving cars must make safety decisions in milliseconds. 5G enables vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication—cars talking to traffic lights, other vehicles, and infrastructure with latency low enough to matter.

Remote surgery: A surgeon in New York operating robotic instruments in rural Montana. Requires both the low latency (you can't have delay in surgical movements) and the reliability (you really can't have the connection drop mid-procedure).

Massive IoT: A smart city might have millions of sensors monitoring traffic, air quality, water systems, and structural integrity. 5G's device density specifications exist for exactly this.

Fixed wireless: Bringing broadband to areas without fiber by using 5G as the last-mile connection. Cheaper than laying cable to every home.

The Hard Parts

Deploying 5G is expensive and complicated:

Infrastructure costs multiply with millimeter wave, which requires small cells every few hundred meters instead of towers every few miles.

Spectrum auctions have raised tens of billions of dollars in some countries. That cost eventually reaches consumers.

Backhaul bottlenecks emerge when cell sites can deliver gigabit speeds but the connection from the tower to the core network can't keep up.

Coverage gaps persist for years as deployment spreads incrementally. 5G in cities doesn't mean 5G everywhere.

Security: Better and Worse

5G improves on 4G security with better encryption, mandatory authentication, and isolation between network slices. An attack on the consumer slice shouldn't reach the critical infrastructure slice.

But complexity creates attack surface. More software, more virtualization, more integration points mean more things that can go wrong. Supply chain security became geopolitically contentious as countries debated which vendors to trust with critical infrastructure.

5G networks inherit some vulnerabilities from earlier generations—backward compatibility is a security burden.

Private 5G

Enterprises are building their own 5G networks rather than depending on carriers:

A manufacturer deploys private 5G across their factory floor, getting guaranteed performance without sharing spectrum with the public. A port authority runs private 5G for crane control and logistics tracking. A hospital operates a private network for medical devices requiring reliability no public network can guarantee.

Some countries allocate spectrum specifically for enterprise private networks. Others require enterprises to work with carriers. Private 5G competes with and complements WiFi—similar flexibility but with the reliability guarantees WiFi struggles to provide.

Foundation for What Comes Next

5G isn't just faster phones. It's infrastructure for autonomous systems, edge computing, and the Internet of Things at scale. The applications that seem futuristic today—autonomous vehicles coordinating in real-time, surgeons operating remotely, cities sensing and responding to their inhabitants—depend on the capabilities 5G provides.

Meanwhile, research on 6G has already begun, targeting terahertz frequencies, sub-millisecond latency, and speeds measured in terabits. Commercial deployment is expected around 2030. By then, 5G will be the baseline—the way 4G is today—and we'll be asking again what the next generation makes possible.