5G Offers Plenty to Look Forward To in 2021 and Beyond

Trite as it may sound, the future is getting here faster than we think. Roughly 20 years have passed since the third generation of mobile networks — 3G in layman’s terms — was unleashed on the world with promises of previously unrecognizable power and speed. That’s downright laughable today, as the era of 5G is officially upon us.

What’s the difference between two generations, anyway? Well, a 3G network has an average speed of 2 megabits per second — a tortoise’s pace compared with 5G’s average speed of 400 Mbps. The technology tools and capabilities we rely on today (such as live-streaming concerts, video calls with loved ones, and even self-driving cars) simply would not work in a 3G world.

Can you imagine surviving the pandemic without today’s internet? It’s a downright scary proposition.

Thankfully, 4G networks have been able to shoulder an ever-increasing load when it comes to data, but bandwidth and latency upgrades are past due. Enter 5G. This fifth generation of mobile networks will enable a bunch of exciting, innovative things.

Dawn of a New Era

Augmented reality comes to mind. It’s a more widely available solution now. Remember Google Glass and its crippling limitations? Chalk that failed experiment up to the slow speed of the internet at the time. That problem is solved with 5G.

With tens of billions of global devices connected to the internet, 5G allows everyone to stream massive amounts of data efficiently at lightning-fast speeds. As a result, we’ll see more advancements in virtual reality. Adoption for VR is increasing substantially, and more people are working in VR than ever before. Companies and individual consumers are starting to embrace this: Oculus is releasing a new headset every year to meet that growing demand, to name just one example.

There’s plenty of reason to believe 2021 will be the dawn of a lot of interesting, cool ideas starting to be implemented in virtual reality. The technology has gotten to a point where it’s not disorienting for a lot of people, the cost is low, and you don’t need a specialized PC to make it run.

You’re already seeing these developments pop up into the social subconscious. Major Lazer recently did a performance in virtual reality. So have Paul McCartney, John Legend, and Billie Eilish. And then there was the kind of quasi-VR Travis Scott concert from Fortnite done through the Fortnite app. These new types of engagement are quickly becoming commonplace thanks to the power of 5G.

Another exciting development will be the continued improvement of automation and artificial intelligence. When you’re writing an email in Gmail, for instance, it now starts to predict your words and phrases. More things like that will happen. Voice assistants like Alexa will get a lot better over the next couple of years. If Google can predict what you’re going to write, pretty soon Google will be able to predict what you’re going to say.

And it’ll happen faster than you can imagine.