This post will teach you about 1G, 2G, 3 G, 4G vs 5G mobile technology. Now many people are using cell phones; in case you didn’t know, there are more active cell phones worldwide than the entire population. Pretty crazy, right? It is because a lot of people out there are using two or three cell phones. So the G and all these numbers stand for GENERATION.
What is 1G?
First, let us get started with 1G. It got popular in the 1980s. So it is built on an analog system and can only do phone calls. Now, there were a lot of limitations to it in terms of range; it had very little security, and anyone could listen in on your phone call and what you were doing. So it was just like this starting era of mobile wireless technology.
What is 2G?
Now 2G was more into the 1990s. It is widespread and is based on a digital technology that has more security but also allows some additional functionality. So 1G was more on voice calls while 2G allowed that and texting and MMS messaging. You have some pretty slow speeds with 2G. Even sending an MMS was incredibly slow and horrible. Only a few companies in India, like Airtel and VI(Vodafone-Idea), offer a 2G connection. Even at one time, Idea, Vodafone, and Airtel were giving free data(2G data) for a limited time.
What is 3G?
Then we move into 3G, which is like early 2000, so this is where the era of smartphones is picking up pace. 3G is where you get accurate mobile data, can surf the Internet properly, look at HTML websites, and download some applications, it’s still pretty slow, but when it was released, it was like the greatest thing ever.
The main limitation of 3G technology was that the Internet would be next to nothing if you got a weak signal because the internet speed was slow at the time compared to 4G.
What is 4G?
And then we move over to 4G vs 5G a stage we’re in. So here is the thing with 4G technology: the 4tg Generation in the 2010s. That is when it started getting popular, increasing mobile internet speed even faster. You can load HD videos on YouTube; accomplishing these things was much easier.
It just became this excellent convenience factor when she ultimately set the standard for 4G. It initially placed it on two conditions.
- The first condition is that if you are in a moving car, you should be able to get 100 MBPS, which is fast, faster than some people’s home Internet.
- The other condition was that if you were staying still and not moving, you should be able to get 1 GB download per second.
But yeah, you read it correctly. That was the industry standard set for 4G. Very few people have met that criterion. So why do all these cell phone companies claim to have 4G technology when they don’t see the consortium that set up the standard? Realize that this is nearly impossible to achieve because switching from 1G to 2G technology is very expensive, changing from 2G to 3 G even more expensive and 3G to 4G even more costly, and so on.
Why is everyone saying 4G vs 5G technology? Isn’t that cheating the system with false advertisements? Yes and No. The industry standard just lowered. As you know, reaching one gigabit per second download speed for someone on their cell phone is challenging. So what they did is they introduced LTE.
What is LTE?
Now LTE is where things need to be clarified between LTE and 4G. They are not the same thing. LTE is not a technology. It’s Long-Term Evolution. That’s what it stands for. It says, “hey, we’re gonna implement LTE:- long-term evolution into 4G vs 5G technology. We are gonna keep making our current internet speed of 4G better and better until they can hopefully reach 1 GBPS”.
So the standard to say that you have 4G technology on saying Airtel Vodafone, Jio was allowed. It is accepted that you know that it is still way faster than 3G. You cannot reach 1 GB per second but use LTE to advance what we currently have. Let us say we have 4G and kind of let it be.
One thing to remember is that any technology you have, let’s say, for example, if you have a 3G phone, will not work with a 4G cell phone signal. It would be best to have these special Hardware chips that allow you to receive unique alerts from other technology. So if you have a 2G phone, it will not work with 3G and 4G.
What is 5G?
So what does 5G Tech mean? This is the big question because many carriers are starting to advertise, especially in INDIA ??. But if we cannot reach the proper 4G speed, why do they say 5G? Well, there has yet to be a standard for 5G. There is mixed information all over the Internet.
You try to research it; the theory here is that with 5G, you should be able to open an HD video and buffer the entire thing on YouTube in seconds. So even loading 4k videos, you won’t have to wait for that loading icon. It will just load instantly.
It should be swift and seamless, with a heavy emphasis on innovative products. This is more than just your smart home products receiving a signal from your cell phone carrier. This could be autonomous cars, self-driving cars, this could be intelligent street lights, this could be anything.
Challenges
Now there are a lot of challenges. The biggest one, of course, is money. As usual, it’s a very costly investment.
The other thing is that 5G signals the way work in that they only reach that far away. And they keep a lot of cross-channeling and interference with other devices connecting to 5G. So what they are going to have to do is implement many towers everywhere.
With 3G and 4G towers, sometimes you can spot them from very far away, even if driving on the highway. The distance between 5G towers is going to be very small. They may be implemented in some light posts. They might have a box attached to a light post; you won’t even know it’s a 5G Tower.
But there will be more numbers throughout your city to allow all those various devices to connect to a bounced signal off the nearest communication Tower. So 5G technology, as some companies are theorizing, might be implemented in 2022.
Even some companies like Airtel have implemented 5G. They might get to 5G technology in 2022 but will not fully achieve it. And the carriers might be like, “Hey, we have 5g cell phone technology,” when it is just like 4G. It didn’t achieve it well, but they set the bar lower because they said, wow, this is mu.
