5G: The Best, or a Waste of Money?

5G is the internet of the future! Right? The truth is, 5G is not all that it’s hyped up to be. 5G is supposed to be a super fast, ultra wideband network, but do we really need it? The short answer is no. Although companies are saying that it will be 25x faster and have 40 times less latency, 4g is already incredibly fast and the latency is shorter than a blink of the eye. There are are many pros to 5g, but they are not worth the cost. Since 5g is faster, the wavelength of the signal would be much, much shorter. This means that it would travel less distance before it hits a dead zone. You may have encountered a dead zone on 4g internet if you have driven on a secluded road in the middle of no where and your cellular signal dropped to 1 or 0 bars. 5g internet will have a lot more dead zones because the signal will travel a shorter distance. This will require many more cell towers, each of which costs a lot of money. As well as the high cost, the signal might have such a high wavelength that it could stop when it hits something like a concrete wall. Two more reasons that 5g is not worth are that you will have to buy an entirely new phone in order to use it, and there has been research into the correlation between high wavelength radiation and brain disease. One benefit to 5g is that it would make data storage easier through the cloud, but that one thing pales in comparison to all the other reasons not to have 5g. This relates to engineering because 5g internet has to be engineered and they have to build and design the cell towers.

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https://www.idropnews.com/news/the-iphone-12s-5g-speeds-come-with-a-cost/145720/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/08/5g-speed/