5G IS THE FUTURE: IF LOCAL NIMBYS AND FEDERAL BUREAUCRATS DON'T MESS IT UP.

• Author: Boehm, Eric

A DECADE AGO, the iPhone was still a novelty. Apple's App Store was barely a year old. Online gaming required consoles or computers, Wi-Fi connections, and power outlets. Your phone could make calls and receive emails, but it would be two years before Facebook even had a mobile app.

Today your phone is a portal to entertainment and essential services, from online games to driving directions to health care records, all of which is available to you just about anywhere.

Less than a decade from now, an even better wireless internet system might let you play a console-quality game on your phone, then click an app to video chat with a physician who can read your vital signs and prescribe medication--all without leaving your house, or perhaps while zipping around town in an autonomous vehicle.

The fourth generation of wireless telecommunications technology, or "4G," allowed for streaming video, integrated mapping apps such as Waze, and an explosion in social media, from Snapchat to Instagram--though few people would have predicted those specific developments when 4G debuted about a decade ago.

With "5G," the possibilities are bigger and weirder. But the leap to the next level of mobile internet connectivity will require a complete overhaul of the infrastructure that's formed the backbone of cellphone networks for the past two decades. New antennas will communicate with faster microchips inside your phone, using a new type of signal in previously unused bandwidth. Some wireless companies are already selling "SG-ready" devices and marketing their networks as ready to "evolve" to 5G.

For now, those are mostly marketing ploys. Even if your phone says it's 5G E, you are not actually experiencing the new network yet. A tiny number of cities have small 5G networks up and running, But as with 4G, the really cool stuff will take more time.

That is, if the government doesn't make a mess of it.

Upgrading existing cellphone networks to 5G will require cooperation from local governments and a hands-off approach from Washington. Unfortunately, the many ways in which modern telecommunications technology intersects with the government's regulatory, economic, and security concerns--and, increasingly, how it figures into the geopolitical "race" between the U.S. and China--provide ample opportunity for bureaucratic interference. All of which means that 5G technology has become the latest battlefield for an age-old struggle between the forces of stasis and of innovation.

"There's about every geopolitical, technical, and economic angle you can imagine," says Shane Tews, a tech policy fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. That creates plenty of opportunities for government meddling. Some cities are upset that federal guidelines determine where critical 5G infrastructure can be located, potentially depriving localities of achance to shake down telecom companies. The Trump administration suggested--and then backed away from--a plan to nationalize part of the 5G rollout, taking decision-making power out of the private sector's hands. And regulators at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have been fighting to keep other agencies from slowing 5G's deployment for frivolous bureaucratic reasons.

"Government can best serve the public interest through regulatory humility," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who has championed a hands-off approach to 5G, said at a conference in Austin, Texas, last year. "Instead of viewing innovation as a problem to be regulated based on rules from the past, government should see innovation's potential, guided by markets that embrace the future."

FASTER GAMES, BETTER HEALTH

TO UNDERSTAND WHY gaming--and everything else done on a mobile network--will be radically different in a 5G world, you have to understand two related ways to measure the speed of a mobile connection.

The first is bit rate, a term for download and upload speeds. A solid 4G mobile connection might provide download speeds of about 50 megabits per second (Mbps), but average 5G connections will operate at roughly 1 gigabyte per second--about 20 times faster than 4G. Qualcomm, one of the world's biggest chip makers, has demonstrated 5G microchips capable of handling downloads at up to 4.5 gigabytes per second, though that sort of speed is unlikely to be common. In practical terms, a feature-length movie that would have taken 24 hours to download on a 3G connection and about 6 minutes on a 4G connection will take just 10 seconds with 5G.

The second component that determines the speed of a mobile internet connection is something called latency. It's the gap in time between when a mobile device sends a command and when that command is received by a server. Even though the gaps can be mere milliseconds, they add up quickly when a mobile game or other app is sending and receiving millions of commands every minute.

Think about it like this: Each shot fired at an in-game target requires your phone to send a series of commands to a server in the cloud. The server determines whether the shot was a hit or a miss, and then the network reports that information back to your phone to be displayed on the screen. It all happens so fast that you don't even think about it--unless a laggy connection ruins the experience.

Mobile gaming exploded during the 4G era, but it's still limited compared to what you can play on a console (such as an Xbox) or a desktop gaming rig. Mobile connections just aren't as fast as wired connections. But 5G technology makes it possible to imagine a Netflix-like experience that requires no console, just a phone or other portable device, with games run completely on remote servers.

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