5G for Designers

5G is here and it will be the future technology when it comes to connectivity. Despite all its outlying controversies and debates regarding data security, privacy and health, it seems like the technology will prevail. And since the rise and widespread implementation of this technology is inevitable (large corporations and Governments are way too invested in this by now for it to be not so), Product Design professionals need to prime themselves accordingly to operate in the 5G space. Developing a working knowledge of 5G for designers is essential because many of the innovations and solutions that the businesses shall now explore around 5G technology will be harder to navigate without doing so.

However, the existing descriptions and explanations of 5G as technology across the web or other resources are pretty technical. For example, concepts like network slicing, which often becomes the central discourse for 5G, can be complex for designers to comprehend without a background in hard-core communications technology. It is also unclear what differentiates 5G from 4G or other high-speed, high-bandwidth technologies like Wi-Fi. After all, 4G or Wi-Fi, serviced with Fibre to home/office infrastructure, also provides fairly robust connectivity to fulfil many of the 5G use cases currently discussed in the industry.

Therefore, the purpose of this article is to provide a simple, non-technical (as non-technical as a technology topic can be) explanation of the fundamental properties of 5G that sets it apart from 4G and Wi-Fi — or any other connectivity protocol before it. I shall be listing and expanding on five basic properties of 5G around which most use cases and applications shall pivot in the industry. Once understood in this simple form, designers could be better prepared to operate and collaborate in projects that leverage 5G technology — I hope.

Before we discuss these five basic properties, it is crucial that we first develop a fundamental understanding of how wireless communication works.

ALL wireless communication happens on Radio Waves. Everything from submarines communicating underwater to your TV, Mobile Phone to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth — all utilise Radio Waves. If data (communication) has to travel from point A to point B wirelessly, it has to ride the Radio Waves of one kind or other. To further understand the meaning of “the kind” of Radio Waves, the Radio Waves have a frequency range of 3 Hz — called the Extremely Low Frequency — to 3000 GHz — called Tremendously High Frequency (Yes, they literally use the word Tremendously here). This is what is called the complete Spectrum of Radio Waves. This spectrum has various Bands in it, which is nothing but frequency ranges within this spectrum. Each Band has a starting frequency and an ending frequency. In Design Speak, one could draw an analogy to a colour spectrum. We all know that the visible colour spectrum starts from Violet and ends on Red. In between, there are many colours like Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow and Red. Each colour is nothing but a range defined on this entire spectrum of visible colours. In the case of Radio communication, the definition of a range of radio frequencies within the full spectrum is called a Band instead of a Colour.

Out of all of these Bands, consumers like you and me should mainly be concerned about five bands:

1. Medium Frequency (MF),

2. High Frequency (HF),

3. Very High Frequency (VHF),

4. Ultra High Frequency (UHF), and

5. Extremely High Frequency (EHF).

Most of the electronics that we use, including but not limited to Radio, TV, 3G/4G/LTE Mobile, Laptops, Wi-Fi routers etc., communicate in one of these five bands.

Out of these five bands, two Bands are the holy grail of radio communication for devices that we use the most. And these Bands are:

1. Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Band, and

2. Super High Frequency (SHF).

UHF Band has a frequency range of 300 to 3000 MHz. (Extracting directly from Wikipedia) Television broadcasts, microwave oven, microwave devices/communications, radio astronomy, mobile phones, wireless LAN, Bluetooth, ZigBee, GPS and two-way radios such as land mobile, FRS and GMRS radios, amateur radio, satellite radio, Remote control Systems, ADSB, all operate in this Band.

SHF Band has a frequency range of 3–30 GHz (or 3000 MHz to 30,000 MHz). Applications like Radio astronomy, microwave devices/communications, wireless LAN, DSRC, most modern radars, communications satellites, cable and satellite television broadcasting, DBS, amateur radio, satellite radio operate in this Band.

If we further zoom in to each of these Bands, each of the different devices/applications mentioned above have their own frequency range (a sub-band, so to speak) in which they operate. Mobile phones, for example, work in the range of 698–806 MHz within SHF. On the other hand, Wi-Fi routers and devices typically communicate on 2.4 GHz to 6 GHz, a frequency range spanning across the tail-end of UHF and the starting range of SHF. You can think of these finer frequency ranges in the colour spectrum analogy as each colour’s shades. Red, for example, has many shades within its spectrum range.

The most important takeaway from this explanation of Radio Spectrum and the Bands concept is that different applications and devices work on a specific frequency range and ONLY in that frequency range. So, for example, a device designed to operate in range A will not operate in Range B. Because of this situation of different device types working on different frequency ranges, different hardware infrastructure is required to provide connectivity to them. For example, you need a tower to get signals to your phone and a Wi-Fi router to connect to broadband. And you need a Bluetooth chip in your wireless speakers to connect to your phone to play songs. This dependence on different hardware types to provide connectivity to different device types has been a significant impediment in how things got connected to each other and the internet thus far. This is a crucial insight for understanding one of the key advantages of 5G.

Now that we understand the fundamentals of wireless communication, we are ready to discuss the five key advantages of 5G technology that I promised in the beginning.

Let us begin with the two most straightforward and widely known ones first: High Bandwidth and High Speed.

Higher Bandwidth?— It is common knowledge that 5G bandwidth is significantly more than 4G in a typical comparison. 5G provides bandwidth in the range of 1 Gbps or higher, which is quite high compared to the 200 Mbps range of 4G. It means that a relatively higher number of users can enjoy higher speeds over a shared internet connection. It is important to differentiate between network speed and bandwidth here. Where the speed is about how fast you can download a movie, bandwidth is about how many more users like yourself can download movies simultaneously on the same shared connection without any significant impact on the speed at which they can download. In Design Speak, think of this as coffee running through a pipeline, being supplied directly to your desk (How wonderful would that be though?). A pipeline designed to deliver coffee at a certain speed to you may fill up your cup quickly enough to your satisfaction. But if the pipeline coffee provider decided to put one more outlet on the same pipeline for another Designer, the speed of filling up your cup is now reduced to half — I know, it sounds brutal. This is because that pipeline is designed for a certain Bandwidth. On the other hand, a wider pipeline can carry much more coffee simultaneously for many more designers to fill up their cups, without having to compromise on the speed — Yay, all is well that ends well! 5G enables a significantly wider pipeline for many users to get their internet connectivity at high speeds.

Higher Speed?— To some extent, it is already covered in the previous point but let us address this with a little more focus. Unlike bandwidth, which is about how many people can share a connection, speed is about how fast the internet will work for each user on the shared connection — provided the bandwidth is sufficient to accommodate all those users. This is another area where 5G scores significantly higher than 4G. 5G speeds will be in the range of 200 – 400 Mbps compared to about 25 Mbps of 4G — on a rough average. If you ever heard of the statement “5G can download a movie in seconds”, it stems from this.

The next property of 5G technology is probably the most significant in terms of its supremacy over 4G and other connectivity protocols.

Low Latency?— If there was one 5G property that contributed the most in making it way better than 4G in terms of what was not possible and now could be possible over the internet, it is the Low Latency. Whereas 4G or other protocols like Wi-Fi serviced by Fibre could for once argue about producing similar speed and bandwidth (with the help of some hefty network hardware setup), there is no debate when it comes to 5Gs supremacy in the area of Low Latency. In case you do not know what latency means, the next time you run a speed test for your connection, the initial delay before the needle moves and buzzes frantically is caused by latency. It is often the first number you see during the speed test — represented in ms (milliseconds). Before 5G, most network setups would not provide a latency lower than 20–30 ms on average — below 20 ms on outstanding networks. On 5G, it is possible to reach latency levels of 1ms or lower. This level of low latency is a game-changer. Whereas in terms of speed and bandwidth, many of the 5G use cases can — in theory — be fulfilled by 4G, the use cases that pivot particularly around the property of low latency of 5G can simply not be catered by any other connectivity protocol thus far. This particular property is the most exciting one and therefore I would like to expand a little bit more on this.

To appreciate the importance of low latency communication, let us think about our bodies for a moment. The average reaction time for humans is 0.15 seconds for a touch stimulus. That is about 150 milliseconds. Now imagine how many things you would not have been able to perform in your daily life if the reaction time was more than that. If you were to accidentally grab the handle of a hot pan (creatives are known for doing that kind of stuff), you wouldn’t jump, scream, drop the pan and shake your hand violently up until perhaps your skin was ripping off because it got stuck on the handle. Sorry for making this so dramatic. But that is the importance of low latency in communication. It reduces the time delay between signal sent and action performed over a network. In this painful example of grabbing a hot pan, the network in play is the network of our nervous system, and in the case of internet connectivity, the network would be the 5G internet Network. It means then that devices will now be able to connect to each other with a way — WAY — lower latency. With such low latency levels, for the first time, communication can be said to be happening in real-time. This ability to send information over the internet with a latency of less than 1 ms opens up many use cases that were simply not possible before. All the popularly discussed applications like surgeons performing remote surgeries with the help of robotic arms connected over the internet on another continent, and that of mine workers operating an excavator from a remote location, all fall into this category of use cases enabled by the low latency property of 5G. As product design professionals, this is probably the most exciting avenue for innovation as this ability to communicate with near-zero latency simply did not exist before. Most use cases and applications conceived around this property of 5G communication would likely be the most novel.

While the first three 5G properties — namely bandwidth, speed and low latency — can be considered most exciting and beneficial from the end-user perspective, the next two are probably the most exciting from the service providers standpoint. This is because these two properties enable businesses to save costs and service their customers in a better way at the same time.

Flexibility?— Earlier, when we discussed the fundamentals of communication technology, we established that one of the major impediments of the current communication technology is that different hardware infrastructure is required to cater to different devices operating on different ranges (Bands) of radio communication. Traditionally, each communication protocol ran on a completely different set of hardware. For example, Wi-FI hardware cannot serve people looking for 4G connectivity for a phone. 4G hardware cannot communicate with Bluetooth devices. And, a Zigbee chip in a smart meter could not connect to the internet directly.

Welcome, 5G. With 5G, one can cover all the use cases with just one set of hardware. To illustrate with an example, imagine I am a Movers and Packers company. I have a fleet of trucks that need to be tracked for their movement through GPS. And I have a warehouse where I have to monitor and account for the inventory by detecting the movement through the low-frequency chips on each box. I also need High-speed internet for my staff in the office building. Plus, I need mobile connections for my employees in the field. Presently, my only option to make this happen is to approach different companies that can provide these services to me. Some can - maybe - offer me up to two of these connectivity requirements but most likely not more. First, I need GPS connected trucks for which I will have to go to a GPS company. Then, I need a high-speed internet service provider and their hardware on my premises (Fibre, Routers and so on). Finally, I will have to speak to a separate vendor who can provide me with low-data, low-bandwidth detection and monitoring of my inventory in the warehouse in the form of something like a Zigbee networker of sensors and receivers and nodes. I then need to have a hand-shake between this vendor and my Mobility/Internet vendor to relay this information over long distances. So, it isn’t so straightforward for me to make this whole system work in a seamless and cost and time-effective manner. Too many different kinds of hardware are involved, and various vendors can only provide hardware for a specific connectivity need. With 5G, all of these requirements can be covered on a single network, powered by the same hardware agnostic to a particular use case’s data/speed/distance requirements.

This ability to cater to different devices on a single network makes 5G a highly desirable technology for businesses. Because now, companies can provide end-to-end IoT solutions rather than pieces of connectivity to their customers to run their operations. This is Network Slicing in a nutshell. This composite offer by network providers to provide connectivity at different frequency bands on a single 5G network infrastructure to run a multitude of devices running on different frequency bands is called a Slice.

Scalability?— The last of the five characteristics of 5G technology that puts it apart from the prevailing communication protocols is its ability to scale on demand. Let us consider another example to understand this. Imagine I am a Gaming startup. My product is excellent, and my userbase exploded. I have a scheduled online gaming event coming up in two weeks, and I know that my connectivity infrastructure is just not good enough to host the event with all those newly acquired users. In a non-5G world, this is perhaps that Geoffrey Moore’s famous “edge of the Chasm” that I am unlikely to cross and am therefore likely doomed. Since I am a startup, my fate depends on the success of this upcoming online event. And I just don’t have the means to beef up my connectivity infrastructure in such a short time — financially or practically. In the 5G world, this would be as simple as me logging into my 5G network provider’s self-service portal, entering the bandwidth I need, for how long I need it and done. That is the magic of scalability on 5G. Not just that. In the case of 5G, this control of how much bandwidth is required, on what frequency range (the Band) and for how long — in other words, the composition of my Slice — is entirely digitally controlled through software. It means that organisations, no matter how small or big, will be able to scale up their connectivity based on their unique situation in a highly customised manner.

There you have it. That is 5G and its five most essential characteristics explained in as simple and non-technical a language that I could come up with. As designers, if we can grasp these five characteristics and some fundamental knowledge of communication technology, I think it should be enough for us to navigate in the era of 5G connectivity. Furthermore, I hope that this knowledge will help you collaborate better with your colleagues who are not just designers but, perhaps more importantly, other stakeholders who come from different functions like Product, Tech and Business. As I mentioned at the start, these are the main characteristics around which most (if not all) 5G use cases will pivot.

Please feel free to get in touch for any comments, clarifications or conversations.