Two things that make 5G more of a
nuisance than anything else right now are
the fact that few advanced services are
available nationwide, and that security is
more of an issue with 5G. As the upgraded
service becomes more widely used, it will
also open users up to faster potential attacks
from cyber villains. Not to mention, the more
your cell phone IP address is spread around,
the greater the risk of
increasing avenues of
cyberattacks. In other
words, if you are
smartphone savvy
enough to program
your refrigerator, your
doorbell and your
self-driving car with
your phone, some
of those companies
may not have optimal
security features
installed. That means
that hackers are savvy
enough to trace that communication back to
your cell phone’s IP address and hack away.
If you use your phone for work, 5G will also
reduce latency — the time it takes for a cell
phone (or other connected device) to make
a request from a server and get a response —
to virtually zero. Communicating with cloud
platforms will be much faster and easier as
well.
To get a good mental image of the change
reduced latency could make in our daily
lives, let’s go back to the self-driving car.
Many people don’t trust the thought of such
a thing, and they certainly aren’t the norm
yet on our roads. But let’s think about this for
a moment: A car with its own brain and an
option to make its own decisions could save
lives every day. How, you ask? The lower the
latency rate of a computerized device, the
quicker it can send and receive information.
It takes 200 milliseconds for a device
working on a 4G service to respond, in
comparison with a one millisecond response
from a 5G device. A millisecond is 1/1000 of
a second.
The average reaction time for humans to
a visual stimulus is 250 milliseconds, or 1/4
of a second. When it comes to driving, a
professional driver might potentially have
a mental capacity
of responding to
danger or change
in the roadway at
around 190-200
milliseconds, and
that’s with proper
training. Imagine
now that your car
could react 250
times faster than
you can.
Imagine it could
also respond
to enormous
amounts of bits of incoming information
and could also communicate its reactions
back to other vehicles and road signals …
all within milliseconds. To take that thought
a step further, if you are driving a regular car
at 60 mph, your reaction distance is about
33 yards before you hit the brakes. With a
self-driving car with a brain running on a 5G
service, there is one millisecond of reaction
time. That means your car would progress
about an inch down the road before an
appropriate reaction kicked in.
You can take that same example of 5G
and apply to something as banal as virtual
reality in a video game, to remote brain
telesurgery. That is where the possibilities
start to become endless. In the near future
it might be that we will see a cleaner, safer
environment for our future generations,
thanks in part to 5G technology.
March/April • 2021 • GASPARILLA MAGAZINE 65