4G: Fast phones. 5G: Faster phones. Neither of them can give you cancer or cause Covid or are Bill Gates mind control or whatever else the cookers are coming up with these days. The best explanation I’ve seen is this hilarious and educational video from ElectroBoom: https://youtu.be/i4pxw4tYeCU

Lots of people getting hung up on specific details… but the actual practical benefit of 5G over 4G is simple:

5G can have an order of magnitude more devices connected at once. This will allow us to have more things connected to the network.

4G ran up against the limit to how many devices per square mile can be connected a long time ago in densely populated areas. The transition to 5G has solved the issue. It’s even solved it for 4G users, since there are now less 4G users.

Lots of fancy math to fit more information into the same amount of radio waves.

I wrote my Bachelor’s thesis on the software that runs 5G networks.

4G (speaking about LTE) has been wildly successful since its introduction in 2009. It replaced the circuit switched network used in 2G and 3G with Evolved Packet Core, a network that delivered network packets directly to the phone using real IP addresses.

Now, a decade after 4G’s release, technology has progressed a lot. What telecom companies call 5G are a collection of new technologies that are all coming out around the same time, but are mostly compatible with existing 4G phones and networks.

The big new technology is “5G new radio” (5G NR), which is a new optimized radio protocol that allows for faster speeds, lower power consumption, and the ability to use new extremely high bandwidth frequencies in the 50-400GHz range, on top of the existing 600-6000MHz range. Cellphones say that they’re connected to 5G when they start speaking with the 5G NR protocol. I believe telecom companies can support 5G NR just by upgrading the cell tower antennas.

These newer antennas supporting this new radio protocol are also being built with beamforming tech, which allows towers to electronically “point” the antennas at nearby phones, improving signal.

Finally, the big upgrade underneath the surface is the migration to virtualize network functions, which is allowing telecom companies to run their networks using flexible lightweight computers inside the towers, instead of big bulky pre-built appliances in some big datacenter. This makes the network backbones faster, easier to program, and makes them cheaper for telecom companies to build out.

Wikipedia gives a bit of a summary about these features here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Technology

There are two 5Gs. There is Sub-6GHz-5G and Milimetrewave 5G.

Sub-6GHz-5G operates in roughly the same frequency ranges as 4G. Radiation-wise it is pretty much exactly the same as 4G. The cell size is similar, the frequences are similar, range and object penetration are similar. What is different is that 4G was built upon 3G which was built upon 2G, which means, that 4G has very complicated and inefficient signaling and overhead compared to 5G, where they decided to declutter the protocol and make the management much easier. The main benefits of Sub-6GHz-5G are for the network operator, since it makes management so much easier. The only really meaningful advantage for the users is, that 5G allows to allocate a higher bandwidth to a single user in case no other users in the cell need it right now. This is only very rarely the case, so in most cells this won’t happen often.

mmWave-5G is a different beast. It operates on frequequencies between 24-100Ghz, which is more than the max 6GHz that the otherr kind of 5G runs on. These higher frequencies are quite different. First, hardly anything else uses it, so the frequency bands are mostly empty, so you can reach incredible speeds on these bands. The problem is, there is a reason why hardly anything uses it. The range is super low (about the same range as a good wifi access point) and the object penetration is abysmal. A sheet of paper can block the 5G signal. Or a tree. Or your hand. Or your head.

So if you hold your phone the wrong way, or turn the wrong way, or have hair that covers your phone, you might not get reception at all.

So the use cases for mmWave-5G in the real world are incredibly limited, and they are usually used in a few hotspots in a larger city, just so the network providers can advertise their services as “Up to (huge number) GBit/second”.

So now for the radiation argument: Both kinds of 5G are solidly inside the non-ionizing-radiation-territory, so the only thing you can do is heat something up. And heat is something you feel, so if it doesn’t burn you it doesn’t harm you. Other than e.g. UV radiation, which is ionizing and causes skin cancer, and yet people willingly expose themselves to UV in intensities that are 10 000x or more than what they expose themselves to 5G. They even expose themselves on purpose to UV to the point that radiation sickness (=sunburn) sets in, but the same people are afraid of 5G. Go figure.

But to really disspell the fear of 5G: Sub-6-5G is radiation-wise identical to 3G, 4G and WiFi. mmWave-5G is so weak in object penetration that it gets blocked by a piece of paper or the outer layer of the skin. And the radiation exposure is incredibly tiny.

I’d recommend against discussing technical things with people who just believe random weird shit they read on the Internet. You can’t win with arguments, because they didn’t need them to believe in cancer rays in the first place.

One of the biggest changes in 5g is the separation of the control and data planes, this means downloading pix of kitties doesn’t interfere with phone control signals and gets everyone better bandwidth and responsiveness.

This also facilitates “edge computing”, which is like a tiny clouds at the base of cell phone towers, this tech is used for super fast facial recognition and things like that where sending the data all the way to the cloud and back is a few milliseconds too slow.