 5G internet. We've been talking about it for a while and now it's finally starting to arrive. It's a revolutionary kind of internet that promises to change everything from your phone to home internet to more futuristic fields like self-driving cars and even remote surgery. But 5G has also been in the headlines lately for a lot of bad reasons with bizarre conspiracy theories and rumors. So to help clear things up we're going to explain to you what exactly 5G is, how we got here, what the technology behind it is, and any real concerns that might exist around the new technology. So what is 5G? Well 5G or fifth generation is the next step in mobile internet technology. It's what all of the next wave of phones and tablets are going to use for speeds that are even faster than the LTE networks that we already have. Now our news editor and reviewer Chris Welch has actually been testing all these networks for a while already so he can actually tell you what it's like to use these speeds today. Okay so all the big US carriers are well underway with rolling out 5G and by the end of this year you should be able to get it wherever you live in the US. But what 5G means on each carrier is different. Speeds are different, coverage is different. So for the last year I've been testing out all the networks Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint is now part of that just to see how fast it is and what a difference it makes in your day-to-day life. So let me try and explain. Now Verizon's 5G is blazing fast. You can get download speeds of over 1 gigabyte per second. That's up to 10 times faster than most home wi-fi connections. You can download a whole season of a TV show in just minutes. But the problem is coverage. Verizon's 5G is very very spotty. It's there on one street and gone the next. And indoor coverage is pretty much non-existent. That's because Verizon bases its whole 5G plan for now on what's called high band millimeter wave technology. You've seen it in those commercials as ultra wideband 5G. But the issue is the signal can't travel very far so in any city where it wants to roll out 5G Verizon's got to put up all these nodes all over the city. And that's not really practical to do nationwide so later on this year Verizon's also going to turn on its low band 5G network. But there the speeds aren't that much faster than what your LTE phone can do today. So for now Verizon's 5G network isn't really worth upgrading to a new phone for unless you've got a node like right outside your apartment or your house. T-Mobile has the most comprehensive 5G plan of all the US carriers. It's also using millimeter wave on the high end plus Sprint's mid band spectrum in the middle and its own low band 5G at the base. Now Sprint's mid band spectrum is much faster than LTE is today. I was in Texas testing their 5G network and I got speeds of 300 megabytes per second. And unlike with Verizon I could count on keeping that 5G signal wherever I went. Think of mid band as the sweet spot for 5G. It's much faster than phones today. It's not quite as fast as millimeter wave but it makes a big difference day to day. And last is AT&T which has a similar strategy to Verizon in that you get the high band millimeter wave and low band sub 6 5G but they're missing that middle part of the cake that mid band spectrum. So you'll have really fast speeds in small parts of some cities and somewhat faster speeds than your phone today everywhere else. Now none of this is to be confused with AT&T's fake 5G which is called 5G-E. You've probably seen it in your phone status bar at times. That's just fast LTE. It's got nothing to do with real 5G that's rolling out right now. These are still the early days of 5G. We've seen less than a dozen of phones hit the market that offer these new faster speeds and some of the early ones were very buggy and would overheat in the summer. Now those concerns along with battery life have largely been overcome with Qualcomm's latest chips. We've seen those chips in the Galaxy S20, the LG V60 and the OnePlus 8. All really great phones. But we're still waiting for that first iPhone from Apple that has 5G and that's removed to come later on this fall in 2020. So when we talk about 5G we're not really talking about anything that's radically different than our current and past mobile technology. Let's put that in perspective. The earliest generation of mobile technology, 1G networks, were launched back in the 80s. Unlike the other generations, 1G networks used analog signals and could really only do voice calls. You've probably seen phones that use 1G networks like the Motorola DynaTAC, that classic oversized cell phone from 80s movies. 2G networks kick things up a notch. More bandwidth meant that in addition to calls, users could start sending data, enabling text messages, SMS, and even pictures, MMS. Later versions of 2G phones could even access basic internet like the most famous 2G device ever sold, the original iPhone. 3G networks offered even more bandwidth and faster speeds and 4G LTE, which is what most of our current phones use, made truly fast wireless internet a possibility. And 5G, as Chris mentioned earlier, takes things a step beyond even that, with speeds that are faster in some cases than home Wi-Fi. But the key thing is that all these technologies aren't fundamentally different. They're all based on the same science. Which means that it's time to talk about the electromagnetic spectrum. This is the EM spectrum, a diagram of the different types of electromagnetic radiation that exists. EM radiation is what we call a wave of photons traveling through space. And all EM radiation, be it AM radio waves, X-rays, infrared, or even visible light, fall somewhere on the electromagnetic spectrum. The difference between harmful X-ray radiation and benign AM radio is simply in the amount of energy it has. Now, on the right end of the spectrum are low energy radio and microwaves, which are characterized by low frequency and long wavelengths. As we travel up the spectrum, wavelengths get smaller, frequencies get higher, and the amount of energy being transmitted gets higher too. AM radio, for example, broadcasts between 540 and 1600 kilohertz. It's low energy, but those low wavelengths can travel incredibly far, up to 100 miles. And depending on atmospheric conditions, they can potentially span the globe by bouncing off the atmosphere. But again, quality suffers. We hear sound originating at that very moment, hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Go up the spectrum, though, to FM radio, which broadcasts at between 88 and 108 megahertz, and you've got more bandwidth, which allows for higher quality broadcasts, but your usable range decreases. It's the same basic idea with cellular data. New generations allow us to improve our transmission technology, which leads to increased bandwidth and higher frequencies, which in turn leads to faster speeds. But at the core, it's all the same basic technology. And the different types of 5G actually illustrate this really well. For example, take AT&T and T-Mobile's low band networks, which Chris referred to. They're in the 600 megahertz and 850 megahertz bands, effectively the same area of spectrum as existing LTE. But the fact that they're new bands of spectrum that aren't already clogged up with existing customers, combined with new transmission technologies, means that these low band 5G networks can offer faster speeds than LTE, even though they're basically using the same spectrum bands as LTE. And that low band nature also means that they can transmit over a much wider range than other types of 5G. Its wide T-Mobile, for example, can claim to have nationwide 5G coverage, while Verizon is stuck to just a few street corners. Next is mid band 5G, which is basically just used by Sprint and now T-Mobile, which owns Sprint. Located at the 2.5 gigahertz range of the spectrum, it offers faster speeds than low band 5G, but it has more limited range. For comparison, 2.5 gigahertz is about the same area of the electromagnetic spectrum as your home Wi-Fi. Now, mid band is middle of the road in almost every respect. It's higher frequency and more bandwidth than low band 5G, but it's not going to be quite the speeds and frequency that you'll get from millimeter wave, which is the ultra fast 5G. Now, these are located around 30 gigahertz, much higher frequency than any of the other types of 5G, and they offer blazing fast speeds, the ones Chris mentioned earlier from Verizon and in limited areas T-Mobile and AT&T. But those radio waves are also really small, between one and 10 millimeters, hence the name, which are actually really bad at passing through objects like walls or buildings, which means that the range is incredibly limited. So even though it offers the fastest 5G speeds, it's also the 5G that you'll probably end up using the least, because that rollout is just going to be really small. But those increases in bandwidth are only part of the story. A lot of the improvements in 5G come from new transmission technology, things like carrier aggregation, which combine multiple LTE bands into one data stream for faster speeds, or MIMO antennas, or multiple input multiple output, where we use antenna arrays made up of lots of little antennas to improve conductivity. But is 5G, or really any cellular radiation, safe? Well, there have been a lot of inaccuracies going around about 5G. Some are completely absurd, like the idea that 5G somehow caused the coronavirus. But the simple answer is that 5G is basically the same as any other type of cellular radio technology, and we already have a pretty good idea that cellular radiation is not harmful. Of course, people are concerned about possible effects on the formation of cancer. If you use a mobile phone a lot, or if you've been exposed continuously to radiation from cell towers, there's a lot of studies available on that sort of effect, but it has never been proven that indeed there is a carcinogenic effect of exposed radio frequency radiation. And there's also concern that exposure to radio frequency fields, for instance, the higher frequencies that 5G is going to use, that that may result in adverse effects on the immune system, and that people may be more susceptible for infection by the COVID-19 virus. There's no proof, no indication whatsoever, that there's any effect on the immune system from exposed to radio frequency fields. Now, I know that cellular radiation falls into the non-ionizing portion of the spectrum. Can you talk a little more about the differences between non-ionizing and ionizing radiation? Ionizing radiation has a very high energy content, and because of that, it is possible that if you're exposed to that sort of radiation, that chemical bonds in the body, that they are damaged and broken, and that may result in uncontrolled cell growth, which may result in the formation of cancer. That sort of effect, breakage of chemical bonds, is something that is not possible with non-ionizing radiation, with the type of radiation that cellular technology uses, because the energy content of that type of radiation is not enough to result in such chemical breakage. The entire spectrum of non-ionizing radiation, up to UV radiation, is something that has no energy content that is high enough to break chemical bonds. Heating is the only proven effect of exposed to radio frequency radiation. While 5G doesn't pose any health risks, there are going to be practical issues with the transition to 5G. Some of the growing pains are just switching to a new generation of technology. Things like more expensive plans, that faster data speed means that you can burn through your data cap really quickly, and that's something that we're going to have to figure out. The first wave of 5G phones were more expensive, although prices are starting to come down. And of course, there's just building out the networks. The low range of mid-band and millimeter wave networks means that it'll take longer and cost more to build more towers to get that kind of coverage that people expect. The good news is, is that we've already started. Qualcomm, for example, has made 5G the default in all of its new chips, and flagship phones in 2020 from companies like Samsung, Apple, OnePlus, are either already shipping with 5G or expect to have it by the end of the year. And that's to say nothing of the big advances that carriers like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T have made in building out the actual networks. And more importantly, none of these issues are really new. The transition from 2G to 3G or from 3G to LTE solved similar problems, and the tech industry was able to solve them. The only difference is that we're a lot more reliant on our phones than we were 10 to 15 years ago, and that's why these issues seem so much more important now. But the key thing to remember is that 5G and the technologies around it aren't really new. It's just our perspective on them and our reliance on our phones that's really changed. Thanks so much for watching. We've been really working on a 5G explainer for a while, so we're really glad to have put this together. If you have any other questions about 5G or technology in general, let us know.