The simple answer to this question is that 5G enables new services (requiring significantly higher speeds and much lower latency) compared to those possible over 4G. But how, and why 4G isn’t capable of driving such features? The purpose of this note is to explain the reasons. In the process, we will also discuss how operators can leverage such capabilities for generating new revenue streams – a must under the current dynamics, where voice and data has already been commoditized.
Multiple Beams
The 5G system is capable of driving the radio signals into narrow beams, each serving an individual customer. This is quite unlike the conventional system, where a single radio beam is designed to serve all the customers located in the sector of the base station. But why it is so important to break the radio signals into narrow beams? As doing so significantly enhances the capacity of the overall system compared to those running on single beams. This is due to the theoretical data carrying limit of the radio channel defined by the Shannon-Hartley equation as explained below.
