What is 5G?

A primer on 5G.

The 2017 Mobile World Congress trade show kicks off next week, and in addition to the plethora of new smartphones, 5G network news is expected to show up in a big way. But what exactly is 5G? Is that the same as gigabit networks? LTE Advanced? Is the whole thing just a marketing trick, like when AT&T and T-Mobile renamed HSPA+ as “4G” data to cover for their lack of LTE support? In the simplest possible definition, 5G is the fifth generation of cellular networking. It’s the next step in mobile technology, what the phones and tablets of the future will use for data, and it should make our current LTE networks as slow and irrelevant as 3G data seems now.