5G promises to save new energy for digital technology

In a study conducted late last year, Hischier and his team pointed out that within a decade, the natural cost of sending one unit of data to a Swiss mobile network should drop by 85 percent. Most of the savings will come from the 5G migration. His team's work included the natural cost of building new horns and upgrading old ones.

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Almost all apps and applications on wireless devices today are constantly connected to the internet. They drag the photos, videos, and other files you want to remote data centers. Apps and applications that use cloud computing do their processing on these data centers, too. Data often flows between phones and data centers over Wi-Fi or mobile networks. That information is transmitted by radio waves. Blasting the waves requires energy. And today's networks can be very wasteful. But the emerging 5G technology can be very helpful here.

Starting around 2020, telecommunications companies have begun rolling out this brand-new network. It uses 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi signals. They operate at a much higher frequency than on the networks they switch to. 5G is usually faster and uses less power. By 2023, 5G networks are expected to become standard in the United States and many other industrialized countries.

The mobile network has antennas that send and receive radio signals. Before 5G, these antennas were attached to the top of a tall tower. They consisted of a circle of a few miles, also known as a cell. When you are within one of these cells, the phone can use a network. The farther away the tower, the harder it is to find a signal.

You would think that 5G would use larger towers to reach farther. In fact, the opposite is true. 5G relies on many, small cells. 5G horns that offer fast speeds up to 500 meters (approximately 1,500 meters). When you combine all the small cells covering the same area with one large, small one that uses less energy, explains Kerry Hinton. Now retired, the engineer had previously worked at the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. There he had studied the power of telecommunications.

Smaller cells are less likely to waste energy by covering sparsely populated areas, Hinton notes. He gives an example of stadiums and entertainment venues. When an event happens, most people need a network. A small cell can support them all. But at night or when no other events are taking place (such as during the coronavirus epidemic), the cell can close. "Small cells make the network smarter," Hinton said.

5G also compresses data over previous networks, such as 4G. It can therefore send “many details at once,” explains Roland Hischier. He is an environmentalist at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in St Gallen. This means your fast uploads and downloads [ up to 600 times ], depending on the average. Compression also reduces the power used to send each unit of data.

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@Winy