Snapshot from our Compact Dashboard monitoring real-time latency and reliability of a 5G network
In a wireless environment, a sustained end-to-end response time under 15ms is a fantastic technological achievement. For us at LatenceTech, such ultra-low latency is the key feature and differentiator of 5G mobile networks. We are confident it will have a greater impact than bandwidth improvements and higher reliability.
But first, let’s have a quick reminder of the key 5G characteristics starting with the “top 4” as shown below:
Top 4 new strengths of 5G cellular technology
Enhancing Mobile Broadband with 10-25Gbps + per radio; up to 1Gbps + per user/device
Much lower end-to-end latency from ~50 ms in 4G/LTE networks to single digit, as low as 5ms in 5G when combined with EDGE. In many cases, the bandwidth shall be about 10x larger than 4G/LTE.
Much higher reliability with the possibility of reaching, for the first time for a wireless network, the famous “5 nines uptime” or 99,999% which correspond to an average of less than 6 minutes downtime per year.
EDGE capabilities at the radio site with compute (CPU/GPU), network, storage capacity to be shared amongst applications.
Other very important characteristics of the 5G cellular technology are:
Enhanced and more flexible machine to machine communication allowing devices to consume less power to communicate and permitting a higher density of connected IoT devide per cell site.
More and new spectrum available such as higher band in the 24-39 GHz range) and improved spectral efficiency
Cloud native Core – an optimized core network build using Network Virtual Functions (NFV) enabling dynamic and automated network topology and configuration.
Network slicing enabling segregation of virtual networks with their own characteristics.
In our opinion, all the new 5G strengths are important but the ultra-low latency is the real disruptor, especially when combined with high reliability.
Ultra-low latency is opening up new possibilities and will positively impact the value chain of many industries. Ultra-Low latency now allows multiple innovative and new use cases in the industrial field by replacing inadequate and cumbersome legacy networks, many of them reaching their limits or unable to provide appropriate quality of service. 5G’s low-latency permits instant interactions with and between connected objects such as autonomous vehicles, industrial IoT devices or robots.
5G connectivity with sustained low-latency will play a key role in the near future in many industrial services and probably in some consumer services. We consider that it is now critical to properly and continuously measure it, understand its “behavior” in different environments, detect anomalies in near real-time, predict future variations and identify ways to improve it.
This is the core belief behind our solution.