＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
Have you ever heard of “5G” or “Next Generation Mobile Communications”? The current “4G” generation will be replaced by the “5G” generation from 2020, which will dramatically improve communication speed.
G” is an acronym for ”generation. In this issue, we would like to introduce “5G” in an easy-to-understand manner.
１．History of “mobile communications
The history of cell phones (mobile telephones) in Japan began in 1979 with the “car telephone service” launched by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (now NTT).
This was an analog “first generation communication system” (1G) with many restrictions, such as calling being limited to urban areas, and was only used for company cars and hired cars.
In 1993, the digital “second generation communication system” (2G) was introduced. With digitization, e-mail became available, pagers and PHS4 appeared.
In 2001, the “third generation communication system” (3G) began operation, enabling data transmission at speeds that were an order of magnitude faster than those of the previous generation. NTT DoCoMo, J-Phone (now Softbank), and KDDI (au) began service with this communication system, which conforms to the “IMT-2000” standard set by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Since that time, it has become common to use the Internet on cell phones.
Around 2015, the “fourth generation communication system” (4G) started, which enables even faster communication by “using multiple radio waves simultaneously. The unit of “data transmission speed” is Mbps (megabits per second), and the maximum speed for 4G is about 150 Mbps.
4G is sufficient if all you want to do is send e-mails and SNS, or enjoy music and videos on your smartphone. However, with the rapid progress of the “Internet of Things (IoT)” (Internet of Things) and the connection of everything around us to the Internet, “traffic” (the amount of data using communication lines) is likely to increase rapidly and 4G will not be able to handle it. This is why 5G is being introduced.
２．What is “5G”?
5G is expected to have a data transmission rate of 10 Gbps (gigabits per second). Since “giga” is 1,000 times “mega,” the speed will be 10,000 Mbps, or about 100 times faster than the maximum speed of 4G. This is expected to be used for “e-sports” (*), which may become a “new Olympic sport” in the future.
(*) “e-sports” is an abbreviation for “electronic sports” and refers to competitions played on computer games. There are pros and cons to the inclusion of this sport as a “new Olympic sport.
According to the GSM Association, an international association of mobile operators, 5G is expected to account for 15% of the world’s mobile subscriptions in 2025, including those for IoT. In South Korea, the most advanced country, it is expected to be 59%, in the U.S. 50%, and in Japan 48%.
３．5G will change “future life
(1) Automobiles: Practical application of self-driving cars
(2) Drones: In addition to home delivery and maintenance inspections of roads and bridges, we can expect to see wide-area drones that can traverse Japan. In addition, systems are being developed and put to practical use for large-scale land development and construction sites, where drones are used to get a bird’s eye view and take measurements, and excavators and dump trucks are used to carry out land development with a high degree of accuracy.
(3) Remote surgery: One of the expected medical applications is surgery from a remote location. Tactile sensations detected by a surgical robot can be transmitted to the primary surgeon in real time.
(4) Transmission of 8K images: Transmission of 4K images requires a bandwidth of about 20 Mbps, and 8K images are expected to require about twice as much. Therefore, if 5G can achieve an average transmission speed of 100 Mbps, it is likely to give momentum to the spread of 8K.