Being implemented across Canada, 5G’s median download speed is about 170 Mbps. Meanwhile, 4G’s median download speed in Canada is 55.5 Mbps. That’s a 205% increase. If you wanted to download a two-hour HD movie off Netflix (about 6GB in size) on your phone with 4G, it would take roughly 40 minutes. With 5G, it would take under five.

With the Internet of Things (IoT) transforming the market for both consumers and businesses, 5G’s network capacity provides us with a crucial advantage – the ability to connect more devices. Compared to 4G’s network capacity, 5G currently offers 100 times more traffic support. But it’s expected that 5G will provide much more capacity in the future, enabling the automation and digitization needed for the ideas behind smart cities and driverless cars.

Have you ever suffered from lags when playing online video games? Coming from multiple factors such as speeds, bandwidth, and the size of data transmitted, this is called latency. Latency is the time it takes for data to travel from one place to another. Having low latency is extremely important for online gamers as the added fractions of a millisecond count. But what does low latency mean for the rest of us? Low latency is a requirement for massive IoT to work. Smart cities, automated cars, virtual reality, and heavy artificial intelligence need extremely low latencies. With latencies faster than the blink of an eye at one millisecond, 5G allows many new technologies to launch worldwide.

Increased bandwidth is another critical factor that 5G provides. In short terms, bandwidth means the maximum amount of room that data can transfer. Think of bandwidth as a pipe with water going through it. If the pipe (bandwidth) is large, more water (data) will go through it. The larger the bandwidth, the better, and 5G has massive bandwidth. 5G’s bandwidth sits at frequencies between 30 GHz to 100 GHz compared to 4G, which operates at about 6 GHz.

5G enabled network slicing allows end-users to slice a single physical network into multiple virtual networks. Splitting the 5G network allows users to tailor speed, capacity, coverage, encryption, security and use cases by reassigning resources from one slice to the next. Network slicing improves the overall efficiency of your network as services are prioritized with different sizes of slices customized to your preference.