What is 5G WiFi? Find Differences Between 5G and 5G WiFi

Referring to 5G technology, many people may feel confused. Hasn’t 5G WiFi been used in our daily already? Why it becomes hot and advanced suddenly? In fact, 5G WiFi and 5G are not the same thing except both of their names begin with “5G”. In the followings, we will talk about the differences.

What is called as 5G WiFi? Strictly speaking, 5G WiFi is not an official name. 5G WiFi generally means 5GHz WiFi which indicats to using 5GHz frequency bands as the WiFi signal. This is not a new thing at all. 802.11n, 802.11ac and 802.11ax are part of the modern WiFi standard for 5G WiFi. We can basically divide the WiFi standard development into six terms:

WiFi standard

Term	Standard	Note
1st term	802.11	Support 2.4GHz only, with the maximum transmission rate at 2Mbit/s.
2nd term	802.11b	Support 2.4GHz only, with the maximum transmission rate at 11Mbit/s.
3rd term	802.11g/a	Support 2.4GHz and 5GHz, up to 54Mbit/s transmission rate.
4th term	802.11n (WiFi 4)	Operate in both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, up to 72Mbit/s and 150Mbit/s transmission rates in the 20MHz and 40MHz channel width.
5th term	802.11ac (WiFi 5)	Operate in both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, up to 866.7Mbit/s transmission rate.
6th term	802.11ax (WiFi 6)	Operate in both 2.4GHz and 5GHz (even 6GHz in the future) and reach up to 1000Mbit/s transmission rate.

The update of the WiFi standards means the faster transmission speed. Especially, the latest standard WiFi 6 should offer speeds at least 4 times greater than WiFi 5, and it will also bring improvements in efficiency and capacity designed with more effective data encoding. Even though 5GHz frequency bands have been strongly resistant to interference, WiFi 6 speeds up transmission rate in 2.4GHZ frequency bands. Literally, it is best WiFi standard currently.

2.4 GHz frequency bands were usually used at the early stage. However, it is also widely used in many electronic devices, such as microwave oven and Bluetooth devices. These devices surely interfere with the 2.4GHz WiFi, and then slow down the transmission speed.

5GHz, the higher WiFi frequency bands can make less congestion in the channel, speeding up the transmission rate naturally. Take the 5th term 802.11ac WiFi standard as an example. The transmission rate can reach up to 433 Mbps in the 80MHz broadband, even up to 866 Mbps in 160MHz, greatly different with that of 2.4GHz.

In addition, 5GHZ WiFi has more frequency bands. There are 3 non-interfering frequency bands while 5GHz contains 22 bands. If you imagine these bands as expressways, 5GHz would cause less congestion obliviously and transmit data smoothly.

Despite the advantages, 5GHz WiFi has downsides. It performs worse than 2.4GHz WiFi in distraction and reflection. Both of 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands travel in straight lines. When they come to objects, they can go through the objects or reflect and distract on the objects. Most of frequency bands can go through the obstacles but some bands will lose along with distraction and reflection.

Since the frequency bands consume lots of energy when traveling the obstacles, much energy will be used up in this process. The higher frequency bands, the much more energy consume. Therefore, the bands received by the devices are usually the remnant that distract and reflect on the obstacles and then gets around the obstacles.

WiFi is actually a kind of electromagnetic waves. 2.4GHz WiFi is better at passing through walls and covering a larger area because its low frequency bands can reflect and distract much more bands than 5 GHz frequency bands. Simply speaking, 2.4GHz WiFi transmits further and keep more bands; 5GHz WiFi covers a smaller area with less bands, but it takes a better data transmission rate than 2.4GHz WiFi does.

We are hearing a lot about 5G recently. What is it? In fact, 5G is the 5th generation mobile networks, the extension of 4G. It is characterized by high speed, low latency and high connection density.

High speed is easily accepted. 5G is the successor of 4G, naturally designed to be faster than the current technology. According to the laboratories’ tests, 5G can transmit faster than 4G at the average download speed of about 10Gbps, 10 times more than the current 4G technology. At this speed, you could make many things possible, such as downloading huge files in seconds, streaming high-quality data simultaneously.

At the same time, 5G can support 1 million device connections per square kilometer, which can be the technological foundation of Internet of Things and smart city. It is easy to find that fast-transmitting 5G can obtain mobile broadband experience much more fluently and promote the development of IoT. 5G can create a more intelligent and interconnected world.

It is expected that 5G networks will be introduced globally in 2020. At that time, 5G, combined with 3G and 4G, can provide an Internet world for each user anywhere at any time.

As we mentioned above, we undestand what 5G WiFi is. 5G WiFi is totally different with 5G, but both of them aim at faster transmission. 5G even tops out at 10Gbps per second.

By the way, the speeding-up transmission should be accompanied with fast-accessing hard disk. If you are using the conventional HDD, you will be lagged behind the era. HDD will be the bottleneck for the 5G fast transmission. We advise you to change a SSD as soon as possible, and then you can literally experience the fast, smooth 5G networks.