Speaker 1: When you think about the infrastructure that runs the world,
Speaker 1: you usually picture things you can actually physically.
Speaker 2: Touch, right, like concrete highways or massive steel bridges exactly.
Speaker 1: Or those giant high voltage power lines cutting across the landscape.
Speaker 1: We expect our infrastructure to be heavy, we expect it
Speaker 1: to be highly visible.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely.
Speaker 1: But right now you and I are surrounded by an
Speaker 1: infrastructure that is completely invisible. I mean it's passing through
Speaker 1: the walls, through the air, even through us constantly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's quietly becoming the central nervous system of
Speaker 2: the entire planet, which is it's a pretty profound shift,
Speaker 2: It really is, because unlike a physical bridge that takes
Speaker 2: decades to plan and poor, this nervous system is evolving
Speaker 2: at a speed that requires a complete reimagining of computer
Speaker 2: science and physics just to keep up.
Speaker 1: And that evolution is exactly what we're exploring today. Welcome
Speaker 1: to this deep dive. Today we are looking at a
Speaker 1: really massive, incredibly detailed text called five G Mobile and
Speaker 1: Wireless Communications Technology.
Speaker 3: It's a foundational text, yeah, edited by some of the
Speaker 3: leading telecom experts in the world of fifth Osirian jose
Speaker 3: F Mansrot and Patrick marsh and the minds who contributed to.
Speaker 1: This text make a pretty staggering claim.
Speaker 2: They do. They argue that five G isn't just you know,
Speaker 2: a telecom upgrade for your smartphone. It actually represents the
Speaker 2: mechanical trigger for the fourth stage of the Industrial revolution.
Speaker 1: Fourth stage wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, enabling a world where up to twenty five billion
Speaker 2: devices are connected simultaneously.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because we're on a mission today
Speaker 1: to look way past the marketing hype. You probably see
Speaker 1: the commercials promising you can download a movie in like
Speaker 1: three seconds instead of thirty.
Speaker 2: Right, the usual carrier marketing.
Speaker 1: Exactly, But we don't care about that today. We're going
Speaker 1: to uncover how five G was engineered from the ground
Speaker 1: up to be this invisible nervous system for the modern world.
Speaker 2: And to really grasp why this is such a revolutionary leap,
Speaker 2: we have to look at the mechanics limitations of everything
Speaker 2: that came before it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's trace that progression mechanically. Think about the jump
Speaker 1: from one G in the early eighties to two G
Speaker 1: in the nineties.
Speaker 2: Well, one G was entirely analog systems like NMT and AMPS, right,
Speaker 2: and if one G.
Speaker 1: Was essentially a dirt road, and four G is a
Speaker 1: modern super highway. Five G isn't just adding more lanes,
Speaker 1: it's introducing an entirely new three D transportation system.
Speaker 2: I like that analogy.
Speaker 1: Thanks so on that one G dirt road, it was
Speaker 1: basically just broadcasting a continuous frequency to carry your voice,
Speaker 1: which was super prone to static. Then two G rise
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety one with GSM.
Speaker 2: The shift to digital.
Speaker 1: Right, the network started chopping your voice down into binary
Speaker 1: code ones and zeros that gave us better voice quality
Speaker 1: and SMS text messaging. Then three G and three point
Speaker 1: five G arrived, bringing WCDMA and HSPA. We saw the
Speaker 1: dawn of packet data.
Speaker 2: And that was the crucial pivot because previously the network
Speaker 2: held a dedicated physical circuit open for the entire duration.
Speaker 1: Of your clock, which is incredibly in a.
Speaker 2: Exactly Packet data, on the other hand, takes your information,
Speaker 2: slices it into thousands of tiny independent envelopes, and just
Speaker 2: shoots them all through the network dynamically and.
Speaker 1: Then reassembles them at the destination, which obviously paved the
Speaker 1: way for the four GLT networks we use today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, long term evolution right, four G.
Speaker 1: Took that packet switching concept and moved it entirely to
Speaker 1: an IP based standard. It essentially turned the cellular network
Speaker 1: into an extension of the Internet itself.
Speaker 2: Which gave us currier aggregation and peaks of three gigabits
Speaker 2: per second, moving us totally away from that old circuit
Speaker 2: switched functionality.
Speaker 1: Yeah, giving us the speeds necessary for streaming music, video calling,
Speaker 1: basically the entire happy economy.
Speaker 2: But there is a massive caveat to all of this.
Speaker 2: What's that The reason for the radical architectural shift to
Speaker 2: five G goes back to a fundamental bottleneck. From one
Speaker 2: G all the way through four G, the absolute defining
Speaker 2: design priority was human centric communication.
Speaker 1: Ah okay, human centric right.
Speaker 2: Getting humans connected to each other and then to the Internet.
Speaker 2: The entire architecture was built around human behavior, human reaction times,
Speaker 2: and human consumption.
Speaker 1: So engineering the network for a person tapping a screen
Speaker 1: and waiting, say half a second for a web page
Speaker 1: to load.
Speaker 2: Exactly, which brings us to the fundamental pivot of five G.
Speaker 2: It is the very first network generation designed primarily for machines.
Speaker 1: Okay, So it's a network built for machines. That is
Speaker 1: a huge shift.
Speaker 2: It's the core thesis of the authors. It's why they
Speaker 2: position five G as the engine of the fourth Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 1: Let's quickly review those revolutions for context. We all know
Speaker 1: the textbook narrative, right. The first stage around seventeen sixty
Speaker 1: to eighteen forty was steam engines and the power loom,
Speaker 1: mechanizing physical labor. Right.
Speaker 2: Then the second stage eighteen forty to roughly nineteen fourteen
Speaker 2: brings bessemer steel, electrification and mass production.
Speaker 1: Then the third stage kicks off in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: electronics it programmable logic controllers basically early computers automating the assembly.
Speaker 2: Line, which leads us to today the fourth stage, the
Speaker 2: era of cyber physical systems or CPS and the Internet
Speaker 2: of Things the IoT.
Speaker 1: When you hear cyberphysical systems, think about the complete integration
Speaker 1: of computer logic with actual physical processes in the real world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like a smart power grid.
Speaker 1: Exactly, a grid that instantly reroutes electricity across an entire
Speaker 1: city based on real time spikes and demand.
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, the information
Speaker 2: and communications technology sector we call ICT was originally born
Speaker 2: from merging telecommunications with computing, but five G forces those
Speaker 2: two fields to fully collapse into one another. The computing
Speaker 2: and storage are actually moving to the network edge, blurring
Speaker 2: the line between a communication network and a computer.
Speaker 1: Just to clarify the jargon for you listening, you'll hear
Speaker 1: terms like IoT or CPS or M two M which
Speaker 1: stands for a machine to machine. They all essentially describe
Speaker 1: the same incoming reality.
Speaker 2: Yeah, connecting twenty five billion devices by twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Which is just a mind body number. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: the physics of that, because this is where the source
Speaker 1: material gets deeply fascinating. To me. Supporting twenty five billion
Speaker 1: devices isn't just a matter scaling up the old servers,
Speaker 1: not at all.
Speaker 2: The designers of five G had to map out an
Speaker 2: architecture that could accommodate radically conflicting needs simultaneously, and.
Speaker 1: They mapped these requirements using something called a spider diagram
Speaker 1: from the IMT twenty twenty standard. Right.
Speaker 2: Yes, comparing five G against IMT Advanced, which is four G.
Speaker 2: The diagram visually demonstrates how the new network has to
Speaker 2: stretch massively in multiple completely opposing directions.
Speaker 1: I want to play Devil's advocate and push back on
Speaker 1: these extremes. For a second. My current four G LT
Speaker 1: is already pretty fast. I can sit on a train
Speaker 1: and stream a high definition movie without much buffering. So
Speaker 1: when you engineers say five G needs to handle ten
Speaker 1: to twenty gigabits per second, I don't know. Do we
Speaker 1: really need a system built for that kind of extreme capacity.
Speaker 2: It absolutely sounds like overkill if you're strictly thinking about
Speaker 2: watching videos on a smartphone. Right, But that specific metric
Speaker 2: on the spider diagram, extreme mobile broadband or XMBB, isn't
Speaker 2: just for downloading movies. It's needed for human centric applications
Speaker 2: of the future like fully immersive, real time, augmented and
Speaker 2: virtual reality.
Speaker 1: Oh like streaming the four K three D world instantly.
Speaker 2: Exactly, or four K media on demand everywhere. But XMBB
Speaker 2: is only one arm of that spider diagram. Let's look
Speaker 2: at the requirement that I find most mind bending latency,
Speaker 2: the delay in the network. Right, the textbook states five
Speaker 2: G requires a staggering one millisecond latency.
Speaker 1: Wait one millisecond human reaction time is roughly what two
Speaker 1: hundred milliseconds roughly?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so a one millisecond delay is so extraordinarily low
Speaker 2: that our biological nervous systems simply cannot detect it. The
Speaker 2: authors refer to this as the enabler for the tactile Internet.
Speaker 1: The tactile Internet, that's a great phrase.
Speaker 2: It means you can essentially feel something over the Internet
Speaker 2: through haptic feedback, and your brain will perceive it as
Speaker 2: happening instantaneously in your physical space.
Speaker 1: But how oh is a one millisecond round trip even
Speaker 1: physically possible? I mean, light travels fast, but it still
Speaker 1: takes time to move through fiber optic cables. If a
Speaker 1: signal has to cross the country to a server and
Speaker 1: come back, the laws of physics dictate it will take
Speaker 1: longer than one millisecond.
Speaker 2: The physics dictate exactly that, which means the architecture of
Speaker 2: the network itself had to fundamentally change. You cannot send
Speaker 2: life critical data to a centralized cloud server thousands of
Speaker 2: miles away and wait for a response.
Speaker 1: So what's the solution?
Speaker 2: Five G utilizes mobile edge computing. It physically moves the
Speaker 2: computing power, the artificial intelligence, and the storage out of
Speaker 2: those distant data centers and pushes it right to the
Speaker 2: very edge of the network.
Speaker 1: So the local cell tower essentially becomes a miniaturized Amazon
Speaker 1: Web Services data center exactly.
Speaker 2: The processing happens locally, circumventing the geographic latency problem.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we have massive broadband capacity and sub millisecond
Speaker 1: physics defying latency through edge computing. What else is on.
Speaker 2: That spider diagram connection density? The five G standard mandates
Speaker 2: the ability to support up to one million individual devices
Speaker 2: per single square kilometer.
Speaker 1: One million devices in one square kilometer that is, I mean,
Speaker 1: think about the sheer density of a modern smart city,
Speaker 1: every single street lamp, parking meter, autonous vehicle health monitor,
Speaker 1: all communicating continuously.
Speaker 2: A four G network would instantly buckle under that localized volume.
Speaker 2: And then you have to add the final extreme variable mobility.
Speaker 1: Right maintaining a flawless connection while moving fast.
Speaker 2: The standard requires maintaining quality of service that speeds up
Speaker 2: to five hundred kilometers per.
Speaker 1: Hour, so high speed bullet trains. The network has to
Speaker 1: manage massive data, zero delay, and a million devices, all
Speaker 1: while handing off the connection from tower to tower at
Speaker 1: five hundred kilometers.
Speaker 2: Per hour without dropping a single packet of data.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting. Let's take these abstract
Speaker 1: theoretical engineering requirements and drop them into real world use cases.
Speaker 2: The textbook explores factory sell automation as a primary scenario.
Speaker 1: My immediate thought reading that was why bother with wireless
Speaker 1: at all in a factory? If you're building cars or microchips,
Speaker 1: wired networks are completely reliable, why go through the immense
Speaker 1: technical hurdle of building a five G wireless system for
Speaker 1: a factory floor.
Speaker 2: Because physical wires are the enemy of modern industrial flexibility. Also, well,
Speaker 2: wiring a massive industrial facility costs millions of dollars. More importantly,
Speaker 2: if market demands shift and you need to reconfigure your
Speaker 2: assembly line to produce a different product, tearing out and
Speaker 2: reinstalling physical wires can halt production for weeks or months.
Speaker 1: Oh I see, So five G allows a manufacturer to
Speaker 1: completely redesign a factory floor over a weekend, just by
Speaker 1: wheeling the robotic stations to.
Speaker 2: Different areas precisely. And previously you couldn't do that wirelessly
Speaker 2: because older networks couldn't guarantee what engineers call life critical reliability.
Speaker 1: Right, Because if you have multi ton robotic arms swinging
Speaker 1: around at lightning speed, coordinating wirelessly, a single dropped packet
Speaker 1: of data doesn't just mean of video buffers.
Speaker 2: It means a catastrophic physical collision on the assembly line.
Speaker 2: Five G provides that ultra low latency and absolute reliability
Speaker 2: that historically only a physical wire could guarantee.
Speaker 1: That concept of life. Critical reliability brings us to remote surgery,
Speaker 1: which we touched on earlier with the tactile Internet.
Speaker 2: It's truly staggering to visualize it really is.
Speaker 1: You have a specialist performing an incredibly delicate procedure from AFAR,
Speaker 1: relying on that sub millisecond haptic feedback to actually feel
Speaker 1: the physical resistance of human tissue through their surgical.
Speaker 2: Interface, and if the network stutters for even a fraction
Speaker 2: of a second while they are making an incision.
Speaker 1: It could mean life or death. The invisible infrastructure has
Speaker 1: to be as dependable as a steel scalpel held directly
Speaker 1: in the hand.
Speaker 2: And that identical level of flawless reliability extends to another
Speaker 2: critical scenario detailed in the research Emergency Communications oh.
Speaker 1: Right disaster recovery. When a massive earthquake strikes, the first
Speaker 1: thing to fail is traditional physical infrastructure cell tower's collapse.
Speaker 2: The source material highlights how five G addresses this by
Speaker 2: allowing individual user devices to act as temporary ad hoc
Speaker 2: relay nodes.
Speaker 1: So it creates an instantaneous mesh network out of the
Speaker 1: surviving devices.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if your phone is trapped in the rubble and
Speaker 2: can't reach a surviving cell tower, it can ping the
Speaker 2: phone of someone walking above.
Speaker 1: The debris, which pings a smart meter down the street,
Speaker 1: bouncing the signal from device to device until it finds
Speaker 1: a working access point to the broader Internet.
Speaker 2: Which introduces yet another severe engineering constraint, extreme energy efficiency
Speaker 2: ah because of the battery right, If a device is
Speaker 2: trapped with the survivor beneath a collapsed building, it needs
Speaker 2: to minimize power consumption. The five G protocol lets these
Speaker 2: devices sleep and wake in incredibly precise microbursts, so.
Speaker 1: A battery that would normally die in a day can
Speaker 1: broadcast a survival beacon for much much longer.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it's a localized self healing mesas network, and the
Speaker 2: volume challenges we discussed earlier apply here too, but in
Speaker 2: different contexts, like large outdoor.
Speaker 1: Events like a massive stadium concert, you have eighty thousand
Speaker 1: people crammed into a single concrete bowl, all trying to
Speaker 1: upload a high definition video at the exact same second
Speaker 1: on four G, your phone just displays a spinning wheel
Speaker 1: of death.
Speaker 2: Because four G operates like a massive floodlight blasting signal everywhere.
Speaker 2: Five G utilizes technologies like massive MIMO and beam forming.
Speaker 1: Which act more like synchronized laser beams right.
Speaker 2: Exactly dynamically steering dedicated, highly concentrated signals directly to individual devices,
Speaker 2: slicing right through the interference of those eighty thousand competing phones.
Speaker 1: Incredible, And because these use cases are so profoundly woven
Speaker 1: into the physical, safety and economic engine of society, the
Speaker 1: role out of five G isn't just a corporate tech upgrade.
Speaker 2: No, it's a highly aggressive, deeply competitive global race.
Speaker 1: The economic and geopolitical stakes for establishing the foundational patents
Speaker 1: and infrastructure of five are nearly impossible to overstate. The
Speaker 1: textbook thoroughly documents the massive initiatives launched globally to drive this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the push was tremendous across the board.
Speaker 1: Europe aggressively pushed research through projects like Metis and the
Speaker 1: five GPPP, which had a one point four billion euro.
Speaker 2: Budget massive investment.
Speaker 1: China mobilized the IMT twenty twenty Promotion Group. South Korea
Speaker 1: formed the five G Forum with a mandate to have
Speaker 1: functional trials for the twenty eighteen Winter Olympics, and Japan
Speaker 1: mobilized the AIRB twenty twenty and beyond.
Speaker 2: Group, every major economic power recognized they had to own
Speaker 2: the infrastructure of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But this raises
Speaker 2: an important question, perhaps the most critical question in the
Speaker 2: entire source text, which is what happens when a network
Speaker 2: of this magnitude is compromised. The security imperative cannot afford
Speaker 2: to fail.
Speaker 1: Right, because we aren't just talking about stolen passwords anymore.
Speaker 2: With earlier generations of wireless networks, security vulnerabilities were primarily
Speaker 2: restricted to the digital domain. A breach meant data theft
Speaker 2: someone intercepting your credit card or.
Speaker 1: Reading emails damaging, for sure.
Speaker 2: But five G actively controls physical machinery. In the real world.
Speaker 2: We are talking about robotic arms on factory floors, smartlocks
Speaker 2: on municipal water plants, and autonomous vehicles making split second
Speaker 2: breaking decisions.
Speaker 1: So a network breach on five G immediately becomes a
Speaker 1: kinetic physical threat.
Speaker 2: Exactly if someone hacks the communication network governing autonomous cars,
Speaker 2: it's not identity theft, it's a physical multi car pile
Speaker 2: up on the highway.
Speaker 1: So the system must be able to instantly identify and
Speaker 1: entirely repudiate false emergency brake messages before they reach the
Speaker 1: vehicle's computer.
Speaker 2: The network has to mathematically guarantee the absolute integrity and
Speaker 2: authenticity of the transmitted information every single millisecond.
Speaker 1: I want to highlight another much more insidious dager detailed
Speaker 1: than the text too. The thread of Data Fusion five
Speaker 1: G is designed to transport massive oceans of data from
Speaker 1: the Internet of Things. Now, any individual message from a
Speaker 1: single sensor might seem completely harmless.
Speaker 2: Right sure, Like a smart thermostat recording a slight temperature
Speaker 2: increase in a living room, or a wearable fitness tracker
Speaker 2: noting a resting heart rate.
Speaker 1: Right, who cares If that gets intercepted.
Speaker 2: Individually, that data is meaningless. But if a sophisticated actor
Speaker 2: intercepts the data from thousands of these trivial, seemingly disconnected devices,
Speaker 2: they can fuse those data points together using machine learning,
Speaker 2: right exactly, using machine learning to reveal highly sensitive, incredibly
Speaker 2: private patterns.
Speaker 1: So they don't just know your living room temperature, they
Speaker 1: know exactly what time you get home, what room you
Speaker 1: spend the most time in your caloric intake schedule, and
Speaker 1: whether you live alone.
Speaker 2: And if they fuse the IoT data of an entire
Speaker 2: manufacturing facility, they don't just know the temperature or a machine,
Speaker 2: They know when the factory's workflow.
Speaker 1: Changes, potentially revealing a pivot to a new seature product line.
Speaker 2: The security architecture must prevent that kind of overarching synthesis,
Speaker 2: establishishing absolute trust at every layer.
Speaker 1: And that requirement for absolute trust becomes incredibly complex when
Speaker 1: you consider the ad hoc METS networks we discussed for
Speaker 1: emergency situations. It really does, because if my smartphone is
Speaker 1: suddenly acting as a temporary relay node passing your sensitive
Speaker 1: medical data or your emergency beacon down the line, the
Speaker 1: network has to be mathematically certain that my phone isn't
Speaker 1: secretly reading or altering your data.
Speaker 2: It demands a paradigm where trust is constantly verified at
Speaker 2: the edge of the network, preventing man in the middle
Speaker 2: attacks entirely.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean when we take a
Speaker 1: step back and look at the entirety of this textbook
Speaker 1: tracing the evolution from analog voice signals on a one
Speaker 1: G dirt road through the extreme demands of the IMT
Speaker 1: twenty twenty spider diagram, all the way to localized edge
Speaker 1: computing enabling remote surgery.
Speaker 2: It becomes abundantly clear that five G is not an
Speaker 2: incremental upgrade.
Speaker 1: No, it's the foundational infrastructure for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 1: bridging the gap between the digital and the physics.
Speaker 2: We have transitioned from a network design to help people
Speaker 2: talk to other people to a network designed to help
Speaker 2: every single physical object on Earth talk to every other.
Speaker 1: Object in real time without human intervention. And that transition
Speaker 1: leaves me with a final thought, an idea pulled from
Speaker 1: the implications of all this research that I want you
Speaker 1: listening right now to ponder.
Speaker 2: It's a fascinating implication.
Speaker 1: If five G succeeds in its ultimate goal, connecting physical objects, vehicles,
Speaker 1: and our own biological health monitors with a latency so
Speaker 1: low our brains cannot perceive the delayout, does the distinction
Speaker 1: between the real physical world and the digital cyber network
Speaker 1: effectively cease to exist for human perception.
Speaker 2: If the latency drops to zero, the boundary between the
Speaker 2: physical and the digital essentially vanishes.
Speaker 1: Think about the physics of it. If a doctor's hand
Speaker 1: can feel the physical tactile resistance of a scalpel one
Speaker 1: thousand miles away, and their brain registers that physical sensation
Speaker 1: is happening instantaneously in their own hand. Where does the
Speaker 1: human end and the net work begin? Thank you for
Speaker 1: joining us on this deep dive. Keep exploring the invisible
Speaker 1: networks all around you.