this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
547 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
57997 readers
5310 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Doesn’t it stand for generation? Like 3rd generation and 5th generation? This is referencing a wifi router is it not?
So sort of: the 3g is part of a standard for data rates, but the difficulty, comes in that networks are not homogeneous. Similarly to how you might be familiar with 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz WiFi signals. As a general rule of thumb the higher the frequency the more data you can send but with more attenuation so the signal can be blocked more easily and cannot travel as far, whereas the inverse is true for lower frequencies. So while the generations did make some changes in terms of protocols— it also came with higher frequency emitters which can theoretically carry more data. Other changes include MIMO antennas which do beam forming to make more of the energy go in the direction of a user using constructive and destructive interference from an array of antennas to accomplish this. However marketing people are always very eager to adopt technical terms and inflate them into oblivion. However some of this can be attributed to honest misunderstanding within a company.
generation for cellular data, not wifi. I liked this video that explains it