For nearly a decade, people have been talking about 5G technology, and now we’re about to experience it firsthand, literally, with the next generation of phones in our hands. But how does the newest and greatest generation of cellphone tech work? Let’s take a look.

Cellular network providers are serving an ever-increasing number of users, many of whom are hungry for greater amounts of data. To cope with these demands, companies are in the midst of launching the fifth generation of wireless technology, aka 5G.

There has been a lot of excitement around this generation of technology, and for good reason!

Cellphones rely on a network of base stations that transmit voice calls and data, using radio waves, from one phone to another. “5G will be so much faster just in terms of raw data that’s transmitted between a phone to a base station,” explains Ted Rappaport, founder of the NYU WIRELESS research center at New York University. “For the first time, [wireless data transmission] will approach fiber-optic speeds in 5G, which was never before possible with the first four generations of cellular technology.”

Read the full article on Science on Tap.