A new study coming out of the University of California San Diego suggests that instead of relying on a few large 5G towers, smartphones can benefit from many small towers.
As first shared by Newscientist, the study suggests that having multiple, small 5G towers could help improve users’ phone battery life by roughly 50 percent.
According to the study, having small towers close to your phone means the power needed for a signal to travel is reduced, and our phones don’t have to work as hard to catch the signal. The change could ultimately mean a smaller carbon footprint for cities, as phones would need to be charged less often.
Agrim Gupta, a researcher at the university, explains that the same idea was proposed back in the 4G era, but switching from tower to tower for a moving device wasn’t possible with the technology. It is, however, possible with today’s smartphones and the 5G network. “Your [phone’s] battery lifetime could be 50 per cent more. So if your battery was lasting 12 hours, it will last 18 hours now, because of this network,” said Gupta.
The researchers also ran simulations using 3D city models and found that to make the project work, we’d need five times more towers than we have currently, but they’d only need to be 15 meters tall. For reference, the average height of 5G towers is 60 meters.
You can check out the full study here.
Via: Newscientist
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