5G, we should be able to make phone calls now!

That's right, the title was written correctly. 5G should be able to make phone calls now.

I believe many 5G users are confused when they see the title. My 5G phone has been replaced for N years. If 5G cannot make calls, I have been lonely for N years?

But if I were to tell you that 5G is just about to support voice calls, would you be surprised? And your past calls were actually made from the 4G network without your knowledge.

As for why such an approach is adopted, we have to start with the evolution history of mobile communication.

At the beginning of the birth of mobile communication, it was specifically designed for making phone calls. The analog communication in the 1G era, in simple terms, directly converts the fluctuations of human voice into fluctuations of electric current, and then converts them into fluctuations of electromagnetic waves, and finally restores them to human voice.

After listening to my description, you can also feel that analog communication is very unreliable. The method of information transmission is simple and crude, with high loss and low transmission rate. Moreover, even if 1G can only support voice calls, due to the limitations of analog communication, it can only guarantee that the voice can be heard. To achieve clear phone calls is a pure luxury.

With the upgrading and replacement of mobile communication technology, the 2G era has arrived. Compared to 1G, the fundamental change in 2G is the adoption of digital communication technology for the first time. The sound of human communication is no longer simply transmitted through fluctuations in current, but is first converted into bit sequences such as 01010101 that can be processed by the chip, and then emitted through electromagnetic waves through a series of operations.

The advantage of this is that digitized information can be processed using various advanced digital technologies such as compression, encoding, encryption, etc. Therefore, under the same frequency resources, the quality of voice calls can be greatly improved.

Moreover, starting from 2G, mobile communication can now perform simple data service transmission. Although from a current perspective, internet speeds of tens or even hundreds of Kbps are considered slow.