5G is going to make your cellphone much faster, and that’s going to change gaming dramatically. 4G, adopted 10 years ago, is shorthand for “fourth generation” mobile technology. It exponentially increased the amount of data sent to your phone and made it possible to stream high-quality video. 4G tech put a DVD player in your pocket; 5G is going to put a PlayStation there too.
“In five to 10 years, a game-streaming company will be as prevalent as Netflix,” Shivendra Panwar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications at New York University, tells Newsweek. Total game sales around the world were estimated to have been $138 billion in 2018.
Panwar says companies like Netflix took off because of wireless consumption of their videos, first via home Wi-Fi and then on phones following the arrival of 4G. But the change didn’t happen fast. “In the early years, video-streaming quality wasn’t great, and it was not available everywhere,” he says.
