Enlarge / Choose your weapons. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

With many organizations now having a significant portion of staff working remotely—and as things are looking, this is going to be the longterm reality—the old model of how companies support a "mobile" workforce is not exactly holding up well.

I've already covered some of the issues related to having a home-based workforce in previous articles in this series. Some companies are now giving employees an allowance to upgrade their home office to something more suitable for longterm habitation. And we've already gone over the network security and architecture challenges that come into play as well.

But as we push closer to a full year of full- or part-time home work with no end in sight, the old model for what is considered "mobile worker" support on the hardware front is starting to show some serious gaps.

Enlarge / This might be the best listing image Aurich has ever created. The duck just kills me. Look at his little hat! (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images )

In this third installment of our series explaining what we can expect from 5G, we're going to focus on how 5G deployment can impact rural and underserved areas.

A brief refresher: What is 5G?

If you didn't read the first article in the series, you might need a refresher on what 5G actually is—and is not. The term "5G" itself doesn't refer to any particular frequency range; it just specifies the communications protocol being used—like 2G, 3G, and 4G before it. You may sometimes also see the term 5G NR , which simply means "fifth generation, new radio"—the two terms are interchangeable. Fortunately, and unlike earlier generations, there are no competing standards—5G is just 5G.

Common frequencies used by consumer-oriented wireless devices. Look at all that mmWave spectrum! (credit: Jim Salter)

With that said, much of what you've heard about 5G likely does refer to specific frequencies that it can operate at. There are three general bands allocated for 5G, which are further subdivided and leased to individual carriers. Those are the low, mid, and high bands. The low and mid bands are 600MHz-900MHz and 2.5GHz-4.2GHz, respectively. These bands share similar radio characteristics with existing 4G LTE low and high bands; taken together, you may also hear the pair of them referred to as "sub-6GHz" or "5G FR1."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about how best to manage the current state of work and what companies will need to do in the near and not-too-distant future to adjust to post-pandemic reality. As expected, our readers had some opinions on these topics, too—ranging from insightful to inciteful.

So, in the interest of better surfacing the wisdom of our particular crowd, I’ve curated some of the thoughts of the Ars community on the topics of working better from home and what our shared experiences have taught us about the future of collaboration technology and the future nature of the corporate office. As always, we hope you’ll share additional wisdom in the comments here, as they may guide some future coverage on issues related to the realities of future work.

Home office adjustments

It came as no surprise that many of our long-time readers have had relatively no difficulty adjusting to working from home over the past six months—some already did, while others already may have had more computing power in their home environment than some companies’ data centers can muster. And there was a fairly consistent theme of improved productivity. As veteran Arsian Zippy Peanut commented :

Enlarge / Artist's impression of gaming with 5G. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

There's been a lot of buzz about 5G over the last year—much of it, sadly, none too coherent. Today, we're going to take a detailed, realistic look at how we can expect 5G to improve cellular broadband, with a focus on the impact we might be able to expect on gaming. Surprise: the news is actually not bad!

What is 5G?

Before we can talk about what to expect from 5G, we need to talk about what 5G actually is—and isn't. 5G, short for "fifth generation," is the next cellular communications protocol. 5G is not, specifically, any given frequency or band. There are two major bands 5G can operate on—millimeter wave, and sub-6GHz. Exactly which frequencies within those bands your devices will use varies from carrier to carrier, and country to country.

Up close with a cellular transmission tower. (credit: George Frey / AFP / Getty Images)

The sub-6GHz band isn't new territory; the frequencies in use there are the same ones carriers already use for 4G / LTE service. Sub-6Ghz can further be divided into low-band—under 1GHz—and mid-band, at 2.5GHz-3.5GHz. Low-band offers greater range from the tower, but at lower speeds; the mid-band offers greater speed, but lower range. It's worth noting that "lower range" isn't necessarily a curse—the greater the range from the tower, the more users you have sharing the same finite amount of airtime, and the lower the speeds and less predictable the latency you'll see.

Enlarge / If you're back in the office, this helpful song will help you remember the cardinal rule of social distancing . (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

If you told any executive at a major corporation in mid-2019 that close to half of the US workforce would be working from home within the next year, they would have at least raised a skeptical eyebrow (and then probably called security to have you removed). Yet, here we are.

Major technology companies, including Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, have closed their physical offices until well into 2021. Twitter has told many employees that they can work from home permanently. And now that we have nearly six months of involuntary widespread work-from-home behind us, many other organizations are also reconsidering the value of office space.

In April, a Gallup poll showed 62 percent of the workforce working from home, and 59 percent hoping they could continue to do so as much as possible once the pandemic is under control. While the numbers have since dropped to some degree—Stanford Institute for Economic Research figures in June showed only 42 percent of the US workforce working from home full-time—the fact remains that people's relationship with their workplace has been dramatically restructured, perhaps permanently.

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The global pandemic and the corporate office shutdowns resulting from it have wrought changes to how work works. While essential people in certain industries have continued their jobs in ways that are relatively familiar under layers upon layers of personal protective equipment, many companies have had to find ways to continue other work at a “social” distance. And in those situations, employees must find ways to continue collaborating as they did when they were packed into cubicles, open floor plans, and all the other various patterns of modern office spaces.

Workplace changes due to COVID-19 won’t go away anytime soon. Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have pushed back the return of employees to offices until well into 2021, and Twitter has declared that employees need never return to the corporate office. Companies in other industries are making the same sorts of calculations, while employees are rethinking not just how they work but even where they live.

All of this hinges on the evolution of tools that make this remote way of work possible. For some of us—well, like everyone who’s worked for Ars , for instance—that isn’t anything new. As I’ve noted previously, I’ve been working primarily from home for over 25 years, and being an early adopter of every technology that could reduce the remoteness of being remote means I’ve lived through the teething pains of collaboration software and distributed teams.