i saw a video from the isp Unifique asking Serjão Foguetes about how 5g would change humanity.
Watch on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/DP9BT-BiIdk/
Sergio got this one wrong when he said 5g would allow a surgeon to do remote surgeries from Japan to Brazil.
latency between Japan and Brazil is high, no matter how fast the internet is, bc of the geographic distance between the countries and the limits of the speed of light through fiber optics.
it could be the fastest 5g in the world. the ping will still be high. we dont have the tech for this.
why latency is limited by physics
speed of light in vacuum is about 300,000 km/s. but inside a fiber optic cable, it drops to around 200,000 km/s (two thirds of vacuum speed).
distance between Japan and Brazil is about 18,000 km in a straight line. doing the math:
- minimum one-way time: 18,000 km ÷ 200,000 km/s = ~90 milliseconds
- round-trip time: ~180 ms
and this is the absolute theoretical minimum, not counting routers, intermediate servers, signal processing, submarine cable switches... in practice, real ping between Brazil and Japan is around 250-300 ms.
why this matters for surgery
remote surgeries need latency below 10 ms to be safe. with 250-300 ms, every movement the surgeon makes would reach the robot with a quarter second delay. in surgery thats huge, it can be the difference between life and death.
5g solves local latency (from 100 ms down to 1-10 ms within a city). but intercontinental latency is limited by physics, not network technology. 5g cant make light travel faster.
where 5g actually helps with remote surgery
5g will help with remote surgery, yes, but at much shorter distances.
- within a city: surgeon at central hospital, patient at peripheral hospital. latency <10 ms. viable!
- within a state/country: with good infrastructure, latencies of 20-50 ms. debatable, but possible in some cases.
- intercontinental: no. physics doesnt allow it.
Sacani is an incredible science communicator, but on this specific point the 5g hype went beyond what physics allows. the 5g hype is real, but it doesnt revoke the laws of the universe.