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| THE COLONY NEWS | APRIL 2023 | 15 GOOD NEWS! We are pleased to announce The Colony's newly revised website, featuring new functionality, a more intuitive site map, updated images and text, and the opportunity for clubs and committees to eventually have their own page. Jane Payne will continue to oversee the website in her role as chairperson of the Marketing Outreach subcommittee. The website is currently being reviewed by the Board and will soon be ready for launch. Anna Mae Van Every and Sharon Boll are our two most recent interviews for our Outreach to History project. If you know a Colony resident who has been a longtime resident and would be willing to be on video, please contact Greg Hill at greg@neotechstudios.com. The following is a report from Merle McDougal, who heads our 5G Broadband subcommittee. The Current State of Broadband For quite some time, we have been hearing about 5G, the next advance in telecommunications for cellular networks. What is it and how far along are we in getting it? Basically, 5G defines how fast you can download something onto your phone or tablet. All the cell providers tell us we have to have it now, and that they are the fastest. There is more hype than truth in the advertising, which is customary in America. 4G is pretty much universal in this country and it defines the speed at which data is downloaded, which is, at best, 100Mbps (megabites per second of data). 5G is more difficult to transmit universally, so they have divided it into three channels: low, medium, and high bandwidth. Low bandwidth is basically part of 4G at the high end, so it will download at 100Mbps to 250Mbps, not a great improvement, but what they have chosen to call 5G. Medium bandwidth will download at 900Mbps and requires special towers with a range of less than one mile. These are being deployed in some larger cities but are way behind schedule. The promised true 5G high bandwidth service appears to be in the distant foggy future. The download speeds of one gigabit/second require antennas spaced every 600 square feet and won't penetrate walls or windows. The numbers look good, but the reality doesn't. In our valley, we have no cellular 5G and no permits or plans have been filed with the City of Murrieta. If you have Frontier or Spectrum cable service, you can get 5G speeds on Wi-Fi. To test this, Google "speedtest" on your cell phone and you'll get a readout. Spectrum showed 466Mbps on an Apple iPhone. Now go out where there is no Wi-Fi, and you get only cell reception and check download speed. AT&T showed 0.45Mbps on an iPhone (pretty dismal). The conclusion is that we do have medium bandwidth 5G speeds in the Clubhouse through the internet and there is no change in sight. COMMUNICATIONS & TECHNOLOGY By Greg Hill