Fifth-generation mobile networks promise peak data rates above 10 Gb s⁻¹ and one-millisecond round-trip latency, but those figures can only be delivered if the antenna system is re-engineered from the ground up. While 4G radios used eight or fewer ports, 5G base-stations routinely mount 64, 128 or even 256 radiating elements in a single panel. This leap is driven by two complementary techniques: massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and adaptive beam-forming. Massive MIMO treats the antenna array as a spatial multiplexing engine, creating many parallel data pipes that share the same time–frequency resource. Beam-forming, in turn, shapes those pipes into narrow, steerable pencils of energy that track each user instead of flooding the cell with wasted power. The combination raises spectral efficiency by an order of magnitude and compensates for the higher propagation loss suffered above 6 GHz.
