Samsung Testing 5G Phones With 1gbps Download Speed

Gumbercules!! writes "While many smartphone users are still on 3G and are waiting for 4G to be available, Samsung is now testing 5G networks, capable of getting speeds up to 1gbps. Obviously, we're years away from seeing these in the wild (the company is shooting for 2020) but it's still an amazing improvement over what many people are experiencing now."

Comments

Actually 4G According to ITU-R

[mentil]

The technical definition of 4G requires 1Gbps stationary and 100Mbps while moving. The network tech mentioned in the article is thus 4G.
Notice that current '4G' technologies are usually called '4G LTE' in advertisements, to try to get around the established non-marketing definition.

The catch is...

[toejam13]

The second article notes that the 5G tests are being conducted on the 28GHz Ka microwave band. They also note that they're using a 64 element antenna array.

While those upper microwave bands are great in that you can get very wide channels (possibly hundreds of megahertz wide), their downfall is that they are incredibly line of sight restricted. This is compounded by significant atmospheric absorption. That's why many broadcasters on the band tend to use highly directional antennas. For omnidirectional use, you're going to have to deploy a lot of picocells.

Also for their tests, are they using the large number of antennas for MIMO beamforming (additive RF amplification), MIMO spacial multiplexing (parallel RF feeds slightly out of phase of each other) or old fashioned directional transmission (or a combi of all three?). How much additional cost is that? Even with fractal antennas on short wavelengths, how many of them can you fit in a handset?

Re:Spectrum?

[rossdee]

"I do not know what is the limit of the "wireless spectrum" if there is any"

There is legal limits (controlled by the FCC)

There is technology limits

The atmospere absorbs some frequencies

There are practical limits - sure you can theoretically get lots of bandwidth in the X-Ray and gamma ray end of the spectrum, but do you really want one of those next to your ear?

Re:Vaporware much??

[KingMotley]

Then perhaps you should stop reading slashdot, and instead go to amazon.com and newegg.com?

Re:What is this 5G thing?

[tlambert]

The Samsung testing was in the LMDS frequency band, which the FCC has auctioned off already in the US to cable providers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Multipoint_Distribution_Service

The FCC has already licensed this band for satellite downlink:

http://spectrumwiki.com/wiki/display.aspx?From=disp&f=28499999999

Which means it can't be used for 5G in the US like they are doing with NTT DoCoMo in the Samsung experiments.

Re:Spectrum?

[WhiteDragon]

I do not know what is the limit of the "wireless spectrum" if there is any. Before this limit is reached, I guess just updating all hardware gears that transmit/route more efficiently is all that is needed.

The limit is given precisely by Shannon's Law, which gives a mathematical limit on the amount of data that can be sent over a given amount of bandwidth. Spectral Efficiency is the amount of bandwidth available in a given wireless spectrum.