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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."
Wouldn't a small amount of these phones flood a wireless spectrum? It would not take many people in an area until the speed is chopped down significantly.
Or do they have poor range and expect femtocells everywhere? But why not just WiFi at that point?
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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.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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?
Must we really publish brain farts from a fanboi on slashdot's front page? This "news item" is completely substance free. No description of technology, no links, no science, no official announcement from someone you might believe. It uses terms that don't exist - there is no 5G - or at least the mob responsible for naming GSM, 3G, 4G, LTE, LTE Advanced doesn't have one yet. And there is nothing particularly special about 1Gbps download speed. LTE Advanced already does that if is has around 67MHz of bandwidth available, and you are the only one using the cell.
So let me see, what is there that could justify its position on the front page? Oh I see now - a baseless jibe at a Apple. That's OK then.
From TFS: "capable of getting speeds up to 1gbps"
That's 0.125 GBps so 8 seconds for a GB. You need at least 80 seconds to hit your 10GB cap which is more than one minute. This sounds much fairer now.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Then perhaps you should stop reading slashdot, and instead go to amazon.com and newegg.com?
It's funny you should say that, since the entire point of LTE is that it is a Long-Term Evolution platform. It isn't that the "standard was set too high" - it's more that the standard was designed to support high speeds so the wheel would not have to be re-invented as technology progressed.
You can either create a new set of supporting standards and technologies every few years, or you can develop a set of standards that scales up as hardware allows better speeds. So it's only if one entirely misunderstands the purpose of LTE, that the standard would appear to be set too high. The gradual progression that Samsung demonstrates in the article is what LTE-Advanced was all about and is still firmly in 4G territory. 5G is just horrible marketing.