EU, South Korea Collaborate On Superfast 5G Standards

jfruh writes The European Commission and the South Korean government announced that they will be harmonizing their radio spectrum policy in an attempt to help bring 5G wireless tech to market by 2020. While the technology is still in an embryonic state, but one South Korean researcher predicts it could be over a thousand times faster than current 4G networks.

Comments

How much more can we squeeze?

[i kan reed]

There's only so much theoretical bandwidth on the broadcast range e/m spectrum. How much gets reserved for non-consumer purposes? How many towers/area can we afford? There's gotta be a theoretical fundamental limit, somewhere, right? Like there is with Moore's law?

Re:How much more can we squeeze?

[AndroSyn]

The limit you are looking for, the Shannon limit is explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:How much more can we squeeze?

[Shakrai]

The Shannon–Hartley theorem (aka Shannon capacity) is the term you're looking for. Modern wireless networks use MIMO (multiple input multiple output) concepts to boost this capacity and squeeze more bits into the same slice of spectrum.

Re:How much more can we squeeze?

[YoopDaDum]

As said by others the fundamental limit is given by Shannon. This defines a maximum throughput given a spectrum bandwidth and S/N ratio. In current technologies we're pretty close to this. This also indicates how to increase the total throughput, which can comes from:

• - Adding channels. This is what MIMO spatial multiplexing (SM) is about;
• - Increasing the used spectrum bandwidth. There is a lot of spectrum at high frequencies, with new challenges, and one option for 5G is to use this;
• - Increase the signal to noise ratio. This is what beam-forming is about.

Having more MIMO SM layers (i.e. concurrent channels) is not practical. The complexity of a MMSE decoder isO(L^3) with L the number of layers, so it gets ugly quickly. Today MIMO SM is typically limited to 2 layers in practice, with 4 likely coming and 8 the practical limit (and that may not be so practical really...).

Using very high frequencies (above 10 GHz) gives access to a lot of free spectrum, but the higher one go the lower the reach for a given power budget. To compensate for the high attenuation this is coupled with massive multi-antennas, the talk for 5G is 64 to 256. This is split between a few very costly MIMO SM layers and the rest for cheap beam-forming. So for example 256 antennas would behave like four 64 patches BF antennas for 4 layers MIMO. Of course with that many antennas and RF transceiver you have to compromise in cost and quality. So it's a lot of poor receive chains, vs. a few very high quality ones today. But there's still the potential to gain overall.
It has challenges though: it will still be for small cells (low reach) and rather low mobility (the beam steering cannot track high speed mobiles, plus small cells don't work wall for highly mobile devices: too many handovers). But because most people are low speed and the places where capacity is most needed are urban centers where small cells are ok, it still can be a win.

But as one can see, high speed 5G won't be universal like 4G is. By this I mean that 4G can (and will) completely replace 2G and 3G in time, while this high frequencies / massive BF 5G could only complement 4G is high density urban places, but will never be suitable for lower density parts (rural) where 4G would stay.

And then there's the elephant in the room: a lot of the improvements in telecoms have been riding on Moore's law. With the scaling problems that start now to be more openly discussed, how much more processing power we can use for 5G and what the users are prepared to pay (cost and power) for all these improvements are interesting questions.

Re:Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5

[Shakrai]

LTE was first proposed in 2003-2004 and lab tested in 2005-2006, which was years before 3G networks were fully deployed. It will likewise be years before there are real world trials of 5G technology, then some time after that before consumer gear becomes available at affordable prices and carriers being deployment.

Now you can blow through your 2GB of data at $30

[hsmith]

In 30 seconds!

Re:a THOUSAND times faster than 4G?

[RJFerret]

I believe the "could be" part, if it's just 10% faster s/he's right.

And an attempt by 2020 means more like 2026, and the US will have an incompatible slower version around 2030.

Jaded, I am.

It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet...

[iampiti]

...is consistently faster than our wired home connections.
It all sounds a little weird to me: Isn't a dedicated cable always much more reliable and capable than a wireless connection? That's what I thought at least.
I guess it's cheaper to deploy antennas every few hundred meters than to wire every home

5G

[rossdee]

5G is about 49 meters per second per second

Re:Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5

[hduff]

What the fuck are they talking about? We don't even have 4G yet, and they are already talking about 5G?

I'm holding out for 6G.

Re:a THOUSAND times faster than 4G?

[hduff]

I believe the "could be" part, if it's just 10% faster s/he's right.

And an attempt by 2020 means more like 2026, and the US will have an incompatible slower version around 2030.

Jaded, I am.

You're being too damn optimistic.

Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet

[gstoddart]

Somehow, I doubt it actually will be faster.

The cell companies will throttle, and continue to massively over-subscribe.

Pretty much every advancement they've touted as bringing faster, better, cheaper has translated into "not much faster", "slightly better (for them)", and in no way at all cheaper.

I have very little faith that most wireless companies will do anything but squeeze us for money money and more profits, while giving us the same service (or worse) than we already have.

That's not what we need in the US

[jtownatpunk.net]

In the US, we need cheaper wireless, not faster. I've been passing thru some of Verizon's XLTE areas lately where my speeds have topped out at 69/19Mbps. That's pretty darn fast but completely useless for the vast majority of their customers with their piddly 1-10 gig caps.

Re:Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5

[Arker]

You missed his point. 4G has a definition, LTE and the other junk being sold as 4g does not make it. Marketing, as marketing normally does, simply lied and mislabeled what they actually had (improved 3g) as what people wanted to buy (4g) and made the sale anyway.

So now we are talking about 5g or 6g but we do not actually have 4g availability yet.

Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet

[MachineShedFred]

Don't forget that the link speed between your phone and the tower doesn't make one single shit of difference if they don't upgrade the backhaul from the tower to the switching office.

Re:a THOUSAND times faster than 4G?

[sandertje]

The problem you US folks have in one problem that's going to plague in many areas for decades to come: low population density. Even your cities are empty by Western European or Asian standards. The cost per capita to deliver services will thus be far higher than in other parts of the world.