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How the Rollout of 5G Will Change Everything
mrspoonsi writes The global race is on to develop 5G, the fifth generation of mobile network. While 5G will follow in the footsteps of 4G and 3G, this time scientists are more excited. They say 5G will be different — very different. "5G will be a dramatic overhaul and harmonization of the radio spectrum," says Prof Rahim Tafazolli who is the lead at the UK's multimillion-pound government-funded 5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey. To pave the way for 5G the ITU is comprehensively restructuring the parts of the radio network used to transmit data, while allowing pre-existing communications, including 4G and 3G, to continue functioning. 5G will also run faster, a lot faster. Prof Tafazolli now believes it is possible to run a wireless data connection at an astounding 800Gbps — that's 100 times faster than current 5G testing. A speed of 800Gbps would equate to downloading 33 HD films — in a single second. Samsung hopes to launch a temporary trial 5G network in time for 2018's Winter Olympic Games.
800 Gbps = 100 GB/s = 4 Blu-ray movies per second.
Who cares when your artificially and ridiculously low data cap is exceeded in 5 minutes?
At 800 Gbps you would blow through AT&T's most expensive ($375/mo) shared data plan of 100GB of data in one second.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
According to theoriginal ITU position to be truly called 4G one need to be able to do at least 1 Gbps peak rate downlink. In order to comply with this requirement LTE release 10 added a new category, Cat 8, doing actually close to 3 Gbps. On paper: nobody implemented it yet --- and it'll be a while before anyone does (if ever: it takes 8x8 MIMO and 5 aggregated 20 MHz LTE channels to reach 3 Gbps).
I'm a telecom professional, and I'm tired about all those "true 4G" statements, and on what is or not 4G. I find the ITU 4G definition ridiculous: a long time ago the world of telecom manufacturers was made of cautious engineering companies. Then very aggressive new entrants came and made outrageous claims [1], and older companies went with the charade not to be seen as lagards. That's basically why we got this very bad joke of "official 4G is 1 Gbps". I guess anyone looking around should see the slight disconnect with reality there? As a bonus joke, new categories were added later on: Cat9 peaks at 300 Mbps, go figure...
For what it's worth, in my opinion the true difference that warrants using a new generation number is the move to OFDMA. 1G was analog, 2G was digital narrow band, 3G is wideband CDMA, 4G is wideband OFDMA. This makes sense to me, as a telecom engineer. The ITU BS I'd rather forgot all about it, it's just too embarrassing.
As for 5G there are interesting things on-going, but it's very early in the game. For now it's only people wanting attention to get funding (like TFA) or cheap PR. Don't feed the PR spinners please. The high-frequency spectrum with many very small antennas and cheap RF (to compensate for the number, 64-256...) is interesting but there is a long road to practical products.
[1] There is a joke on this, and let's protect the culprit: how do you tell the difference between an Ericsson engineer and a Xxx one? The E/// engineer couldn't tell a lie if you put a gun to his head. The Xxxx engineer couldn't tell the truth. I work for neither E/// nor Xxxx BTW.
Keeping the blades dry is the key to long life. Microrust of the edge is what dulls them. A humid bathroom is not a good environment for blades. http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-...
Well, LTE is a bunch of things and was originally intended to describe the process, not the standard.
But think of it like this:
2G GSM (ie first GSM) was ISDN married with cellular. That is, the engineers who created it were tasked with creating a modern, efficient, mobile phone system that would integrate into what was supposed to be a pan-European ISDN network. Why ISDN? Because that literally was the most advanced mainstream digital phone system in the world at the time, and most of Europe planned to migrate everyone over to it, even private residences. Everything you wanted to do over the phone in the 1980s was possible (and better when) using ISDN. And so 2G GSM was built as a single line ISDN with lower bandwidth.
At the air interface end, a custom FHSS digital interface was built to support the requirements of the upper level protocols.
This worked great, except the Internet happened, and people wanted to access the 'net everywhere. So 3G GSM happened, also known as UMTS. This involved rejigging the protocols to provide what they thought mobile users wanted - two "lines", one for voice, and one variable width for data (think ISDN + DSL in terms of usage model) So it was a complete redesign.
As it was, the FHSS interface made for 2G GSM didn't work for it, so they made a new one, based - largely because of politics - on a Code Division Multiple Access system. Actually there are at least two, one called WCDMA, the other TD-CDMA I think.
This... sucked. Part of it was Code Division Multiple Access isn't all its cracked up to be, but most of it is that ISDN+DSL is not actually the model to go for. It's a kludge that expects networks in general to be divided into voice and data, when in fact we're increasingly going with data only.
Hence 4G LTE. Which is still being rolled out FWIW. But voice is now a service over IP when implemented on LTE. Which means an LTE device fits into modern networking, and in theory, ultimately, you can roam an LTE device onto your Wi-fi network and it'll just work. Eventually. It doesn't work right now.
Now, funny thing here. At this point, the air interface thing kinda changes and kinda doesn't. For actual 4G LTE, as in, IMT-Advanced LTE, they created a new OFDM based air interface with really low latency (E-UTRA.) However, the upper layers of LTE can also run over W-CDMA (the name of the air interface in UMTS - 3G GSM), and the more advanced variants, such as HSPA+, actually work well with the protocol.
So what does all this mean? Well, it means we've had three generations of GSM that are about protocol, not air interface. The air interface was changed at the same time, and each time coincided with this whole 2G/3G/4G crap, but that was a side show, the action was in the upper levels.
It is not likely at all at this stage - in the next two decades anyway - that there will be a fourth generation of GSM as far as protocols go. Everything-over-IP is the way everything is going, and LTE already does that.
So 5G will be LTE at the upper levels too. It'll have a new air interface. But right now LTE already runs over HSPA+ and E-UTRA. This'll just be another approved air interface for LTE. Which is good.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.