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Europe Agrees To Agree With Everyone Except US What 5G Should Be

Posted by samzenpus on from the here-comes-the-naysayer dept.

itwbennett writes: Following agreements signed by the EU with South Korea in June 2014 and with Japan in May 2015, the EU and China "have agreed to agree by the end of the year on a working definition for 5G," reports Peter Sayer. "About the only point of agreement so far is that 5G is what we'll all be building or buying after 4G, so any consensus between the EU and China could be significant," says Sayer.

3 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Standard /. approach is valid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Don't read the linked article, it says nothing. More specifically, it has the same headline, contradicts its own headline halfway through, and still tries to claim some moral failure of the USA as part of this somehow.

    Much better off to just go with the normal uninformed reactions of Slashdotters than to try to find any meaning to this.

  2. What is the point of this article? by Solandri · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From TFA:

    China and the European Union have agreed to agree by the end of the year on a working definition for 5G, perhaps the most overused and least understood term in mobile telecommunications.

    About the only point of agreement so far is that 5G is what we'll all be building or buying after 4G, so any consensus between the EU and China could be significant.
    [...]
    The standards bodies that defined 3G and 4G for us, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the 3G Patent Partnership (3GPP), are more measured in their approach.

    The ITU plans to decide on its own name for 5G next month. That's likely to be International Mobile Telecommunications system 2020, for the year by which it expects the first equipment will go on sale. It won't get around to choosing a technical standard until February of that year, though.

    Around December, 3GPP plans to start a six-month study of the requirements for 5G radio access networks, with a view to submitting a proposed standard to ITU in early 2020.

    That slow-but-steady approach makes Monday's 5G agreement between officials from the European Commission and from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology seem almost hasty.
    [...]
    Neither agreement constitutes an end run around the ITU or 3GPP, though, as the EU, China and South Korea also agreed to promote global standardization in support of the work being done by those two bodies.

    In other words, two government bodies which have nothing to do with the actual 5G standard have agreed to agree what 5G is (that is, they won't support different standards). The actual standard itself hasn't been set, and the two bodies which actually do make the standard don't plan to set it until 2020.

    Was the whole point of this submission to take a shot at the U.S.? Need I remind you that had the U.S. signed up for the GSM standard, CDMA would've been stillborn and we would likely have 50-200 kbps data speeds today. GSM used TDMA, which allocates bandwidth to phones which aren't even using it. CDMA allows all phones to transmit simultaneously, and bandwidth gets distributed evenly between all transmitting phones. CDMA worked so well that by the time 3G rolled around, GSM adopted CDMA (it now uses TDMA only for voice) and nearly every GSM phone in the world also packed a wideband CDMA radio for data. That's right, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. That's why you could talk and use data at the same time on a GMS phone - they had a TDMA radio for voice, a wCDMA radio for data. CDMA phones used the same radio for both, just in different modes.

    (And if you're curious, most LTE implementations use OFDMA. Mathematically it's a lot like CDMA, except using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. The orthogonality is what allows you to pick out a specific phone's signal even though all phones are transmitting simultaneously. The transmissions from other phones just increases the noise floor, so a phone that's not transmitting decreases the noise floor, everyone else's signal to noise ratio improves, and the bandwidth the non-transmitting phone would've used is distributed equally among the phones which are transmitting. TDMA is just giving each phone a timeslice, so only one phone can transmit at a time - or not transmit if it didn't actually need the timeslice.)

  3. Re:Of course, this is natural. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Other than the road signs, lumber sizes (2x4s, etc.) and gun calibers, I don't know any real measurements in the US that have not moved to metric. My vehicle's engine is measured in liters, the torque I use to tighten down bolts is newton-meters, Pressure inflating air bag suspension is in PSI and kPa, and so on. Even the bottle of meth-mouth soda-pop is a 2 liter bottle, not a half gallon size.

    The US is going metric... only thing left are just road signs and eventually those will go into both miles and kilometers... hopefully dropping miles for good eventually.