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

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.

Comments

Of course, this is natural.

[burtosis]

The United States will accept the standard when the rest of the world ditches that stupid metric system and go back to real units.

Re:Of course, this is natural.

[myowntrueself]

The United States will accept the standard when the rest of the world ditches that stupid metric system and go back to real units.

You mean Freedom Units!

Re:Of course, this is natural.

[gstoddart]

You joke, but what really happens is the US carriers have decided "we'll call it whatever we like for marketing purposes". Which means someone comes along, defines a standard, and then US carriers co-opt the name and say "yup, we have that", when in reality they don't have that.

This has nothing to do with metric, and everything to do with US corporations saying "Yeah, we totally have 4G", except it's not really 4G, it's some marketing term which has nothing to do with 4G.

So, you know, stop letting your companies take the name of a specific bit of technology and say they're using it when they aren't. Then you won't have the problem of the US glaringly not running the technology they claim.

But, apparently, part of corporate free speech is mis-representing your service to your customers.

Re:Of course, this is natural.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Of course, this is natural.

[mrvan]

** or is that knots?

My dear Sir, miles are a distance unit and knots a speed unit: a knot is a (nautical) mile per hour.

Interestingly, while imperial miles originate in a "biometric" (roman miles were 1000 two-pace steps), nautical miles fit very well in the "geometric" spirit of the SI: a nautical mile is one minute of arc measured along any meridian, ie the distance between the poles is 180×60 = 10,800 NM. The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000 of the distance between the equator and the pole, so these definitions are quite close. Although the definition of both the NM and the m have changed a bit as they were standardized, the international definition of 1NM=1852m is pretty darn close to the expected 20,000 / 10,800 = 1851.85m.

Note that as a European I use metric exclusively: for me, a pound is 500g and an ounce is 100g, and a cup is something I put coffee in. That is, until I step foot on a sailing boat, when suddenly the only units that makes sense are knots and miles. Metric is for landlubbers, I guess :)

good

[hjf]

The US will build their OWN 5G network. With Blackjack. And hookers.
In fact, forget compatibility.

The US will adopt a closed standard, with royalties, that will work only in the US. That'll keep the eurotrash out.

Re:good

[Noryungi]

The US will adopt a closed standard, with royalties, that will work only in the US. That'll keep the eurotrash out.

Yup, and you will keep on paying 10x more than anywhere else in the world.

The US is becoming more and more irrelevant each step along the way.

Re:good

[nytes]

It will be decided on by the telcos. It will be something that can be achieved inexpensively and yield maximum profits. It will grant a minor speed bump for us in the USA, while giving the telcos an excuse for doubling consumer costs.

And it won't be remotely as fast as "5G" anywhere else in the world.

Re:good

[halivar]

In the long list of things that can and should make a country irrelevant, the cost of a phone plan is pretty much... not there.

Previous, universal definition of 5G

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Buzzword.

Who cares?

[jtownatpunk.net]

Increased speed is pointless if they keep choking it with ridiculously low caps. "Oh, wow. I can hit my monthly cap in 19.3 seconds."

What is the point of this article?

[Solandri]

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.)

Re:What is the point of this article?

[PopeRatzo]

Slashdot is a pretty provincial, chauvinistic and bigoted publication... as long as these qualities are directed in an anti-US manner.

I get the feeling Slashdot is provincial, but in the sense that their province is the basement and they hate everyone outside it.

Me, I only hate Australia because they have death adders and kangaroo, who are not at all cute and cuddly. They're mean and they just want to kick your ass all the time.

Europe, US, South America, Asia. As long as I can get a decent meal, they're all OK in my book. But you can't get a decent meal in Australia, unless by "decent meal" you mean getting bitten by death adders and your ass kicked by a surly kangaroo. Even koalas you can't trust. They're cute until you get close enough for them to pull a death adder out of their marsupial sack and then it's your ass.

No sir. I do not like Australia.

Sounds familiar...

[jacks smirking reven]

Carriers: The numbers all go to 5G. Look, right across the board, 5G, 5G, 5G and...
Customers: Oh, I see. And most networks go up to 4G?
Carriers: Exactly.
Customers: Does that mean it's faster? Is it any faster?
Carriers: Well, it's one faster, isn't it? It's not 4G. You see, most blokes, you know, will be surfing at 4G. You're on 4G here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on 4G on your phone. Where can you go from there? Where?
Customers: I don't know.
Carriers: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Customers: Put it up to 5G.
Carriers: 5G. Exactly. One faster.
Customers: Why don't you just make 4G faster and make 4G be the top number and make that a little faster?
Carriers: [pause] These go to 5G.

5G is already outdated

[Misagon]

I have a 7G mobile hanging in my window. That is seven G's! Two more than this 5G and at least THREE MORE than what most people have.

I added a small bell to balance them to eight items. I had used a pre-made mobile ring with eight holes around the circumference and was too lazy to measure and drill seven new ones for the strings. But when the window is open, and the wind catches the G's in the mobile, the bell hanging from the ring rings.
People have asked me if I could also talk into it: of course I can, but I don't see the point.