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Next Generation of Wireless -- 5G -- Is All Hype (backchannel.com)
Many people have promised us that 5G will be here very soon. And it will be the best thing ever. To quote Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, 5G is "wireless fiber," and to quote SK Telecom, thanks to 5G we will soon be able to "transfer holograms" because the upcoming standard is "100 times faster" than our current communications system 4G LTE. But if we were to quote Science, the distant future isn't nearly as lofty as the one promised by executives. Backchannel explains: "5G" is a marketing term. There is no 5G standard -- yet. The International Telecommunications Union plans to have standards ready by 2020. So for the moment "5G" refers to a handful of different kinds of technologies that are predicted, but not guaranteed, to emerge at some point in the next 3 to 7 years. (3GPP, a carrier consortium that will be contributing to the ITU process, said last year that until an actual standard exists, '"5G' will remain a marketing & industry term that companies will use as they see fit." At least they're candid.) At the moment, advertising something as "5G" carries no greater significance than saying it's "blazing fast" or "next generation" -- nut because "5G" sounds technical, it's good for sales. We are a long way away from actual deployment. [...] Second, this "wireless fiber" will never happen unless we have... more fiber. Real fiber, in the form of fiber optic cables reaching businesses and homes. (This is the "last mile" problem; fiber already runs between cities.)
It's just plain physics. In order to work, 99% of any "5G" wireless deployment will have to be fiber running very close to every home and business. The high-frequency spectrum the carriers are planning to use wobbles billions of times a second but travels incredibly short distances and gets interfered with easily. So it's great at carrying loads of information -- every wobble can be imprinted with data -- but can't go very far at all.
"nut because" - There is more to proof-reading than spell checking.
In most places 5G (in currently envisioned form) will not happen at all due to economics of it. Outside of Japan and such we simply do not have population density to justify putting a cell unit at every lamp post (because signal is short range and does not go through walls very well).
So maybe New York and such, but that's probably it...
Stuff you should already know.
since I'm using 5G, bitches!
What the f is a "wobble"?
I know that explanations have to be simplified for a non-tech audience. But radio waves "wobble"? Really?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
If it is reasonably faster than 4G and technically feasible for providers and cell phone manufacturers it's legitimate. Who cares what the technology is or if there is a standard?
love is just extroverted narcissism
All this talk of wobbles, but the real nut is here:
Above 24 GHz is Ka band, now favored for deep space communication. It has one issue that the article doesn't mention - it is blocked by rain. Look for your 5G bandwidth to drop significantly in a downpour.
I'm not buying a new phone until 5G is rolled out. My new 5G phone will fart fairy dust and transport me via a rainbow to a pot of gold all via holograms. I'll be able to download movies from the future that haven't been filmed yet like in Spaceballs. The new Google AI will already have so much data on me it will know exactly what I want when I want it, no longer will I have to enter an address into GPS it will just know where I'm going! But alas you can only use your phone for 30 minutes at a time because battery life still sucks.
I know that explanations have to be simplified for a non-tech audience. But radio waves "wobble"? Really?
Yes, didn't you know that? Radio consists of big balls of wibbly-wobbly ether-wether stuff.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
they are repeating exactly what they did with 4G, which includes both WiMax and LTE technologies. LTE eventually won out, of course, which really sucked for the few companies that bet on WiMax early on.
We know that waiting for standards can be a pain, but they sure can save the bottom line from having to recover from an expensive, lost bet. (Looking at you, Sprint.)
Yes, I know, let's get the jokes out of the way first.
Now, seriously, EHF is going to be seriously attenuated by windows and walls, being pure line of sight communication. I suppose the assumption is that people would use wifi for anything indoors? What if your windows don't face a local tower? Multiplicity of towers to avoid that situation? Increased infrastructure costs associated with this?
This doesn't sound likely in the near term.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
And you can chew up your entire month's pittance of bandwidth 30 seconds after the start of the month...
So, what you're telling me is... 5G right now is essentially what 4G was a few years ago. Simply marketing fluff and bullshit from the carriers to promote their latest gizmos, but none adhering to any actual standard. This is going to be HSDPA(+) vs WiMax va LTE all over again!
So are they going to raise the data caps 100x to compensate for this 100x increase in speed? Or will we see fiber speeds and low double-digit GB caps (if lucky)
TLDR: So the post starts out with a good point, 5G is currently a marketing term, but starts to go off the rails after that.
1. If "true" 5G isn't standardized (and honestly still a concept), how can you make proclamations about what it will and won't do? Yes, there are practical considerations but the same was said of current frequencies until things like OFDM were implemented. So yes, it's not currently practical but that doesn't mean it won't be by 2020.
2. The assumption that you need fiber running to a cell site in every house or office is ridiculous. Even current 4G standards can get up to 1Gbps over current frequencies in a lab environment. Are you going to get that in the field? Nope. Cellular providers need to upgrade their cell sites, users need to have phones with the latest radios and even if you have all of that it's going to depend on how many people you have sharing a given cell. But my point remains, "fiber" speeds are achievable with the current equipment and environments. But, but, but, football/soccer games. Exactly, there you can deploy higher frequency sites that cover short distances but have more bandwidth. Out in rural areas or suburbs with less density you don't need microwave frequencies.
3. The reason your 2.4ghz and 5.0ghz devices can't broadcast outside your house is because the FCC doesn't want them to (and you don't want them to either). Carriers aren't restricted by these limitations (which is why the pay millions for frequency rights, at least in the US). There are still power limitations, unless you want to see pigeons go up in smoke every time they fly past a tower (which might actually be a selling point here in NYC).
If a member of the board of directors of ICANN says the tubes, they wobbles, it wobbles.
Actually, she's a Harvard Law professor, so maybe the technical jargon isn't her strong suit.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
They are going to do one better than that. They will give you:
20 GB of 5G data
2 GB of 4G data
200 MB of 3G data
2 MB of 2G data.
They won't give you any tool to tell you how much of each type of data you are using and will just surprise you by billing you whatever they feel like each month in overage charges.
with $10 a GB overages and $15 a meg roaming that is a lot of profit that can be had for very fast cell internet.
Price and data caps is what matters. Currently speed does not matter in the US. The cheapest data plan you can get here in the states is around 2gb/month for roughly $50. Who cares if it's on 3G, 4G, or 5G networks. You hit the cap with light usage. The telecoms are pushing you into more expensive plans. Then they bump up the speed of the network, thus causing you to use more data, thus milking more money from you.
How about we continue to work on the 4G networks. Expand them and pay them off before worrying about the not-even existing 5G standard. Increase the caps and lower the price before trying to give us fiber on the phone (with a 3 year contract, $120/mnt for one line, 10GB of data, and unlimited talk and text!)
*Rant from someone who doesn't own a phone, but would if he could get a data plan with useable amount of data for a reasonable price.
**Wife goes through 30gb+ a month on her company phone, and I know my usage would be even more due to my work.
if you keep posting that infantile rubbish.
Believe it or not, LTE doesn't meet the 4G requirements. WiMax deployment would be a step up.
If 5G is all about short distances, why wouldn't people run their own cells? Kind of like running an open Wi-Fi spot.
For technologies that work over long(er) distances, it's -somewhat- logical that you can't put up your own cell tower. If everybody did that, some would stick to standards and some would not. And soon enough you'd have a free-for-all making the spectrum band(s) useless.
And thus we have (some) government regulation on who gets to use the spectrum & how. Auctioning it off to providers who rig up city- or nationwide networks. But what do you pay a provider for:
a) For maintaining the infrastructure. When everybody puts up their own 'micro-cell tower', no need to pay a 3rd party for maintaining it.
b) For connecting it to upstream (wired) infrastructure. But when those upstream connections have to run all the way to your front door anyway, you can do that yourself right? Again, same as in-home Wi-Fi routing to your internet connection.
c) For user-sharing on those networks, billing, network performance monitoring, etc. Again: when it's all short-distance anyway, no need for that, can be done decentralized by end users. Users that don't play by the rules, can only mess with the spectrum in their immediate area.
Yes you'd still need some standards to enable users to move from micro-cell to micro-cell seamlessly. And use the spectrum in a way that minimizes interference for users that are close to each other. But this is mostly a matter of putting some puzzle-pieces together & declare some de facto standards that every user can follow, right? (in the usual case, baked into consumer devices & their firmware).
'5G' coverage would then simply depend on how interested people in an area are in putting up their routers / antenna's etc. Or am I missing something here?
Last month we were told that theTelecoms would withhold 5G from Europe if net neutrality were enacted.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/07/10/2033245/telecoms-promise-5g-networks-if-eu-cripples-net-neutrality
But now we learn that "5G" doesn't mean anything, so the threat is completely meaningless.
If you have an obvious sequence of sequential standard names (2G, 3G, 4G, etc.) your standards body's first priority is to trademark all feasible designations to avoid stupidity like this.
"Our Gs go up to 11. All the other companies, their Gs only go up to 10."
This isn't too far from what the article is telling us..
You can wobble trillions of times a second, but that doesn't really matter. Bandwidth usage is driven by the baudrate of the signal. That's true regardless of your frequency band.
Radio waves wobble but the networks don't fall down.
In the 5G future, Weebles deliver your mail.
I'm wondering how close and feasible this technology is, and if it could be used with simple antennas mounted externally and one microcell every block? would it be comparable to fiber and have most of the speed and bandwidth? That would make the cost of rolling it out drop quite a bit wouldn't it?
5G' will remain a marketing & industry term that companies will use as they see fit.
In that case we should start to see some marketing one-upmanship any day soon. With the advent of the marketing term that can be used as they see fit New!!!! 6G systems.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You've described "just like wifi", then asked if there's any reason people won't use it for mobile phone service, instead of using a wireless carrier.
Well, do people use wifi for their phone and not have a carrier? That's essentially the same thing as what you're proposing. Do people do it? Nope, most people use a carrier with their phone. Why? Well, why DO you have a carrier?
Sure, theoretically everyone could run their wifi with an open guest network, then use voip from their phone. Aside from security concerns, let's look at one obvious financial issue. You're running the hotspot, which you presumably have connected to your cable internet connection to connect to the rest of the world. Two of your neighbors like to stream HD Netflix all night, falling asleep with movies playing. That's helping run your internet usage close to the cap amd you need to upgrade your internet if you're going to have enough bandwidth for you and your neighbors, so you ask the neighbors to throw you a few bucks toward the bill each month. They each pay you $25/month, which you use to pay the upstream cable bill. So now your neighbors are paying you for the connection - congratulations, you're a carrier.
Suppose you DON'T connect your microcell to the internet. Suppose it's a pure mesh, where you hand the data off to the next neighbor, who hands it to the next, who hands it off to the next, on and on until it hopefully reaches the Netflix server. So that kinda works for a month or two - it takes a long time to make several hundred hops, and sometimes a site in the middle gets overwhelmed and drops calls but it kinda works. Then somebody says to you "rather than sending your traffic over hundreds of micro-routers and hoping it doesn't get dropped, you can conect to our cell which has a direct fiber optic connection to an all-fiber network, and it's just three hops (via fiber) to reach Netflix." The fiber-connected cells work a shitload better than jumping hundreds of wifi-like connections, of course, so you want to get on their fiber-connected cell. Only $25/month.
Mesh networks CAN work, much like two cans on a string can work. If you're in a small farming community in the middle of the desert with no cabling and no connections to the outside, talking to someone 20 miles away by being routed through a dozen neighbors is better than not being connected at all. But compared to connecting to a multi-gigabit fiber network running on redundant $25,000 Cisco routers that can reconverge around a dropped link in under a second? Not even close. On average Verizon spends $6 billion each year on network upgrades. Last year they spent $11 billion. They don't spend that kind of money on something that's no better than Linksys.
The technological idiots in marketing are trying to redefine "hologram" to mean standard stereoscopic imagery, which it is not. Microsoft does not use holography in its HoloLens device. Cellular data technology will not be routinely transmitting holograms. Holograms are produced by capturing the interference patterns of light waves. Holograms are NOT standard stereoscopic imagery--they are much more than that. For one, holograms make objects truly appear nearer or farther by requiring our eyes' lenses to focus for different distances. For another, people whose eyes are separated different distances see holograms differently, just like they view "real life" differently, and not the exact same stereoscopic pair of images that standard stereoscopic technology provides.
Are we saying that 4G isnt all hype? Are there any real 4G networks out there? Has WIMAX been deployed at all. LTE sure as hell isn't 4G.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
This sounds strangely familiar.
Cutting Through the 4g Hype
There is a lot of research being done on this subject right now. Yes, right now there is no standard, so anyone saying 5G can basically be researching or claiming a wide variety of things. But here are some of the awesome things that ARE being looked at:
Massive MIMO: Huge multi antenna arrays that can effectively aim and focus a signal with destructive and constructive interference using DSP techniques.
Real-time channel mapping: Using advanced techniques, they are beginning to work on real-time channel mapping that allows the selection of best wireless channel communication so fast it can almost be done per transmission. In many cases, they are doing this not only for frequency, but transmitter and receiver emission direction.
Spatial Multiplexing: This one uses similar principles, but can multiplex signals based partly on their position of origination. This, in the ideal case, can allow multiple transmissions to be received at once without corrupting each other.
Pre-distortion techniques: Applying pre-distortion to the signal of the transmitters in mobile devices, so their power supply overhead can be cut (which would usually screw up third order intercept point and affect signal quality on the other end). This increases power efficiency and obviously battery life in the end.
In addition to those (and I'm sure I'm leaving some out), they are exploring drastic increases in instantaneous bandwidth, which they are quantified by bits per second per Hz. With improved signal reception and transmission techniques, the QAM modulation scheme can transcode more bits into a single signal carrier.
So yeah, some of it's hype, but if you think they are just slapping a new name on the same old stuff, you will be left behind.
A lot of Americans live in urban areas, but often very much urban sprawl. Particularly the residential areas are often composed of single family homes, with yards and so spread out, not large apartment buildings. Look at Phoenix, or LA, or the like. The Phoenix metro area has like 4.5 million people in it, but that is spread out over 23,500 square km. Ya it isn't rural, but there's a LOT of land area to over if you want to blanket it with wireless of some kind, and it gets really problematic if said wireless is short range.
Now that is not to discount cities like New York (though a lot of people there also live in suburban sprawl) just noting that many of the big urban centers in the US are also big land-area wise. Those are more difficult and costly to cover.
The issue then is one of percentage of the population you can cover vs cost and if it is worth it. So suppose you determine you can cover a place like New York, or the downtown commercial districts of some other large cities, economically but not the residential areas of many places like Phoenix. Is it worth it? Is it worth getting new towers just for those places, and new phone technology that most of the nation has no use for?
Cost vs benefit always has to be considered.
big deal.. we will just hit our max quota sooner and get either throttled or dropped as a customer.
" In order to work, 99% of any "5G" wireless deployment will have to be fiber running very close to every home and business"
So this is the plan: they roll the costs of finally upgrading the fiber they have been promising to upgrade/expand/etc for decades, into 'upgrading our networks into "5G", which you know is better because its 5, and not 4* ...so it will probably be faster, but not as big a leap as 3G-to-4G was, and plus there's no actual 5G standard yet so BASICALLY TL;DR: they are using an ISO Standard as a marketing term which is just... fascinating.
*3 is right out.