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.

Comments

They's right, probably

[sshir]

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...

Re:They's right, probably

[OzPeter]

Outside of Japan and such we simply do not have population density to justify putting a cell unit at every lamp post

NYC has a population density almost 5 times greater than Tokyo. And there are a huge number of places in the USA with a population density greater than Tokyo.

Do you really think that Japan would put 5g across every square km of its country? So why do you think that 5G roll out in the USA has to cover everywhere?

Re:They's right, probably

[hey!]

Of course we have the population density; it's just not uniformly distributed. Sure, the US on average is not densely populated, but the average American lives in a densely populated area, and many of those densely populated areas are merging into megalopolises.

If you take a super-densely populated, highly afflurent neighborhood, it doesn't matter whether that neighborhood is Azabu in Tokyo or the Upper East Side in New York. The staggering concentration of wealthy people is capable of supporting anything that is feasible and desirable. Tokyo is the richest city in the world, and New York is a close second. Of the twenty richest cities in the world, eleven are in the US.

No, there are only two barriers to the adoption of 5G in the US: (1) A political culture reluctant to adopt and promote technical standards and (2) the fact there is no such thing as 5G.

Spectrum "wobbles"??

[jenningsthecat]

I know that explanations have to be simplified for a non-tech audience. But radio waves "wobble"? Really?

Wibbly-Wobbly balls

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Same as 4G

[darkain]

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!

This post is mostly hype

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

I can see it now..

[toonces33]

"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..

Re:penetration

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Marketing forces have yet to defeat the laws of physics. Between the frquencies that would have to be used, and playing with Shannon's limit - which can be violated up to infinite data transmission with an infinite amount of power, 5G speed will almost certainly be relegated to the laboratory.

Radio frequencies do not act all the same. Some, like HF, can give worldwide transmissions, some times at power levels that make your cell phone look hugely overpowered, and frequency dependent on time of day and the sunspot cycle. At other times be completely dead becaus of solar activity. Low VHF is a crapshoot, often dead, sometimes opening up. None of that is useable for data. At VHF, it is starting to get interesting, but an effect know as tropospheric ducting will sometimes cause signals from far away to come in and interfere with the ones you want.

Now the VHF and UHF and above frequencies have adesireable effect. They usually are line of sight only, and they become even shorter in transmission/reception distance as they go up in frequency. The 2.4 GHz frequencies used for wireless routers are actually well suited for Wi-Fi. They attenuate quickly enough to allow for other people nearby to have their own wi-fi devices.

But eventually we get to the point that the RF is absorbed by things like water, leaves, bodies. And if the 5G is going to be at 24 GHZ, well good luck. As noted, you'll need to be darn close to the transmitter, you'll need to have a good bit of power on both ends. So it's fiber right up to a few inches away.

5G is almost as much hypefail as Broadband over Power Lines, which had so many failure points it was an exercise in suck.