Verizon and AT&T Prepare to Bring 5G To (Select) Markets In 2017 (ieee.org)

An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum: This year, Verizon and AT&T plan to deliver broadband internet to select homes or businesses using fixed wireless networks built with early 5G technologies. These 5G pilot programs will give the public its first glimpse into a wireless future that isn't due to fully arrive until the early 2020s. With 5G, carriers hope to deliver data to smartphone users at speeds 10 times as fast as on today's 4G networks, and with only 1 millisecond of delay... Over the past year, companies have completed a flurry of lab tests and trials to figure out what types of radios, antennas, and signal processing techniques will work best to deliver 5G in hopes of bringing those technologies and their capabilities to market as soon as possible.
The article notes that standards groups are halfway through their eight-year process of finalizing technical specifications (set to finish in 2020), but "With so much cash on the line, and facing pressure from data-hungry customers, carriers are moving fast." In Japan, NTT Docomo has even tested dozens of programmable antennas simultaneously transmitting signals, resulting in transmissions at 20 gigabits per second. "At that speed, a complete 2-hour, 1080p, high-definition movie can be transmitted in a second and a half."

Comments

Anything to avoid FTTH

[grumling]

Yet another bridge tech to keep from having to run fiber to the home. Cable companies are almost to the point where passive coax makes sense everywhere (Comcast will be deploying "fiber deep" tech in their network over the next 2-4 years). VZW again attempting to dump their copper pair network, this time for wireless. No idea what AT&T is up to with Uverse these days, but I think they're continuing to push RDSLAMs out closer to the customers. Any new build developments above a certain number of homes will be fiber to the home for every ISP thanks to joint open trenching, but all that legacy stuff is too expensive to dig up. The good news is that fiber continues to get cheaper.

Verizon was on the right track with FIOS, but unfortunately not enough customers bought into the tech to make it profitable in the timeline they wanted. This is the fundamental problem with very large national ISPs, they cannot scale out the last mile without sinking billions into the network, but because people don't necessarily understand what increased bandwidth means (and yes, lack of competition), there's little business at risk for doing nothing. So once again when the new bandwidth hog hits the network the ISPs are woefully unprepared.