Slashdot Mirror
Verizon Begins Rolling Out Its 5G Wireless Network In Chicago, Minneapolis (cnbc.com)
Verizon announced today that it has turned on its 5G wireless network in Chicago and Minneapolis -- two of the first markets in the world to receive this next-gen network. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg told CNBC that the company will activate 30 additional markets this year. From a report: Vestberg added that Verizon is unlikely to see any impact on revenue from people who upgrade to new 5G phones until around 2021. This network complements Verizon's existing "5G Home" service which launched in October in select areas and is a wireless alternative to a traditional cable-based home internet connection, but does not work far beyond the walls of your home.
Verizon said the wireless network will give customers access to peak speeds up to 1 Gbps. That's about 10 times faster than you might traditionally find on the LTE connection you have now. Put plainly: You'll be able to download movies in seconds instead of minutes. Only a select number of phones will support the network at first. Samsung will launch a Galaxy S10 5G model later this quarter that will be exclusive to Verizon to start. AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint will begin to sell it in the second half of the year. That leaves the Motorola Z3 as the only phone that supports Verizon's new 5G network right now, and it requires a separate accessory to work on it.
Verizon said the wireless network will give customers access to peak speeds up to 1 Gbps. That's about 10 times faster than you might traditionally find on the LTE connection you have now. Put plainly: You'll be able to download movies in seconds instead of minutes. Only a select number of phones will support the network at first. Samsung will launch a Galaxy S10 5G model later this quarter that will be exclusive to Verizon to start. AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint will begin to sell it in the second half of the year. That leaves the Motorola Z3 as the only phone that supports Verizon's new 5G network right now, and it requires a separate accessory to work on it.
There actually are many potential applications for these speeds, but lets break it down to a couple of simple use case senarios.
Total throughput alone is enough to justify it. The reason for increasing bandwidth also reduces latency because more per second can be transmitted and received. Or in laymens terms... (yes this will be a gross over simplification so don't go crazy about it) If your can only do 1G speeds and everyone needs at least 0.01G to function then only 100 people can effectively use that network at any given time. If usage is low, then yea this is find. But if the business has 1000 customers and they all try to use it at the same time... a lot of people are going to have problems due to congestion. Now... if you move to 5G and people still really only need 0.01G to function you can now support 5 times as many or 500 active users. Which means that the network could support more people and folks will have less latency because when they do receive data it gets to them faster, even if its only a little bit, and they get their usage done before the next group of folks try to use it.
So, does everyone need 250MB/s of through put? The answer is yes, even when they do not think they do. Air space has limited bandwidth depending on the protocols and technology, this means you share the same wire up if you are using the same tower as those around you and you have to share that bandwidth. And when you can download that 25kb web page in 1/2 a second on 1G you can download that page in 1/8 of a second on 5G, that really is important!
except this isn't bandwidth to a central server, where you need capacity for all your customers.
this is bandwidth between a cellphone and the local cell tower, which for 5G networks are going to cover crazy small areas. and each of these towers has multiple antennas and frequency bands, so it's not all shared either.
increasing bandwidth doesn't always decrease latency. If the new protocols require minimum packet sizes, like some encryption and compression algorithms, you end up using more wire bandwidth for the same data, or delaying data until that packet is big enough.
I'm reminded of an old wireless broadband technology, which was based on WCDMA but also incorporated TDMA to increase peak bandwidth.
Bandwidth increased but it had a negative impact on latency and jitter, as packets had to be scheduled to fit in the time divisions.
1.45Gbps LTE requires 6-carrier aggregation. Qualcomm's 5G x50 modem has a theoretical peak of 5Gbps with 8 carriers, so the current 1Gpbs real-world performance is probably only dual-carrier. Plenty more headroom to exploit down the road.
Not to mention the redefinition of 5G, since full 4G was defined as up to 1 Gbps down and 5G was defined as over 1 Gbps.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.o...