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Fifty 'Connected Cows' Already Have 5G (reuters.com)
A herd of dairy cows in the U.K. "are enjoying the benefits of 5G connectivity before you," reports Reuters:
For the cows, among the 5G-connected gadgets they are wearing is a collar that controls a robotic milking system. When the cow feels ready to be milked it will approach machine gates that will automatically open. The device recognizes the individual to precisely latch on to its teats for milking, while the cow munches on a food reward. At the government-funded Agricultural Engineering Precision Innovation Centre (Agri-EPI Centre) in Shepton Mallet, in southwest England, around 50 of the 180-strong herd is fitted with the 5G smart collars and health-monitoring ear tags.
But -- why?! The Verge explains: According to Reuters, Cisco is testing infrastructure for the eventual global rollout of 5G that could be used by various industries that are not traditionally in the tech bubble but are still dependent on increasingly sophisticated hardware and software. That includes farming. In this case, Cisco is trying out 5G in three rural locations...
It makes a whole lot of sense when you think about it: farms are large and spread-out spaces, and cows are often shuffled between grazing grounds and areas of the farm where they can be more easily milked and checked on. With the 5G collars, Cisco says farmers can keep tabs on the animals at all times of the day without having to physically trek out to observe the cows up close... The future is wonderful and weird, and farmers have access to it before you and I because without them, we all starve.
"We can connect every cow, we can connect every animal on this farm," Cisco's Nick Chrissos told Reuters, in what may be the strangest boast a Cisco executive has ever uttered in public. "That's what 5G can do for farming -- really unleash the power that we have within this farm, everywhere around the UK and everywhere around the world."
But -- why?! The Verge explains: According to Reuters, Cisco is testing infrastructure for the eventual global rollout of 5G that could be used by various industries that are not traditionally in the tech bubble but are still dependent on increasingly sophisticated hardware and software. That includes farming. In this case, Cisco is trying out 5G in three rural locations...
It makes a whole lot of sense when you think about it: farms are large and spread-out spaces, and cows are often shuffled between grazing grounds and areas of the farm where they can be more easily milked and checked on. With the 5G collars, Cisco says farmers can keep tabs on the animals at all times of the day without having to physically trek out to observe the cows up close... The future is wonderful and weird, and farmers have access to it before you and I because without them, we all starve.
"We can connect every cow, we can connect every animal on this farm," Cisco's Nick Chrissos told Reuters, in what may be the strangest boast a Cisco executive has ever uttered in public. "That's what 5G can do for farming -- really unleash the power that we have within this farm, everywhere around the UK and everywhere around the world."
Lower power and extra features such as high resolution location tracking. Check out LWPA and narrowband iot.
Also, older technologies are being phased out so that the spectrum can be reallocated. If you target something like 2G now, you may run into diminishing coverage soon.
2G specifically would have severe scalability problems. AFAIK, each 2G data link is basically a circuit-switched voice call that skips the modem part and goes straight to the bitstream. In landline terms... kind of like ISDN. The point is, if a given tower is provisioned to handle ~24 simultaneous voice calls, each 2G data connection eats up one of those slots for its duration.
So... 2G might work if the collars connected only infrequently, for a few seconds, and had the ability to wait random delays before attempting the next connection... but even a single herd with a few thousand cattle attempting to "phone home" daily would probably have a noticeable impact on at least a single tower's capacity.
3G could handle daily uploads without breaking a sweat, but would run into problems if collars tried to treat it like an "always on" connection. AFAIK, no single tower in a 3g network can handle more than a single subnet, and IP leases are (usually) for an hour, so after the first {n} radios connect and establish a session, nothing else can connect until users from the first {n} go away and stay away for the remaining duration of their lease.
I'm not sure how much of 3G's limit is hard-baked in to the standard itself, vs the de-facto limits imposed by off the shelf hardware, software, and configurations used by carriers out of habit, but I know 3G doesn't deal well with situations that involve HUGE numbers of transient users over a short window of time... the crowd blows through the tower site's DHCP pool, and for a while nobody else can connect at all.
I think 3G's max tower-users-per-time-interval can be tweaked upwards (by allocating more IP addresses per tower, reducing DHCP lease times, etc), but the point is that an "average" 3g tower with typical urban-suburban configuration would probably have issues if a farmer suddenly lit up tens of thousands of 3G radio collars over the span of a few days without at least coordinating it with the cellular network (to give it a few months to re-provision the affected tower site with a more appropriate configuration).
The point is, it goes beyond merely "total bits per second". There are also limits on the total number of user sessions per time-interval, and those limits can become significant if an area suddenly experiences an unanticipated surge in total connections, even if they aren't transmitting more than a few bytes of payload data apiece.
4G mainly gives enough headroom to make "lots of ephemeral connections from lots of users within a short interval of time" less of a problem. It HAD to, because the rapid emergence of Android & Iphone (all continuously making network requests in the background) pushed existing 3G networks to the breaking point. A 3G tower next to a 14-lane freeway that might have once served a few thousand users who "went online" deliberately suddenly had tens of thousands of users per hour driving by & establishing data sessions so they could ping Facebook or Twitter in the background. 4G had other benefits, but the increase in the default connection limit per tower site between middle-stage 3G and early 4G was a big one. It's also why it's legit to call HSPA "4G"... a tower configured for HSPA can basically handle as many connections per hour as a LTE tower of the same era, and WAY more than the same tower could back when it first went online in early-3G UMTS form. It's not as efficient as LTE, but most of the hard limits users associate with "3G" are gone.
Ditto, for 4G vs 5G. If you only care about ping times & speedtest benchmarks, a pimped-out LTE tower with lots of low AND high-frequency spectrum doesn't look all that different to end users than a "5G" tower with the same spectrum and users. 5G's benefits are mostly in the "efficiency" realm, plus features like enhanced location-positioning (basically, every 5G tower broadcasts a periodic beacon with GPS-like timestamp that can be combined with a database of known tower locations and acts like a terrestrial GPS satellite). I'm pretty sure 4G d