Stockholm first city to get mobile 5G network in 2018 | Hacker News Reader

Stockholm first city to get mobile 5G network in 2018

thelocal.se

58 pointsimartin2k33 comments

Even the PR people from Telia and Ericsson (who are partnering to do this again, just like how they launched "the world's first 4G network in Stockholm in 2009") say (when interviewed by Swedish media) that this will be similar to the 4G preview/test. So what we can expect to see is city-wide coverage and a few thousand heavily subsidised end-user 5g terminals (probably USB 3.0 modems at first - at the 4G preview in 2009 they came from Huawei.) Making Stockholm/Tallinn-wide coverage a reality with that few users isn't super costly.

Ericsson are happy because they get a realistic field test of usage, handover between base stations etc. They also get a credible proof of concept for further sales.

Telia are happy because they get to project the apparance that they are ahead of the curve to their customer base.

Telia and Ericsson have had this symbiosis thing going on for 100+ years now, btw. It seems to be working quite well for them both.

I wonder if, like 4G, it actually won't be 5G [1]

[1] 2010 http://gizmodo.com/5680755/the-dirty-secret-of-todays-4g-its...

This time they have a clear path so that likely will not happen again.

LTE as 4G, The original 4G is now LTE Advances which now some network call it 4.5G

Many of the 5G tech are coming out in incremental releases. So 3GPP Rel 15 will be 5G Phase 1, and Rel 16 will be 5G Phase 2.

There will be LTE Advance Pro, which provides all the features up to Rel 14. As a matter of fact most of the latency reduction will be done in Rel 14, it is likely they start calling Rel 14 as 5G and continue to evolve on it.

And to be honest ( apart from T-Mobile I think ), LTE really do deserve the name 4G. It brings much faster access, and more importantly lower latency that feels so much faster when browsing the web.

As most user will properly not notice a difference between 300Mbps and 600Mbps. Let alone 1Gbps. So really the biggest benefits of these new release are increase in Capacity of Mobile Network. Most Network operator today are facing the same problem.

> LTE really do deserve the name 4G.

Indeed. I live in a rural area and until recently I was too far away to get reasonable broadband, so I switched to LTE exclusively and no that there is fiber I have no reason to downgrade yet since I'm quite alone in the cell. Stable and fast.

>As most user will properly not notice a difference between 300Mbps and 600Mbps. Let alone 1Gbps. So really the biggest benefits of these new release are increase in Capacity of Mobile Network.

Do you know if there's a latency difference? LTE is has pretty low latency compared to earlier standards, but compared to wired internet it's still garbage.

Sorry I should have been clear about it. Yes. Part of the 5G Goal is sub 1ms latency. You will get most of the Latency improvement in 3GPP Rel 14.

So in real world, assuming the route between your Wired ISP and Mobile Network are the same, the latency difference on 5G should be less then 10ms max.

Sounds more like it's 4F.

Anecdata: long long time ago (~2005), living in central Europe, I used to use a direct-connect p2p client where you could connect to the "hubs", see the members and see the actual file lists of those members. I quickly learnt that Swedish hubs and people with [Telia] prefix in their nick were the best bets - getting stuff from them was like downloading on a LAN.

I believe those guys are able to deliver it.

Hehe. And we (Swedes) felt the opposite when getting connected to people from the rest of Europe. :)

(I'm only slightly confused that you learned to recognize the Telia prefix rather than the B2/BBB/Bredbandsbolaget prefix. Telia was predominantly ADSL with like 15/1 and B2 was Ethernet with either 100/10 or 10/10.)

From my experience, Telia was always known as quality, and BBB as the lowest tier crap. The routing quality difference was huge. Although yes, the Telia connections were business/edu class.

Strange.

BBB actually (sorry, I simplied above) had two types of customers, ADSL and Fiber/Ethernet. Maybe the routing to eastern Europe was different.

Hmm, actually: I do know that Telia Networks invested quite a lot in eastern Europe during the past two decades. Perhaps what you were seeing was a result of that.

Well the whole G thing is marketing spiel for the masses.

To me it will always be GSM, UMTS, LTE, etc.

I still want to see the potential of 4G realized. In most places its illogical to want to run fiber to the home to everyones house when you could just setup cell towers at the 20-40mb rates 4G usually gets and provide everyone with Internet that way.

For most people, their phone really should be their router and gateway. Getting new-classification broadband to everyone would be so incredibly cheap if all we had to do was give everyone 4G modems and let them use unlimited 40mb/s data over them, but its blatantly apparent the spectrum mafia is holding technology back - we need vastly more spectrum liberated for public consumption, especially that which is corporate controlled today, so that we can better provide the world with wireless connectivity. Right now the allocated spectrum is like a tap barely open where if regulation would let us we could get so much more bandwidth out of if archaic ideas about the private ownership of mathematical patterns would go away.

What kind of latency would people get on 4G vs. fiber? People don't know what to call it, but they do care about lag in voice/video calls and games.

Having used 4g for calls all the time, that has never been a problem. Conferencing is fairly latency tolerant.

Games are always the exception, but I'm not sure how many would truly value low latency in games over the aggregate savings of millions not having to supply and support wired uplinks in the last mile.

But I'm not really talking about places you already get 20+ mbps by wire - I'm talking about places like my grandmothers town in rural PA where 4G coverage and speed can be up to 10x faster than the low rate dsl / cable options available to her ranging from 1.5 to 10 mbit. Whenever I visit sprint 4g is 50mb/s and her best landline option is 10mbit residential cable from the township.

Conferencing is fairly latency tolerant.

It's easy to say this until you've experienced six remote people all trying to say something and, because of the latency, nobody knows who actually started first :). Also when you haven't tried something like Mumble.

http://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page

I run my own mumble server and regularly conference with people from Europe (and my server and I are in the US). In my experience, 4G doesn't have the insane latency variance 3G does - its usually only around 200-300ms. If you are having half second or more delay it gets really hard to hold a conversation, but there is also the factor that people adapt fairly alright to asynchronous verbal communication - people with good manners get in the habit of waiting for responses. People on my server usually get 150-200ms just from the hop across the bay.

Can you achieve 20-40Mbps per person when so many people are using it simultaneously?

Certainly not with the tower density and limited spectrum we have today, but thats not the point. GSM tech is capable of providing last-mile wireless access at broadband speeds and would be much cheaper than infrastructure fiber.

As far as I understand, 5G will require IPv6 support. That will drive IPv6 adoption.

Even so, it doesn't mean web servers have to adopt IPv6 IPs. They can stay with IPv4 addresses as they do now.

Sure, but as more and more phones go 5G, they may see their traffic drop.

ISPs will continue to support IPv4 until the costs outweigh the benefits, but IPv4-only web servers will see a gradual degradation in the quality of IP reputation, geo data, and possibly performance, as more users get NATed behind fewer addresses.

They said the same about 4G and it did not happen.

Does 4G mandate IPv6?

I do think v6 adoption is now happening.

There are plenty of operators handing out dual IPv6+IPv4-adresses on LTE(4G) though!

One of them is Tele2 in Sweden. TeliaSonera... doesn't offer that yet though..

I know. But it was supposed to mandate ipv6.

So, what is 5G anyway?

Unspecified right now but lower latency and better support for more devices connected without degrading performance. LTE currently needs to slice down the 300Mbit it can achieve per sector by the number of connected devices. It can chose though how it allocates hat bandwidth on a per device basis.

5G requirements:

- 1-10Gbps connections to end points in the field (i.e. not theoretical maximum)

- 1 millisecond end-to-end round trip delay (latency)

- 1000x bandwidth per unit area

- 10-100x number of connected devices

- (Perception of) 99.999% availability

- (Perception of) 100% coverage

- 90% reduction in network energy usage

- Up to ten year battery life for low power, machine-type devices

http://networks.nokia.com/news-events/insight-newsletter/art...

Many new industries like automation outside factories (self driving cars, drones, smart grids, etc.) want more reliability, flexible adaption, lower latency and more coverage, everyone wants more bandwidth.

Do you know how they're accomplishing higher bandwidth? Is it adding more frequencies (such as bands used by the navy when there's no ships around?) or is it more complex than that?

I am not sure but the way from UMTS to LTE was purely technical. In UMTS the sender just spams out the signal for all receivers and you need to retransmit more because the error correction keeps kicking in. So the more devices in a cell the higher the latency, variance and lower the bandwidths.

With LTE each device is measured by the tower about how well it can receive data and the tower time slices specifically for this device. So when the tower sends there, it does not send to any other device.

(That's my understanding of the situation)

massive MIMO, beanforming, more frequencies, fast switching between channels.

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