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Comment by towb | Hacker News Reader

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towb·

So, what is 5G anyway?

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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.

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.

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