What 5G Will Mean for You
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I just got back from 3 months in Southeast Asia, and it's just baffling to me how I could get fast data to my phone in virtually unlimited quantities, out in the sticks of rural Cambodia, for five dollars. But coming back to England, my town of 25,000 people has neither working DSL nor cellular data.
I keep a 3G router in the desk drawer to battle the bi-weekly half-day outages that BT routinely delivers, but that also will happily drop down to 300 baud if anybody else in town decides to use the internet at the same time.
It is certainly solvable. But the monopoly internet supplier doesn't seem to have it as a priority to supply internet.
Its also absurd companies offering "unlimited" mobile traffic do deep packet inspection. Whenever I try to SSH to any of my servers I get banned immediately, despite having a ridiculously low data rate.
Indeed, ToS requests that you don't use the data connection for something like VoIP or other type of communication, in practice they don't care.
I have in Germany's Vodafone 3GBs that I can spend over LTE, and boy, they are spent religiosly until the last KB. Half free communications to outside Germany, half is streaming music/videos.
One day Virgin will route a cable our way, and life will be good. Until then we're stuck with BT and their 200 year old copper (and a few cell towers without enough power to drill through the stone buildings in town, let alone the little hills around it).
Actually you're right on the edge of the coverage area, why not contact them and see what it would take to extend it.
Or there's always satellite...?
Still not sure how that explains the differences.
I can only assume that the general environment is different (regulatory, government subsidies etc.).
3G is a useless technology and absolutely pointless in perusing at this point. It's cheaper and better to just go with LTE and there is a bit of room for upgrading in that stack.
The entire article is complete speculation, and the sad part is that they don't even talk about the cooler ideas they're coming up with for the specification.
For anyone wondering about 5G I think the coolest thing they've discussed so far is breaking down the different use cases (people in home, people traveling on trains, vs working in an office building) because these put completely different types of strain on a network. They're trying to come up with sub specifications to encompass more types of network use cases rather than thinking "xG is for cellular phones" it'll be more like 5Gx is spectrum/protocol for home internet, 5Gy is the spectrum/protocol the phone uses. Although from a marketing prospective this will sound like "Bring 5G to your home."
Honestly I'm surprised that didn't happen with 4G, I know there are things like Clearwire (I think they were bought by sprint?) but it wasn't a huge move from physical infrastructure.
For some more realistic info on what's happening:
https://www.ngmn.org/uploads/media/NGMN_5G_White_Paper_V1_0....
EDIT:
On a small note, this is "finalized" pdf but in reality it will change when implementation occurs.
In which world (other than T-Mobile US) does 4G mean anything other than LTE Advanced? Sure, there was a fight for many years but it was because of carrier marketing, not because of real technical grounds.
At least on a basic level I am quite interested in what comes out of the 5G efforts because what's being discussed will be very interesting for new use cases that cannot be done on existing networks.
Same goes to those mm waves with beamforming - no DSP (IP core) can handle it now and even soon. You need to stick with very expensive FPGAs. Besides that there is WiGig coming and you can offload traffic from LTE to Wifi - investing in those mm wave small cells seems rather pointless.
Beside that you can get those multi-Gbps with new Rel13 LTE carrier aggregation (up 32 CC).
And LTE CC is not the necessarily a good way to get multi-Gbps due to radio complexity.
Secondly you don't really want to use FPGA for majority DSP processing in LTE PHY. Design cycles on FPGA are too slow and HLS techniques are still not trusted. Beside that x86+fpga are some kind of specialized stuff - you could just put a PCIe accelerator with some major wireless SoC.
Regarding FPGA, of course you don't do the complete implementation in it, you accelerate the low level stuff, FFTs, coding, etc, as are already done in all baseband dsps.
Care to elaborate? I fail to see what the technical challenges are. Many services are already virtualized just on different layers if I understand this correctly (for instance Wifi calling).
LTE PHY requires a lot of algorithms that doesn't fit well on x86 or general purpose HW like FFT or turbo decoding. Those usually are done in HW accelerators of baseband SOCs. x86 lacks also complex arithmetic ISA, where wireless DSP do many complex multiplies in on cycle and complex ops are ~80% of signal processing done on DSP (not accelerators).
Second things is energy consumption, take e.g. Ceva XC4500 DSP core and a equivalent Xeon - it is magnitudes more efficient. In case of FFT or turbo it gets even worse.
Lastly, IQ data streams requires a lot of bandwidth ~1Gbps per one carrier in case of 20MHz. FDD LTE uses mostly 2 or 4 antennas in each direction, where TDD is good with 8 antennas, and this just one cell(sector). Newest ENB can handle up to 96 cells (with 2 antennas) in one box.
In theory you could run non-PHY layers of uplane in a server and use ENB as a L1 server, but still the lower MAC and scheduler needs tight latencies so server with DPDK is a must, but ARM/PowerPC/MIPS parts of the basebands SoCs are left idle (not really useful for PHY). PDCP layer seems reasonable to run in SDN because of carrier aggregation and not so tight latency requirements, but this layer is very simple.
Of course you can run whole control plane in a cloud, which actually makes sense but this is not a great achievement ;-)
Not sven sure how this is relevant. First of all the virtualization happens not on a global scale but quite local to whatever you can the base station in technical terms. Secondly there is no requirement in futuure standards to be as strict as LLE on that level. Lastly this is a few years out and obviously specialized hardware would be in place. It's kinda pointless to assume that this has to run on general purpose hardware.
Where does this idea come from that this virtualization has to happen on the other side of the world?
Where you got the idea that I assume the ENB has to be on other side of the world ?
That's just to the base station, no? How does that in any way apply to what you transmit over your network?
> Where you got the idea that I assume the ENB has to be on other side of the world ?
Because your comment about latency implied that.
>Because your comment about latency implied that. Goal with ENB virtualization is to have single or few server farms per city, unlike today where ENBs are spread all over the city, and such usecase is still problematic with latencies - been there, done that.
Intermingling the data and transport layers initially strikes me as a bad thing. What am I missing?
(At least inasmuch as it is claimed to describe anything in the real world. As a source of vocabulary, it's at least OK, though it does suffer from people using numbers where I would rather they used the names of the layers. Much like RAID terminology is still impenetrable to me despite the several dozen times I've read the definitions.)
data and transport layers are almost always intermingled
What the transport layer adds on top of that is
- multiplexing of network layer addresses (TCP and UDP use port numbers for this) so multiple processes can share a single network layer connection and
- error detection/correction (TCP only) to transform the unreliable (best effort) service the network layer offers into a reliable service.
- Streaming (TCP only): the sender's data stream that a TCP client creates is split into packets and later reassembled.
I think it's a beautiful separation of concerns.
>On a small note, this is "finalized" pdf but in reality it will change when implementation occurs.
It's one thing to say, here's the specification, however like construction you get to the site and then you realize oh shit, this isn't going to work. So they amend changes to make it work.
In a perfect world they should have gone back to the engineers/architects and reported their findings so they can make the changes to the white paper accordingly. But this almost never happens, same thing in the tech industry.
That's why when they go back on site to fix a pipe leak they drill into the electrical conduit because they moved the whole line to the right 3 feet and never told anyone.
And I mean real network hardware through which the packets your received these words are, too, not just abstract theoretical "somebody's got something somewhere that does something weird". The model hasn't been accurate since before it was created.
If you saw what
Seems like relying on low network latency for critical safety features is designing a fundamentally flawed system.
Is this really how driverless cars are being made or is the author just pulling things from his ass
Driverless cars will likely eventually communicate via some peer-to-peer wireless technology, but I would assume that would use a different set of protocols than our mobile phones do.
It wouldn't be a safety issue, though. The car would not start driving to the destination until it had everything it needed.
Absolutely nothing for the next 20 years, seeing how my carrier just started deploying LTE (50 MBit, that is, not 300 MBit) at eye-watering costs ($20 a month for 5 gigabytes!).
Still a problem when I end up back in Indiana from time to time, but most of my time is in the cities or international (where they have free data + texting included in the plan).
If you are using more than that on your mobile phone, something is wrong with you and not the data cap ;D
> With 4G, downloading feature-length movies could take as long as eight minutes.
Am I wrong in thinking that an operator would prefer to keep their antenna busy for only 5 seconds instead of for 8 minutes? If this is the case, if they have enough bandwidth to the antenna, they should try to move people to 5G quickly.
But you still need 90 minutes to watch the movie and you probably reach the monthly cap with only a few movies, so maybe this is not the main use case for 5G. The reduced latency to 1 ms is much more interesting.
We need to remember that the vast majority of people access the Internet primarily through mobile devices and broadband penetration is very low in developing nations.
So even though people have access to high speed internet though mobile networks, data caps act as a hindrance to utilize the service effectively.
The issue that needs to be addressed immediately is making unlimited data available at low costs.
Unless you can make radio spectrum unlimited (you can't), data caps and/or throttling are going to be a reality for the foreseeable future.
But will it move everybody back to download versus streaming. Be interested to know how much of streaming start time is network time to first byte versus authenticate/authorise/check geo-fence admin activities? So would be slightly faster start time and may be less likely to degrade. However, streaming operators if they switch to download are going to have to deal with sending bytes that are never watched. Would be interesting to know how much is downloaded from Amazon Video that is never watched.
> These machines will have to communicate almost in real time with everything around them to avoid cyclists and other obstacles. That can happen only if carriers offer one-millisecond latency, something that may become a lifesaver if autonomous cars become a reality.
Will only be possible if there is a guaranteed quality of service. Would be interesting to see how your EULA/T&C of mobile service are written/rewritten to cover life critical usage scenarios.
> ability to go online no matter where they are, forcing operators to extend their networks to practically every corner of a country.
What sort of frequencies are available to 5G and how will that propagate compared to other options?
Each day that goes by will make streaming operators care less. A gigabyte costs a fraction of a penny to transmit at current IP transit prices.
Worth noting that Nokia and NTT DoCoMo will be making efforts to get an outdoor 5G network in place in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
3/2/15: The companies said they have achieved super-fast data transmission speeds of higher than 2 gigabits per second in a joint indoor trial using Nokia Networks' radio technology operating in the 70 gigahertz spectrum band. [1]
Nokia demonstrated 5G on their commercially available Airscale base station at MWC this year. [2]
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-telecoms-mwc-ntt-docomo-id...
[2] http://networks.nokia.com/news-events/press-room/press-relea...
Why would that not be for "you"? When LTE rolled out in my country my usage pattern shifted. I paid up for higher/unlimited data allowance and can truly work remotely now unhindered. That includes data and latency critical tasks.