Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G
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I am sure that legions of lobbyists, politicians, and businessmen are working diligently as we speak to make sure that doesn't happen, but I want to believe.
I doubt it. No one is going to build another network of cell towers just because new bandwidth is available
It should be seeing similarly to advances in computer power throughout time, to some it makes little difference depending on the time horizon they are viewing, to others it allowed for machine learning to be used by a wider audience for example.
Whoops, truck drove by, there goes the signal!
They're both needed.
While relevant, I find that predisposition limiting...
Broadband wireless tech has generally helped to address last-mile connection with less infrastructure. But it is very often all or nothing; radio waves don't punch through rocky mountains. Covergage maps are theoretical at best, and won't feel very relevant when you have to go into your kid's bedroom and hold your phone out the window in order to place a call.
Verizon is effectively a monopoly where we live, as its longer-wavelength coverage seems more forgiving of the canyon topography here. They continue to invest in infrastructure upgrades, but I don't know what aspects of 5G will be relevant in actual use in the near term.
>>when most carriers aren't running full bandwidth 4G and have significant data
Time and Time again I have seen this everywhere in forums. In Reality is not like Telcos, MNO or Carriers what ever you like to call it, tries to limit your Data Cap. MNO are fundamentally limited by their capacity. There is roughly 10 to 20% YoY increase ( Depending on Nations ) in Mobile Data usage. There is a long tail of users just coming in from 3G to LTE and start enjoying the Mobile Internet. Since their Infrastructure don't improve their capacity 10%+ per year, that is why you have Data Caps and why your Mobile Network isn't getting faster. ( And may in fact be getting slower ).
MNO reframing the 3G spectrum to LTE to help lessen the load, users upgrade to latest Smartphone with better features set to improve network efficiency usage, The faster you finish, the less time you are on the network. Another reason why MNO wants you upgrade to the latest and greatest Smartphone
Once 5G reaches the current stage of 4G, you are likely looking at ~10 to 20x Capacity improvement. ( This is accounting for 128 x 128 Massive MIMO, Small Cell etc ) In theory this gives plenty of room for different MNO to compete, and should lower the price. In the long term, 5G should lower the cost per MB for everybody. That is assuming all else being equal, wages, lease, equipment, etc. In realty those prices are rising as well.
But judging at the current climate we are at least 4 - 5 years away that happening. One being Cell Site infrastructure, despite what AT&T or Verizon wants you to believe, they are far from optimal. It will likely take another year of testing and tuning before widely deployed ( Or to be more precise, Switched on. Since most of the current Cell deployed are software upgradable to support 5G ). Second being 5G Smartphone will be expensive. Everything from Silicon to the Antenna are much more complicated. And as we know technology aren't dropping prices like they are used to. Third is Smartphone replacement cycle are now into 4 years. If you buy an Smartphone in the past 18 months, it wont be until 2022 before you might get a new one. And 5G Smartphone might still be expensive then, which causes delay it for another cycle.
The big difference between LTE networks and 5G networks is not the frequency ranges used, low band 5G is perfectly feasible. The big difference is the linear increase in information capacity per antenna in MIMO (multiple in multiple out, many send many receive antenna) verses the logarithmic increase per antenna with single antenna to single antenna links. (while power his held constant)
If you want to learn more this is a great intro to channel capacity with MIMO, http://complextoreal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/mimo.pdf
5G is upping the number of antennas per base station. Theoretically, this allows a linear increase in capacity, but linear scaling is not always achievable in practice.
The advantage of the higher frequency bands is the larger bandwidths available there. Conventional cellular bands typically have 5, 10, or 20 MHz bandwidth, sometimes 100 MHz. 5G's millimeter-wave bands support bandwidths up to 400 MHz. Information rate scales linearly with bandwidth. That said, there are many practical challenges to operating in the millimeter wave bands that might limit real-world performance.
Or Specifically Massive-MIMO, which is as you said upping the Antennas per base Station. LTE Massive MIMO actually already works in 3GPP Rel 13 for FDD, and Rel 7/ 8 for TDD. However 5G were specially designed with M-MIMO in mind, which brings higher efficiency than using in on LTE.
I have yet to see what exactly the hype is about.
One of the areas I've heard should be improving with 5G is latency. On 4G we're talking O(10ms)? which on 5G, so says the marketing, should be O(1ms). If this is true, it will make a noticeable impact on the responsiveness of web driven apps (aka almost all apps) as well as video/audio chat liveness. Was this oversold to me (highly probable)?
For example: A 10ms video refresh rate would be 100fps.. the average movie is 24fps.
But in general for web browsing, 100ms would be unnoticeable yeah.
In addition to mobile network latency you have to add a few more things - depending on how far you are from the data centre serving the web app you're looking at ~20ms-300ms additional network latency, plus however long the server takes to process your request, regardless of 4G or 5G. Check out https://www.cloudping.info/ for some ping times to AWS datacentres around the world
Beyond URLLC are protocols aimed at replacing wires in "serious" industrial control systems: things like real time control of grid switchgear and heavy machinery, so you might not see it on your phone. Latencies of the order of microseconds have been demonstrated in recent years and the stretch goal is about 200ns.
https://i.imgur.com/Dg4Jit5.png
That's my RTT ping to 8.8.8.8 as I travelled south on CalTrain from SF last week, on T~mobile's network.
Now, this is on an old phone that is only capable of HSPA+. However, the actual performance on the whole is still nowhere near any theoretical limits, or even limits of HSPA+.
I'd take 4G LTE as implemented in much of urban Japan over hypothetical 5G any day. I witnessed nigh-instant web page load times with my phone reporting zero bars in the Tokyo subway once. Over a period of weeks, I can't recall having anything less than a "pretty darn good" level of service, no matter what the signal was reported as. In the US, I find that two bars is slow and sketchy, while one bar (still @ 4G LTE reported service!) is often a "forget about it" level of service. I.e. I'd take service consistency over theoretical-max-speed any time.
On that basis, I suspect the signal consistency challenges 5G faces will make it a very frustrating service for many real-world users.
Also is signal strength important as some 4g router do report it but they are bigger
Similar things can be said about the insane techniques that have been used to increase processor power each order of magnitude.
Just some changes:
* You will have your own 5G home router micro cells. Factories will have their own 5G networks in unallocate bandwidth. Like Wi-fi but lower latency and better services.
* High quality low latency streaming means that gaming consoles will disappear from homes. You can stream games either from servers or from edge servers. You can have "tactile internet" with 5G latency. Enough to stream games.
* Very low power gadgets in your home will use 5G.
Can't wait for the rise of GaaS (gaming as a service) and the associated monthly subscription fees.
Nothing about 5g is _unique_ to 5g except that it's controlled by telcos.
You can run local networks without buying it from telcos.
Those radios aren’t for phones, they are for fixed wireless with antennas attached to your home. 5G is the cable killer, and eventually the WiFi killer.
The FCC is choosing to let the telecoms do whatever. It’s wasteful as they do things like block crosswalks with additional poles (to avoid renting from the electric utility) and place the poles in less attractive spots to reduce cost.
>and eventually the WiFi killer.
How is this going to work? The radios you're talking about are very high frequency, so they require line of site.
Plus running fiber from the street to the house means the residents don't have to worry about heavy rain, trees in their neighbor's yard, or buses impacting their internet service.
The branch factor kills you. I had fiber installed at my house. It took half a day to run it down the main road to the subdivision another half a day to run it to the pole next to my house. Another half a day to trench it under my driveway and install the CPE. If they just ran it to the subdivision and put up a 5G base station, they could serve a couple of hundred users. It would cost far more time to actually pull the fiber to each of those same couple of hundred users.
If you want enough bandwidth to replace fiber to the premises, you're going to use millimeter wave (if you're talking one tower per neighborhood you're already talking about mm wave), so you'd need completely unobstructed line of site to every single house. The pole would need to be high enough that tower would he a more accurate description, you'd have to keep removing trees and cutting branches to maintain that clear line of site, and rain would cause problems.
I've set up microwave transmitters before for a similar use case. At these frequencies it's going to be much harder.
My guess is that they're going to have to run fiber to the end of the hypothetical subdivision anyway and set up multiple towers throughout.
Also you don't need to actually run fiber to every house to get competitive speeds to 5G. And you can run fiber without burying it. I don't think 5G towers in every suburban neighborhood is going to be a viable replacement for cable.
So a small increases in elevation in an area between the 2 points means that the LOS can still be crossed by a bus.
It took Verizon two weeks to install external FIOS CPE equipment in my brothers’ subdivision, and probably yielded fewer homes.
That’s a lot of capital cost, and these telcos are looking for margins closer to cellular. They get that by eliminating these costs and getting better regulatory terms.
For those (a large majority, I suspect) whose actual data usage is determine by factors that have little to do with the network, the point of a faster network is less time waiting.
For example, I'm going to take about the same number of photos on my phone if I'm on a fast network as I will if I'm on a slow network. The fast network, though, will mean less waiting to transfer the photos to my desktop for editing or for sharing.
A good way to see this is to go the other way. Suppose you have a 10 GB cap. Would you object if your network were slowed down to dial-up modem speed (56 kb/sec)? That's more than enough to transfer 10 GB/month, so what's the point of anything faster if you have a 10 GB cap?
I actually prefer always getting 3Mbps any time I want to use my phone compared to the more expensive plan which might get 30-50Mbps... until you hit your cap and you're throttled to 128Kbps. (But, as you'd imagine, if I'm A-OK with 3Mbps, I have a hard time seeing what benefit 5G brings me.)
The "if you build it, they will come" model applies to the creation and administration of most any constrained shared resource, whether that be roads or network bandwidth.
Bandwidth isn't just increasing to meet future demand but to ease existing demand. I recall a conversation I had with an industry exec a few years back, they told me that bandwidth demand roughly doubled every year while all they could do to keep up was increase cell density, which isn't always viable or cheap.
I think there's way too much marketing on 5G like it's going to revolutionize telecoms overnight. It's going to ease some of the strain on the networks as its rolled out over the next few years, and hopefully provide better QoS eventually.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/att-d...