ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
70% Positive
Analyzed from 2100 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#still#network#frequencies#available#lte#countries#need#marketing#more#wifi
Discussion (62 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
We are closing in to rolling out the last / final phase of 5G. And yet none of the Massive MIMO on FDD is happening. We are still stuck on 32T32R, hardly that impressive considering we have that in LTE already. Not to mention the insane complexity increase from 4G to 5G. And judging from the previews of 6G that seems to be event worst.
If you ask an average user, they will tell you they don't feel much different between 4G and 5G. Yes there are capacity increase and other things. But at this stage I don't think the benefits outweigh the cost of switching. That is both from MNOs and End user perspective.
Calling that 5G obscures the fact that millimeter wave 5G standalone is a totally different beast, and a huge network engineering challenge.
It may seem bureaucratic to regulate what people can call 5G, but US consumers get ripped off thinking they're on in advanced network when in fact you could call it the long-term evolution (see what I did there?) of the existing network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP
Like 3GPP release 15 or 16 is what we currently know as a lot of in production LTE/LTE-Advanced stuff.
The interesting part of 6G doesn't seem to be faster downloads so much as sensing. ISAC is basically about making the network capable of sensing the physical environment as well as communicating.
Some of the current work is already discussing the "six sensing modes", involving different combinations of the network and UEs transmitting and receiving signals reflected from objects, and even how users might be incentivized to let their devices participate
That feels potentially much more consequential than another speed bump. 3G/4G didn't just make phones faster; they enabled an entire ecosystem that was hard to predict beforehand. My guess is that sensing could be a similar pivot for 6G.
Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now.
3GPP releases are more fine-grained than that. E.g. rel. 99 introduced 3G/WCDMA, rel. 8 introduced 4G/LTE, etc. Other releases only add features.
In the industry Gs are used all the time to refer to the technology/architecture, then releases are used to refer to specific features, though generally noone supports all the features of a release.
I hope they go into the direction wifi is taking though - stability rather than speed.
I never think about cell speeds being slow anymore but irritation at lack of coverage is still frequent. Esp in urban jungles where buildings block it
For building penetration you need low frequencies but those low frequencies have less bandwidth available because the bands are smaller. At the same time bandwidth needs rapidly go up, making those low bands fuller. Because there's a limit to how many bits per second you can get out of a Hz of spectrum.
What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters. A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally. This could be incorporated into the standard. Then establishments could easily include a booster just like many of them offer free WiFi now.
They're still readily available.
But yeah think this would need a legislative push to solve. Force high rises to host multi provider relays as you say and hook it into their fiber links.
/s
I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM.
Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are famous for suffering this much.
This usually has similar (in practice) performance characteristics to LTE Advanced.
5G SA is an actual, end to end 5G network. The two biggest wins here for an end user are reduced latency (a big focus in 5G) and reduced power usage (the phone doesn’t need a simultaneous 4G connection).
NSA is non stand alone meaning basically 4G with some 5G backwards compatible improvements.
They created an option to use just the 5G radio modem parts with 4G tower equipment to run them in the "Non-StandAlone" mode, so that telcos can start deploying 5G before even it matures. And the modem parts and their specs are called "5G New Radio", which is one of names of all time.
I remember people saying the same thing about 4G relative 3G and 5G relative 4G.
I doubt majority of phone users who have a decent 4G connection would notice the difference if they upgrade to 5G.
Talking is one of the steps towards making things available to the broad masses. You have to start these things ahead of time so they are ready to deploy when the time comes.
I guess other countries are further behind?
Yes, and even in Europe. The demand-led need was badly misunderstood or anticipated in my opinion as operators were hesitant to invest (and some big ones still are). In this sense, 7G is a pipe dream (but of course worth researching as such).
The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.
But what do you suggest instead (on Android, a Pixel specifically)?
In the US at least, low-band or extended range 5G is widely available and has been for some time (and I'm talking about the "real" 5G low-band, not the BS marketing speak AT&T used for a while). Mid and high band 5G, or 5G ultra capacity, is much less available but if course it only really makes sense in dense cities.
I'm surprised that low band 5G isn't widely available in most 1st world countries, as again it's been here in the US for many years now.
I'd be perfectly happy with less headline speed increases and just a real world busy tower speed improvement. That or efficiency gains.
There is no reason you can't have phased array antennas of tens of elements on the handset and thousands on the masts, to give a massive bandwidth increase.
It will take a lot of generations to get to the limit physics sets.
Will 7G be needed?
I say no for the next 15 years. Because there are 1425235 other things that are way much important than this.
So 5G for most folks is just marginally better LTE and that's about it. Any higher frequencies like 6G (30GHZ~3THz) or 7G (???) won't achieve much of anything outside of laboratory, because they will hit exactly same walls like 5G UWB.
Its extremely limited range and penetration is a benefit there because you can put up thousands of cells without them interfering with each other.
It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
The speeds thing was just marketing BS as usual but mmWave did have benefits in niche scenarios.
In india, jio is using 26ghz for wifi now instead. It's a service called airfiber. This don't even use any 5G. It's a weird custom hybrid solution where all the frames are wifi. Density here means that it's feasible to put the receiver on the rooftop of apartment buildings wherever you can get LoS. So in some sense it's been salvaged and those bands are actually being used. It's a fairly popular service.
URLL failed because it's main immediate usecase was supposed to be vehicle to vehicle comms. And auto didn't want telcos middlemanning there. But there is still hope here.
well if they ever get the lander upright, you'd think they'd learn to put crashbags that self-inflate to upright landers by now
* https://www.wired.com/story/nokia-4g-network-on-the-moon/