Mobile operators brace for bigger, faster headaches with 6G Mobile operators are pushing for consensus on the key components of next-gen 6G networks, warning that a new radio interface could add complexity – though they acknowledge it would also allow for higher data rates. The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN), an association of mobile operators, has published a report …
This is Concorde/HS2 thinking. Faster is better. No, most people want cheaper, if a bit slower. Hence Ryanair & EasyJet now rule the skies, not British Airawys or Air France.
6G will need a lot of investment. While it could service some specialist services - the mass market will be reluctant to pay for it. It's not the 1990s when 2G & 3G addressed, respectively better voice and practical data. 4G made video practical. 5G is a bit meh. So I'm not salivating about 6G. Mobile devices have now entered their mature phase of the life cycle. Like Windows all the excitement about the next iteration faded after Windows 7.
Only brute force is going to make most go to 11 - unless it's the Spinal Tap edition.
“I live in Aylesbury in Bucks”
May I offer my most sincere condolences (I text from experience)
But I agree. My 4G service (EE) is abysmal. And I don’t think it’s because of where I am physically - it seems to be a network/service problem - the actual signal is great. It just doesn’t do much most of the time
As someone mentioned lower down it may be that your 4G tower has a crappy copper VDSL backhaul, shared between you and all the prats on their TikToks
The worst is "Edge" though, and for once i'm not talking about the abominable MS Web Browser.. Whenever I am out of 5G/4G range (3G being decommissioned) my phone switches to Edge, and it is near 100% utterly useless, I can rarely get even the level of service of a 1990s GSM WAP phone out of it
I check my phone and note with dismay that while outside in the rain I had 4G, now that I’ve sat down, my connection is rapidly dropping through 3G to 2G, then to Edge, then to fax modem, then to Morse code over telegraph, and finally settling on smoke signals. Weak ones.
-Alistair Dabbs
Too much packet loss to hawks and moggies.
Although, 5G RFC1149 would provide for multiple dovecots mounted along the street lamps, allowing high-speed burst traffic along line-of-sight with greater resilience to packets colliding with CAT transmissions.
I was suckered in to getting EE with their supposed better network (more spectrum) as everyone kept saying O2 which I was on was rubbish. Now in built up parts of Surrey where I had good 4G on O2, I now get slightly faster 5G on EE, but everywhere I was barely getting any O2 4G (still in built up areas) I now get absolutely no 4G or 5G with EE.
Improve the coverage, not the speed.
-- basic Web page --
ie one loaded wit so much graphics that you might as well nt have bothered, because you cn't see the bit that would have been of interest.
Pictures are only worth a thousand words when they add to or ease understanding of the message. The rest of the time multiply their worth by minus one.
I find myself mostly turning 5G off on my phone owing to the significant reduction in battery life. I don't know if this is something that has improved in newer models. However, the peak data rates I can get out of 5G are far more that I could use on a phone and probably significantly more that I would need for fixed equipment in the home. There's probably room for some improvement in spectral efficiency, but I get the impression that cell size and backhaul capacity are now probably bigger contributors to the user experience.
For the most part, the operators aren't the source of the advertising and aren't getting a cut but they get to pay for the network equipment.
In fact, they've got their fingers burned in spectrum auctions for 5G on the assumption it would unlock pent-up demand only to find they couldn't sell it at a premium price and are struggling to roll out the new technology (as evidenced by the Vodafone-Three merger).
I can see the network equipment vendors have an interest in creating constant "upgrade" paths, but operating networks is not the cash cow it once was.
I don't think 5g is for us.
Puts tin foil hat on: I think it is for the coming surveillance network. It's out of control, way beyond needed for catching criminals unless you intend making everyone a criminal. It's the drive behind AI as well. So the awful leaders we have can effectively see and hear everything and therefore control everything.
OK the nanobots is tin hat stuff (hopefully) but those jabs were bad. Not everyone gets hit immediately and the batches varied a lot. But ... there is lots of increased illness and death rates since their rollout and throw in the mass censorship, deplatforming and barring of doctors who questioned it you get suspicious. Now correlation is not causation but why shutdown all questioning? Why were the 3 letter agencies all over the social media companies to block dissent?
If you believe it's safe, fill your boots with boosters and the best of luck to you. Just don't force it on everyone, that's tyrannical and if they work why would you need to?
there is lots of increased illness and death rates since their rollout
Not half as much as there would have been without them.
if they work why would you need to?
The fundamental principle that vaccines use is that reducing the severity of an illness and duration of contagion in a community will stop the spread of the disease (the famous "R" number << 1). It isn't an individual fix, it's a community protection, and only works if a sizeable majority of a community is vaccinated.
If you don't want to be vaccinated (be it COVID, measles, mumps, smallpox, or anything else), that's your choice, but please then stay indoors and don't put the rest of us at risk.
That may seem funny but trust me (safer than trusting Bill) that man is unhinged, a latter day Dr Strangelove. Watch him and check the body language, especially the footage of when he was in court over monopolistic activity at Microsoft, but even recent interviews. I can't wait to see the Epstein lists if we ever do.
Of course they will. But how are marketing folks to peddle their wares without constant progress? Or at least the illusion of constant progress. Thinner devices and rounded corners have already been done. And it's not like the manufacturers can add bigger tail fins or more cupholders. Have you no sympathy for the (potentially) starving families of industry leaders without 6G ... And 7G .... And 8G ... And .... ?
Yes, but then we will have an antenna tucked in every traffic light and lampost, along with the one that can be seen in the wild (or not, I know a few well hidden antennas on Paris roofs hiding as chimneys or elevator engine housing)
Despite the fact that I spent nearly 30 years working for $TELCO equipment builder cited in the article, I also think that 5G is quite enough to cover 99.99999% of the current and forseable future use cases. Even in a Private Mobile Network environment.
What 6G could do is enhance security on the edge of the network (the part where different telecom networks talks to each other) and that's about it... And that not even something worthwile of a new mobile generation label.
Was bullshit as it was. Even some celebs got suckered into the hype such as that ex rugby player. If you're going to go into a field to try and advertise it and make money, understand the tech first instead of listening to the bullshitters that suckered him in. James Haskell is who that is "5G could of made me a better rugby player", what the actual fuck does that even mean!
We have a very odd issue with 5G in one area around these parts. You'll go to this small shopping area, get 5G but nothing works while on it. Move down the road abit and 5G goes and back to 4G where everything works. Its very odd. Only happens in this one area. 5G by the local large M&S works fine.
Our infrastructure in the UK is shockingly shit. When I can get better 5G coverage and even better 4G coverage when I go to Europe than I can in the UK. Went on a cruise to the Christmas markets, all those EU cities full signal. Get back to the UK, struggle with 4G in the house!
Vodafone and Three are the shittest for coverage. I take the dog for a walk past a massive mobile mast side of the farmers fields. 4G is full but no ones bothered to install a 5G on it or next to it.
Indeed UK infrastructure is total pants ans will continue to be so for the distant future but on the bright side the UK is top of the class in having MP's, endless committees & so called regulators who all hold up innovation and implementation of any infrastructure and just cost more money ... HS2 being a prime example.
It was only ever going to cut about 15-20mins off a journey
That wasn't the main reason. By moving express trains onto dedicated tracks it becomes possible to run more stopping trains on the standard tracks. Otherwise they get in each others' way.
Next time you're on an overcrowded once-every-two-hours local train stumbling slowly along, think about how much better it could have been if the express trains weren't trying to share the same routes.
HS2 was badly managed, and costs should never have been allowed to escalate as they did, but it was, and is, a good idea.
Sounds like a capacity issue.
There are two sorts of 5G deployed in the UK:
1) The new 3.5GHz band, which has massive capacity but needs new antennas added to the towers.
2) Old 4G spectrum that's been rebadged as 5G. This doesn't need new antennas, but doesn't add any new capacity. You get a shiny 5G icon and 4G performance.
Summary: if you're getting 5G signal from a mast that doesn't have a little squarish antenna for 3.5GHz, don't expect too much.
>experience gained during 5G implementations aka we got our asses kicked.
As everyone above says, the current signals are shit on 5G and that isn't likely to change until stuff gets bolted onto starlink (or similar) and then the IoT wankfest can begin. However IoT is low data. You don't get many connected cows downloading cat videos or taking out Netflix subscriptions.
6G is just the AI hype of the who world.
That's been the main issue since 4G.
Backhaul is mostly performed by microwave links and copper pairs... Only cities and parts deemed important enough got the fiber upgrade all around with 4G and the operators are not going to waste money on replacing the high latency routers/switches put in at that time by 5G low latency ones... At least they are not going to replace them fast, not bother deploying fiber... they will use all the trick possible ( using horizontal and vertical polarization on the microwave links to double the bandwidth when it's not already the case, going to higher frequency on the microwave links... sadly the copper wires are already at capacity so it's fiber or nothing )
Mobile operators very rarely deploy their own fibre to the cell towers - they're reliant on Openreach et al, just like the rest of us.
Pretty much every proper (i.e. 3GHz) 5G site has got fibre - there's no point spending the money on giving a site >2Gbps *per sector* over the air, if the backhaul then throttles it.
But that means the rollout of fibre is a limiting factor for deploying full capacity 5G sites.
(The pretend 5G sites that use low frequency spectrum could be on anything though.)
It depends on the country.
In France Orange has it's own fiber network ( paid when it was France Telecom ), SFR has it's own fiber network ( the old SNCF fiber network... since then the SNCF built another fiber network ), Bouygues has it's own fiber network ( obviously when you're building roads and more you take the opportunity to lay some fiber along the way ), add to that some Level 3, the French Waterways ( it's easy to dump a fiber at the bottom of a river/canal ), and a few more with local fiber networks...
Now they don't go everywhere, and in some case they piggy back from one operator to the other ( thus you cna have some Bouygues equipments that are connected by an SFR fiber in an area, and in another area they will all use an Orange fiber.
Now if you want better bandwidth, you need to go in higher frequencies and the 3G coverage won't cut it. You need more RATs as the area covered by those higher frequencies is smaller. Thus the need to put antennas in traffic light and lamposts at the extremely high end of the spectrum to have a decent coverage and the relevant fiber connection to backhaul all the traffic out of a specific lampost in the center of say Paris or London.
By all accounts you'll certainly be getting a headache if you live near a transmitter! Be interesting to see if RFK really examines this.
Anyway as others have said 4g is fine, so why is 5g needed? Who really needs it and why? In fact when I'm on 5g it seems worse. The connection cuts or pauses and downloads are no faster.
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