ZTE ups 5G investment

Chinese mobe-maker ZTE is ramping up its R&D by ¥400 million RMB*, and wants 800 new engineers in China, Europe and the US – all to help it keep pace with 5G development. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal the company's chief scientist, Dr Xiang Jiying said that the company sees the technology's touted 1,000-times 4G's …

[marky_boi]

I call BS

4G running out of puff???? where I live the roadmap is clearly defined BUT my company also invested in backend infrastructure to carry the data the towers serve up.

More like these muppets want to sell kit that carriers don't yet need.

Fortunately our technical staff have input into the purchase process and are not swayed by shiny baubles ....

[Henry Wertz 1]

Not feasible

These so-called "5G" standards might be *technically* feasible. But they aren't realistically feasible providing the stated benefits, because if you look, that so-called 1000x speedup is like virtually the same spectral efficiency as current LTE (since it is after all pretty close to state-of-the-art, and approaching Shannon's limit to how many bits per second per hz can actually be transmitted), just assuming people will be willing to let the telcos grab up ghz of extra spectrum. The thing is, there's not that much of the "high quality" (below 2 or 3ghz or so) spectrum available, and the higher-frequency spectrum does not penetrate walls or buildings or trees or any of that stuff you'd like to penetrate for a viable phone network.

And "IoT" == "hype". The main issue with large numbers of bursty devices is the control channel. Besides initiating phone calls (both incoming and outgoing), texts, and initiating picture or video messages (although the actual picture or video is sent via a data channel), the control channel is also used to initiate data channels, close data channels, and put the data channel in a power-saving "idle" state to save battery power (effectively closing the data channel but not ditching the IP address), as well as kicking the idle channel back into active state. Apple's were causing severe problems years ago because of being far to agressive using this idle mode, clogging the control channel. Nevertheless, LTE has support for large numbers of bursty data devices, and 3G and even 2G do to with proper tuning (adjusting the "idle" timing and adding control channel capacity -- which can be done on existing systems without having to add more of the other channels, if the data capacity is otherwise adequate.)

When it gets away from the "1000x speedup!" hype to real info on capacity improvement, number of channels that can be bonded (whether it's realistic or not), and so on, then things will be interesting. Don't get me wrong, some 5G standard will come out eventually.