5G: Mother of all pipes, or actually useful?

The 5G standardization timeline is set, demos and proofs of concept are proliferating, and claims to 5G world firsts are on the rise. Yet, many mobile operators and vendors don’t really know what future 5G networks will be needed for beyond better mobile broadband services, and they’re calling on potential industry users for …

[Anonymous Coward]

Coverage

The missing bit in all the hype is the coverage.

If the mobile network providers are going to do anything with this are they going to have to provide more towers for the same coverage, or less? What about those areas that have poor coverage at the moment, will it improve or disappear altogether?

As it stands 5G sounds like a solution looking for a problem to solve.

[Barry Rueger]

Not in my country

All of this assumes that the greedy pig wireless companies eliminate the 1 or 2 gig cap on "free" data.

[HmmmYes]

Will it work if it rains?

[chris 17]

Interesting.....

Anyone for a national wireless mpls network where you the customer get to add or remove devices to your own network? Poor coverage, just add femtocells to your lan (of course vlan'd / firewalled off). Stuff offsite, maybe 5g will permit competitor net roaming?

No more installing umpteen wifi access points and controllers. No more broadband or leased lines for site wide wifi. A laptop with 5g and no VPN client could work from anywhere. How weird would it be to securely connect with HQ without a VPN? Maybe use geofencing to enforce extra authentication away from an office or home?

[Mellipop]

Absolutely. Stick a 5G base station where you or your community needs it and connect to the internet.

There's powerful groupings building to stop the mobile network operators (MNO) from controlling 5G like they have with the previous generations. We need no more islands of technology that require regulation to force interconnect and interworking.

Hopefully we'll demonstrate that the only reasons for an MNO in the future is customer relations. Oh and billing. All the infrastructure should be shared and just be an extension to the internet.

FYI on the MNO side we have http://ngmn.org/home.html

And on the open cellular/telecom Infra side we have humanity - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/06/opencellular_facebook_tests_its_open_templates_on_base_stations/

[Lamb0]

Verizon plans...

to start deployment in 2017. What could go wrong? (Icon is a ~2-5 year veteran antenna tech)

Attenuation under various conditions and propagation have been studied for awhile. A handful of papers not requiring registration or fee to access for light reading include:

ARPA ORDER NO.: 189-1 3G10 Tactical Technology R-1335-ARPA March 1974 Atmospheric Effects on Terrestrial Millimeter-Wave Communications S.J. Dudzinsky, Jr. A Report prepared for DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2007/R1335.pdf

FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION OFFICE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY Bulletin Number 70 July, 1997 Millimeter Wave Propagation: Spectrum Management Implications https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet70/oet70a.pdf

L1104-WP (Microsoft Word?) Understanding Millimeter Wave Wireless Communication by Prasanna Adhikari VP of Business Development for Network Solutions Loea Corporation, San Diego ©2008 Loea Corporation http://www.loeacom.com/pdf%20files/L1104WP_Understanding%20MMWCom.pdf

Rain Attenuation on Terrestrial Wireless Links in the mm Frequency Bands (Mar 1, 2010) Vaclav Kvicera and Martin Grabner Czech Metrology Institute Czech Republic http://www.intechopen.com/download/pdf/9975

Estimation of Terrestrial Rain Attenuation at Microwave and Millimeter Wave Signals in South Africa Using the ITU-R Model (pdf) PIERS Proceedings, Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA, March 27–30, 2012 https://piers.org/piersproceedings/download.php?file=cGllcnMyMDEyS3VhbGFMdW1wdXJ8MlA3Yl8wOTUyLnBkZnwxMTA5MjAwODA0MTk=

Guessing at Verizon's distance between towers and the power required I am NOT getting close to those 5G transceivers! With Interstate Hwy 80 ~50 miles away I expect the boonies to largely be served as few by as few 4G towers a they can get away with.

[Christian Berger]

5G is currently more or less just a buzzword

Such standards usually have a clear idea what people are going to achieve with them from a technical standpoint. And standards always take about 10 years from finalizing what operators want to the products getting onto the market.

1980s: GSM was about digital telephony and low bitrate circuit switched data.

1990s: UMTS/WCDMA was about "high" bitrate circuit switched data and soft handover.

2000s: LTE was about packet data, ditching all that circuit switched data, as well as scalability and interoperability on oddly shaped spectra

Essentially all the hype about 5G can already be done on "LTE Advanced". You can have special "low bandwidth, low power" nodes. After all LTE already stands for "Long Term Evolution". Maybe there won't even be a 5G for the forseable future.In any case, whatever will be decided now will result in products 10 years down the line.

[Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese]

Re: 5G is currently more or less just a buzzword

In "Long Term Evolution" vs "5G" the latter will win...people want/expect new stuff, and every company has a marketing department geared towards providing that. Even if LTE is good enough, it won't appear as shiny as a new thing with a new name

[hoola]

5G......

How about doing something useful like providing 3G and getting rid or the not spots before flooding London with this. But that of course is never going to happen because there is no money to be made out of rural areas. Although there are plenty or areas that have equally crap service that are not rural or remote, although maybe a lawn is classed as rural now.

This is the reverse of Royal Mail that are obligated to deliver post at the same price as part of the universal service. No private company is interested in delivering to remote areas and simply either say they cannot do it, charge a fortune or dump it with Royal Mail to take the hit whilst pocketing the profit.

We are reaching the point where mobile coverage and data is in the same category but because of an inept regulator and petty bickering that will never happen. At least BT/Open Reach will provide a phone line even if it is at a cost. Virgin are not interested unless there is a critical volume of homes to connect AND it is close to an existing backhaul location. Virgin have been wreaking pavements for months round SW Leicester burying fibres 6" underground and generally making a huge mess. The first bit of utility work that needs doing is going to have to go through this mess as it zig-zags over everyone else's infrastructure. What could possible go wrong! They even cut the phone line to the local post office who could then not operate for 2 weeks whilst it was fixed.

[Cuddles]

4G would be nice

Shouldn't we have 4G first before people start worrying about 5G? LTE was a cludge that was retroactively called 4G because no-one was willing to put the work in to actually meet the original standard. And of course LTE Advanced, which in theory should meet the standard but so far still doesn't in practice, has even been advertised as 4G+ despite being one of the first offerings of actual 4G at best. Of course, Wiki gives a good idea of the reason for all this:

"New mobile generations have appeared about every ten years"

Obviously it's more important to get something, anything, out the door with a new label on it than it is to have that something be useful or the label to actually mean anything. The fact that the "trend" consists of a grand total of two data points (the arrivals of GSM and then 3G) doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone. It's a trend, therefore 4G must have happened in 2011 and 5G must come by 2020 no matter what.