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No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”
- joezydeco 8y ago5G's main application around the world will be more capacity, a good thing for telcos Or companies that want to break the residential broadband monopoly in a local area. Personally, I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town. 5G would be a complete success if that happens.
- dvdhnt 8y agoThat's a really good point! I'm curious as to how expensive implementation will be for municipal providers.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoMuni/coop internet providers? Should be low if they can keep lease costs down for 5G base stations colocating with existing muni real estate, and use existing fiber for backhaul (or new fiber laid as part of Dig Once guidelines).
- Azerb 8y agoThis is the key. Look at the roadblocks Google Fiber has hit in their own fiber deployments, pivoting to wireless to bypass the resistance they're getting from incumbents.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoI'm interested to see how this plays out. When I looked into it, it seemed hard to compete with wired broadband internet. I think wireless has the best chance in areas where people's only option is satellite or dial-up.
- DenisM 8y agoWhy? TMO is faster than Comcast, they just need more capacity.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoBecause there's only so much wireless spectrum and at some point you saturate the link. Plus interference from other carriers reduces the capacity of the link. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's also not obvious to me that wireless is better in dense areas, especially since the main cost in wired internet is laying the cable in the first place, which is easier to do cost effectively when you have an urban market to offer service to.
- DenisM 8y agoHow can there be interference between different carriers, if each is using their own spectrum?
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoIt depends on whether it is licensed or unlicensed spectrum. Some of the technology is in ISM bands that anyone can use. In either case, the channels still have capacity limits. I'm not saying it's impossible, which is partly why I brought it up in the first place. I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would chime in. The main advantage wires have is you can just run more of them when you reach your capacity (or in some cases you can just change the hardware at either end of the wire to newer technology).
- DenisM 8y agoAre there any US carriers that are using unlicensed / shares spectrum? The bandwidth is only limited per tower, you can easily double the throughput of a given area by doubling the number of cell towers (and reducing power to avoid interference). It’s a lot cheaper to build a new tower than to run new wires to 200 homes (permits and all). On top of that 5g gives 10x bandwidth over 4g in the same band.
- joecool1029 8y ago>Personally, I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town. Yeah... about that: https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-reiterates-apathy-toward-fixed-5g-services https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-reiterates-...
- joezydeco 8y agoJan 2017, 10 months before the Layer3 acquisition. We'll see what happens.
- a_imho 8y agoI'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town Is Comcast really that bad? In my admittedly European experience all the service providers are (dis)functional and greedy pretty much to the same degree, none of them are good guys.
- wetpaws 8y agoIt's even worse.
- qwz4233 8y agoI live in a Cox area. They offer fine service, but they are monopolistic and keep increasing prices.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoComcast and Countrywide were in the running for the Consumerists 2008 worst company of the year. Countrywide won but had to help nuke the economy. Comcast had a real shot at winning for being such a malignant organization. The rebrand to Xfinity is a joke.
- a_imho 8y agoWhy? Are they significantly more hated than any big co? Like Uber and Facebook received quite a lot of bad press lately. Is this just perception or are they really that bad/evil? TMO (yeah Austria, not US but still) were bragging about not hashing passwords on twitter just a couple of weeks ago. Not exactly professional.
- geodel 8y agoWell good companies are one which write same CRUD apps Nth time. And then in few months/years they either shutdown or join forces with a bad company.
- csydas 8y agoIn the US they are. Comcast has rather notorious Customer Retention policies and frequent abuse of their position as monopolies in many cities, whether it's a matter of the prices, the data caps, the script injections, the promises made to cities that never materialize, and so on. It's basically like comic book villainy, the only thing missing is photos of Comcast Executives cackling over the complaints from customers. And I say that as someone who was overall okay with Comcast's service the one time I had them. The behavior of Comcast defines the perception most of the US has with them.
- ac29 8y ago5G would need to increase capacity by at least 2 orders of magnitude over 4G to compete with wireline service. That's not going happen, radio spectrum is a finite resource.
- dgllghr 8y agoI've heard that 5G will be especially beneficial to rural areas, where it will have the bandwidth, speed, and coverage capability to replace broadband, DSL, and satellite. Can someone with industry knowledge confirm whether this is true?
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoI'm not in the industry, but I've done some research on this and looked into setting up an ISP in a rural area near me (got far enough to where I was talking to fiber providers). For really rural areas it doesn't seem feasible because the radios essentially need line of sight, so in order to serve enough customers to be profitable you need several towers that have a wireless backhaul to some fiber line that you have a connection to. All of those towers cost money to install and maintain, which adds to your expense, so for low enough population densities, it's not economical. For small towns it can be economical, but it depends on the geography. If it's very hilly or there are lots of tall trees you will have a hard time getting line of sight to potential customers.
- itchyouch 8y agoI have a buddy running a Wisp as a side gig out in rural Michigan. I think he got 10M fiber ran for a couple thousand a month. Then maybe 10-20 people have wireless access setup with ubiquity gear to beam them internet. I think it breaks even or is just pocket money as the main business’s internet needs are subsidized by the neighbors. It’s really a tough situation in the rural areas. To run last mile cable costs thousands of dollars per house with houses quarter to half mile apart. and at $50-100/mo, it doesnt make sense to serve those customers.
- pas 8y ago> quarter to half mile apart With next gent Wifi/5G that's actually a great distance. The big problem for rural deployment is that the backhaul was/is too expensive, but with wireless advances a mesh is the optimal (cheap and simple) way to go.
- 8y ago
- k__ 8y agoHopefully Germany doesn't f*ck this up again...
- wlesieutre 8y agoContext?
- Libturd 8y agoww2
- kuschku 8y agoDuring the 2G, 3G and 4G frequency auctions in Germany the prices went extremely high. As result carriers charge massive prices for data, and there’s few carriers in the market.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoHmmm, that's an interesting problem I hadn't thought of with the auctions. People are going to pay for data pretty much regardless of what it costs (within reason), so it's economical to buy part of the spectrum assuming you can pass on the high price to consumers. Typically you think of competition benefiting consumers, but that's obviously not true in this case.
- kalleboo 8y agoFor the original UMTS 2100 auction in Sweden, instead of having an auction, the regulator gave away the spectrum for free to the bidder who could show a plan for the best coverage in the shortest rollout time in a "beauty contest". This left the operators with more money to build the actual networks in a sparse country with a low population. Of course everyone totally failed to achieve the plans they submitted, and one carrier that one dropped out completely (Orange) because they thought a buildout would still be too expensive. But Sweden still ended up with some of the best mobile networks (speed/coverage) in Europe at the time.
- 8y ago
- fredliu 8y agoWhen "4G" was initially commercialized, one could have claimed it has No "Material Difference Between 3G and 4G". HSPA(+) was just faster 3G, already reaching lower end of 4G bandwidth requirement, minimally qualifiable as 4G. But has 4G/LTE eventually turned out to be "one generation" better than 3G? Hell yeah. Same thing here for 4G-5G transition. The real deal is when milimeter wave got massively deployed and commercialized.
- tracker1 8y agoIs the coverage/range and rate of speed at range much better for 5G vs. 4G/LTE? I don't think most people need (much) more speed over wireless so much as better/more coverage and better speed at lower signal. Also, it's about relative cost... what about data caps? If they intend to compete with wired in home connections for things like set top (online streaming), they'll need a compelling story, and not running out of your allotment or being throttled after watching a couple 4K movies in the evening less than a week into your billing cycle.
- fredliu 8y agoThe coverage/range of 5G depends on the scale of deployment, and the environment of the deployment (e.g. urban with lots of tall buildings, vs rural), assuming we are talking about mmw type of 5G not LTE+ type of 5G. Due to higher frequency, 5G might actually have a disadvantage in range for a single tower, in dense urban environment due to weaker penetration. But it could be compensated by deploying more towers, at more strategic locations. The value proposition is that the gain in speed and delay would be well worth it. Weak penetration is still a problem for long range open field 5G communication, but due to different factors like fog, weather conditions, etc. Regarding data caps, I view it as more of a business model question, less related to the technical capabilities of 4G vs 5G.
- ysleepy 8y agoThere is a material difference between UMTS and LTE, UMTS is using CDMA which comes with some practically unfortunate tradeoffs like the "breathing cell" and inheriting the old GSM style slow system design.
- jupp0r 8y ago> 5G's main application around the world will be more capacity, a good thing for telcos This is important for consumers. When did you last get 100Mbit+ speeds with 4G? In real world scenarios, the number of people in a cell (due to limited spectrum bandwidth) limits 4G speeds, not protocol maximums. My understanding of 5G is that bandwidth can be used much more efficiently (both by being able to allocate less in idle situations and by spatial multiplexing), benefitting telcos and customers both.
- Cshelton 8y agoThe lower speed on 4G is mostly due to the number of devices on it. 5G will be no different in that way. At first, the few people with 5G devices and networks will have very fast speeds (mostly), but once everyone in 4G moves to 5G, we’re back to how it is today. I’m also curious what the effect of all the WiFi networks will have in regards to interference with 5G bands.
- vinylkey 8y ago> but once everyone in 4G moves to 5G, we’re back to how it is today. Would there be a benefit to split 50:50 between 4G and 5G?
- msoad 8y agoI thought the point of "Long Term Evolution (LTE)" was not to have this "next generation" thing all over again!
- topranks 8y agoIt was and is. 5G is basically a marketing term for a global population used to cell networks changing "generation" every few years. 5G improves and augments the existing LTE standards, it doesn't throw them all out and start from scratch.
- stagger87 8y agoI was a little disappointed after looking at the NR spec, it looks like 5G is mostly a sample rate multiplier on the 30.72MHz clock. It's still OFDM 8x8 MIMO. I'm sure there is some other additions that take advantage/optimize that additional bandwidth, but it doesn't have the same excitement as going from CDMA to OFDM did.
- awill 8y agoInnovation is great. But with more carriers throttling after a few GBs, there's no customer value yet. What's the value in getting 1Gbs when my plan throttles after 5GB. That's 40 seconds before I'd be throttled for the rest of the month.
- bluGill 8y agoCarriers will be able to throttle at higher and higher GBs, so it is long term value.
- rajeevk 8y ago> IoT will rarely require speeds more than 100's of megabits. Most actually is kilobits. This reminds me this famous quote by Bill Gates: "640 kB ought to be enough for anybody"
- tedsanders 8y agoBill Gates says he never said this. There is no record he ever said this. And even if he did say it, he almost certainly did not mean it literally. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/ https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2863/did-bill-gates-say-640k-ought-to-be-enough-for-everyone/2893 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2863/did-bill-g...
- Dylan16807 8y agoThere are plenty of uses for high speeds, but IoT uses? Can you name three kinds of IoT device that require broadband? Cameras sometimes do. I can't think of a second one. The main focus of IoT is tiny embedded devices. The biggest use is very likely to always be data-light.
- godelski 8y agoThis reminds me of when Verizon and Time Warner said their customers don't want gigabit internet.
- mhneu 8y agoIf I understand correctly, the cellular companies do some hairy, hairy manipulations of TCP in order to preserve data connections across cell towers. Do we need a better protocol for cell data and would this improve throughput and latency?
- topranks 8y agoNot true. Your TCP traffic is encapsulated in a GTP tunnel from the head end to the local tower / aggregation point. The network looks after moving / switching the endpoint of the tunnel as you move from cell to cell. Basically all the hard stuff is done to make the tunnel endpoint roam from cell to cell. Your TCP stream, inside the tunnel, doesn't realise anything is happening and doesn't need to change in any way to keep working.
- MichailP 8y agoWhat frequency band will 5G use?
- jlgaddis 8y ago> The primary technologies include: Millimeter wave bands (26, 28, 38, and 60 GHz) offer performance as high as 20 gigabits per second ... "Low-band 5G" and "Mid-band 5G" use frequencies from 600 MHz to 6 GHz, especially 3.5-4.2 GHz. [0] See also "5G NR frequency bands" [1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands
- Nokinside 8y agoIt's excepted for South Korea, Japan and China take the lead in adoption and applications. US customers might not be not priority, because US consumers have have very low bandwidth caps, lets wait and see. I think many people underestimate the ambition of 5G and assume that 5G is just 4G with more bandwidth. Big advantage of 5G over 4G is that it can _also_ use unlicensed spectrum. This enables more use cases like enhanced mobile broadbands, device-to-device mesh networks, private 5G networks, etc. 5G is designed to use wifi when available. It's more than just new cellular radio interface and antennas (NR part). 5G connection can use 5G/LTE/WiFi simultaneously. Gibabit LTE can be used as an anchor for 5G functionality even when 5G network is not available. In this sense 5G NR is not a priority. 5G NR first arrives in the most congested areas to increase the bandwidth. If you have only LTE, you may not get as much as those with 5G phones in some concerts and crowded events. Among the first uses of 5G NG are base stations companies build for themselves. Like networks in factories and other locations using unlicensed 60 GHz band. It looks like Chinese are jumping into industrial use of 5G very rapidly. They are already ahead of the schedule. Consumer applications will follow.
- topranks 8y agoWhat advantages are there to using 5G on unlicensed spectrum vs WiFi. Seems to be there is a whole lot more complexity doing 5G, would 802.1ax with OFDMA sub-channels not be a better way to use that spectrum?
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- ksec 8y agoI was kind of expecting someone will trim in with proper information and Engineering prospective. But nearly 150 Comments into it it seems there are lots of misinformation. Yes, 5G, which includes 4.9G, or 3GPP Rel 13, 14, 15, will provides lots more Capacity. I see many saying this is only good for telcos, and 5G will be the same once everyone moved over. Which is so far from truth. Your current LTE speed is limited by Telcos capacity. So if you have less people in your area sharing your bandwith, you are likely to get much higher speed. So If Telcos improves its capacity, it also means you get higher speed when you use it since it is less contention. This is of course assuming the demand stay constant. And some comments refer to less congested in 5G being the reason, once everyone moves to 5G it will be the same. This is again false. 5G is more like an 4G extension, you really dont switch to 5G, at least not in the 3G to 4G way. In many developed countries, Smartphone Users has already hit a plateau. Growth is going to be slow. Massive MIMO, in 4.9G or what ever they decide to call it, ( likely 5G ) already provides 3x capacity in FDD-LTE environment, and up to 10x in TDD-LTE. So the network, all of a sudden is capable of supporting 3x to 10x more users. As we have stated before there aren't that much user growth anymore, so as a user you now get 3x speed up when Massive MIMO is deployed in Handset and Cell tower. ( Actually this is over simplify and it is more then that ) So you ask but that is assuming user are using the same amount of Data. Most of the Data we use are actually Video, this is especially true on Mobile. We have HEVC, I doubt it will cut the Data required, but you will have a much better quality streaming. All this is 4.9G with Massive MIMO, This is excluding additional capacity with Small Cell, LTE- LAA. And 5G is actually designed with Massive MIMO in mind, even more efficient, additional spectrum, even more antenna in Massive MIMO. It is not too hard to imagine by 2025 we have at least 20x the Capacity then we have today. Now can you imagine you spend 20x the time then today watching Video content in 2025? Which is one reason why many telcos around the world are already switching to unlimited*, or priority based access after certain amount of data. And assuming no additional killer apps for Data usage, Telcos will likely have to consolidate even further to may be only 3 per region.
- daveburstein 8y agoAuthor Here to clarify The article is comparing today's LTE and 5G, deploying in 2018-2019. Is there really a big difference to the consumer between 100-400 meg real speeds (LTE) and 5G at 200 -600 meg mostly? In what application? Latency in today's equipment from Ericsson and Huawei for either is 5-15 milliseconds. Only 10-20% of the "5G" will be the 1 gig millimeter wave until after 2020. Even then, what's the practical difference for most people between 150 megabits and 900 megabits? Some details: Most LTE going in today is 100-400 meg real with a decent connection, 600-900 meg peak. (3 or 4 CA, 4x4 MIMO.) 2) 80-90% of the "5G" in the world through 2020 will be midband 3.5 GHz 200-600 meg. Only a small fraction will be the true 1 gig millimeter wave. 3) Latency on either most likely 5-15 milliseconds. (The difference in Ericsson equipment is 1-2 ms.) email me, daveb@dslprime.com for references to primary sources. Don't believe the hype. 5G millimeter wave is planned for 1-4 ms URLLC, but not until 2022-2025. It can go 10-20 gigabits in the lab today, but I don't know any carrier designing for more than 1 gig to a user in the next 5 years.
- karlkfi 8y ago> Connected cars are already on the road, using lidar & radar, not the phone network. Xu points out, “even today we have the technology that can support autonomous driving”. This point is silly. Lidar and radar don't replace high bandwidth internet on a self-driving car. The beefy super computer in the trunk is trying to replace the cloud compute processing that is inaccessible because there's not enough low latency, reliable bandwidth available to stream a dozen camera, lidar, radar, and IR feeds over the internet for remote processing. Self driving right now requires either precision 3D mapping and local processing of a huge amount of data from multiple sources OR highway-only limitations where there are fewer objects to track that all move in predictable ways. Both of these would be easier and produce better results with more bandwidth and lower latency. 5G may not be mature enough to make a difference today, but that doesn't mean connected and self-driving cars aren't a legitimate use case for the technology and its stated goals.