Personally, I'm just hoping that 3G will eventually make it to England. That seems more realistic, though I don't doubt that the Bay Area will be happily basking in this 5G niceness by the time it happens.
I just got back from 3 months in Southeast Asia, and it's just baffling to me how I could get fast data to my phone in virtually unlimited quantities, out in the sticks of rural Cambodia, for five dollars. But coming back to England, my town of 25,000 people has neither working DSL nor cellular data.
I keep a 3G router in the desk drawer to battle the bi-weekly half-day outages that BT routinely delivers, but that also will happily drop down to 300 baud if anybody else in town decides to use the internet at the same time.
It is certainly solvable. But the monopoly internet supplier doesn't seem to have it as a priority to supply internet.
The cellular coverage in Southeast Asia was surprising for me as well. I'd like to know the economics behind this, I guess the main considerations are:
- energy consumption
- rent for antennas on other people's houses
- data backhaul
- population density
> I'm just hoping that 3G will eventually make it to England.
3G is a useless technology and absolutely pointless in perusing at this point. It's cheaper and better to just go with LTE and there is a bit of room for upgrading in that stack.
It isn't just England. Even in many areas of the states getting a good cell connection can be frustrating. Half the time if I need data while on the road I will end up at a McD just to get a good connection.
4G definitions are still largely being fought over, and you're gonna try and jam "5G" down my throat?
The entire article is complete speculation, and the sad part is that they don't even talk about the cooler ideas they're coming up with for the specification.
For anyone wondering about 5G I think the coolest thing they've discussed so far is breaking down the different use cases (people in home, people traveling on trains, vs working in an office building) because these put completely different types of strain on a network. They're trying to come up with sub specifications to encompass more types of network use cases rather than thinking "xG is for cellular phones" it'll be more like 5Gx is spectrum/protocol for home internet, 5Gy is the spectrum/protocol the phone uses. Although from a marketing prospective this will sound like "Bring 5G to your home."
Honestly I'm surprised that didn't happen with 4G, I know there are things like Clearwire (I think they were bought by sprint?) but it wasn't a huge move from physical infrastructure.
> 4G definitions are still largely being fought over
In which world (other than T-Mobile US) does 4G mean anything other than LTE Advanced? Sure, there was a fight for many years but it was because of carrier marketing, not because of real technical grounds.
At least on a basic level I am quite interested in what comes out of the 5G efforts because what's being discussed will be very interesting for new use cases that cannot be done on existing networks.
This is totally wishful thinking.
No one in industry has a slightest idea what 5G will be.
We keep throwing fancy terms like eNodeB virtualization and then we have a reality check - LTE userplane cannot be virtualized due latency and performance reasons (LTE PHY on x86 - yeah, right...).
Same goes to those mm waves with beamforming - no DSP (IP core) can handle it now and even soon. You need to stick with very expensive FPGAs. Besides that there is WiGig coming and you can offload traffic from LTE to Wifi - investing in those mm wave small cells seems rather pointless.
Beside that you can get those multi-Gbps with new Rel13 LTE carrier aggregation (up 32 CC).
>They're trying to come up with sub specifications to encompass more types of network use cases rather than thinking "xG is for cellular phones" it'll be more like 5Gx is spectrum/protocol for home internet, 5Gy is the spectrum/protocol the phone uses. Although from a marketing prospective this will sound like "Bring 5G to your home."
Intermingling the data and transport layers initially strikes me as a bad thing. What am I missing?
Surely it's the latter. Driverless cars that rely on Internet access would not be feasible, for obvious reasons.
Driverless cars will likely eventually communicate via some peer-to-peer wireless technology, but I would assume that would use a different set of protocols than our mobile phones do.
Absolutely nothing for the next 20 years, seeing how my carrier just started deploying LTE (50 MBit, that is, not 300 MBit) at eye-watering costs ($20 a month for 5 gigabytes!).
There has to be a way to reduce costs somehow. Is there any real reason besides greed for data caps to remain low/costly? Simultaneous usage (with everybody at peak speed) is/has to be planned for (assuming most plans reset at 1st of the month). That network is just sitting there costing money, why not utilize it more and increase revenue?
Don't know what data caps are in your country, but if you max out one in Sweden (https://www.tele2.se/handla/mobilabonnemang/) 100GB, you can get it for quite affordable $40/month.
If you are using more than that on your mobile phone, something is wrong with you and not the data cap ;D
Agreed. I've got 4G at the moment and it's plenty fast, since I can only use it for moderate surfing/etc since I'd otherwise hit my monthly cap in a week. If I had super fast 5G, I could accidentally burn through my cap in a day.
> With 5G, downloading feature-length movies could take less than five seconds.
> With 4G, downloading feature-length movies could take as long as eight minutes.
Am I wrong in thinking that an operator would prefer to keep their antenna busy for only 5 seconds instead of for 8 minutes? If this is the case, if they have enough bandwidth to the antenna, they should try to move people to 5G quickly.
But you still need 90 minutes to watch the movie and you probably reach the monthly cap with only a few movies, so maybe this is not the main use case for 5G. The reduced latency to 1 ms is much more interesting.
The development of the 5g standard and it's deployment is something to look forward to, but one issue that remains is data caps.
We need to remember that the vast majority of people access the Internet primarily through mobile devices and broadband penetration is very low in developing nations.
So even though people have access to high speed internet though mobile networks, data caps act as a hindrance to utilize the service effectively.
The issue that needs to be addressed immediately is making unlimited data available at low costs.
> With 5G, downloading feature-length movies could take less than five seconds. With 4G, downloading feature-length movies could take as long as eight minutes.
But will it move everybody back to download versus streaming. Be interested to know how much of streaming start time is network time to first byte versus authenticate/authorise/check geo-fence admin activities? So would be slightly faster start time and may be less likely to degrade. However, streaming operators if they switch to download are going to have to deal with sending bytes that are never watched. Would be interesting to know how much is downloaded from Amazon Video that is never watched.
> These machines will have to communicate almost in real time with everything around them to avoid cyclists and other obstacles. That can happen only if carriers offer one-millisecond latency, something that may become a lifesaver if autonomous cars become a reality.
Will only be possible if there is a guaranteed quality of service. Would be interesting to see how your EULA/T&C of mobile service are written/rewritten to cover life critical usage scenarios.
> ability to go online no matter where they are, forcing operators to extend their networks to practically every corner of a country.
What sort of frequencies are available to 5G and how will that propagate compared to other options?
> negotiations are expected to persist until at least 2019, so 5G cellphone networks will not become widespread in the United States or elsewhere until well into the next decade.
Worth noting that Nokia and NTT DoCoMo will be making efforts to get an outdoor 5G network in place in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
3/2/15: The companies said they have achieved super-fast data transmission speeds of higher than 2 gigabits per second in a joint indoor trial using Nokia Networks' radio technology operating in the 70 gigahertz spectrum band. [1]
Nokia demonstrated 5G on their commercially available Airscale base station at MWC this year. [2]
It won't matter much because there's not much you could do with 5G that you can't do with 3/4G. Internet connection speed is rarely a bottleneck for casual usage now (browsing, watching steaming videos, chatting etc.) For IoT it won't matter too, because for most telemetry/control means even <3G was ok and WiFi/Bluetooth/ZigBee is still preferable solution as all these xG modems cost way too much. To sum up, unless we start steaming virtual reality, I really don't see many benefits of 5G for few/several years to come.
That is very wrong. There is for instance a lot you can do with 4G that was not possible with 3G. With 3G the more devices the worst the throughput for all. LTE time slices and runs qos for all devices so it does not degrade with increasing device count. However there is a general linit in the the cell which is hard to raise making it uninteresting as a replacement for fiber. Future standards want to remedy this.
[+] [-] jasonkester|10 years ago|reply
I just got back from 3 months in Southeast Asia, and it's just baffling to me how I could get fast data to my phone in virtually unlimited quantities, out in the sticks of rural Cambodia, for five dollars. But coming back to England, my town of 25,000 people has neither working DSL nor cellular data.
I keep a 3G router in the desk drawer to battle the bi-weekly half-day outages that BT routinely delivers, but that also will happily drop down to 300 baud if anybody else in town decides to use the internet at the same time.
It is certainly solvable. But the monopoly internet supplier doesn't seem to have it as a priority to supply internet.
[+] [-] sgt101|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|10 years ago|reply
Still not sure how that explains the differences.
[+] [-] the_mitsuhiko|10 years ago|reply
3G is a useless technology and absolutely pointless in perusing at this point. It's cheaper and better to just go with LTE and there is a bit of room for upgrading in that stack.
[+] [-] Shivetya|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] condescendence|10 years ago|reply
The entire article is complete speculation, and the sad part is that they don't even talk about the cooler ideas they're coming up with for the specification.
For anyone wondering about 5G I think the coolest thing they've discussed so far is breaking down the different use cases (people in home, people traveling on trains, vs working in an office building) because these put completely different types of strain on a network. They're trying to come up with sub specifications to encompass more types of network use cases rather than thinking "xG is for cellular phones" it'll be more like 5Gx is spectrum/protocol for home internet, 5Gy is the spectrum/protocol the phone uses. Although from a marketing prospective this will sound like "Bring 5G to your home."
Honestly I'm surprised that didn't happen with 4G, I know there are things like Clearwire (I think they were bought by sprint?) but it wasn't a huge move from physical infrastructure.
For some more realistic info on what's happening:
https://www.ngmn.org/uploads/media/NGMN_5G_White_Paper_V1_0....
EDIT:
On a small note, this is "finalized" pdf but in reality it will change when implementation occurs.
[+] [-] the_mitsuhiko|10 years ago|reply
In which world (other than T-Mobile US) does 4G mean anything other than LTE Advanced? Sure, there was a fight for many years but it was because of carrier marketing, not because of real technical grounds.
At least on a basic level I am quite interested in what comes out of the 5G efforts because what's being discussed will be very interesting for new use cases that cannot be done on existing networks.
[+] [-] f00fc0d3|10 years ago|reply
Same goes to those mm waves with beamforming - no DSP (IP core) can handle it now and even soon. You need to stick with very expensive FPGAs. Besides that there is WiGig coming and you can offload traffic from LTE to Wifi - investing in those mm wave small cells seems rather pointless.
Beside that you can get those multi-Gbps with new Rel13 LTE carrier aggregation (up 32 CC).
[+] [-] xorlord|10 years ago|reply
Intermingling the data and transport layers initially strikes me as a bad thing. What am I missing?
[+] [-] jtmarmon|10 years ago|reply
Seems like relying on low network latency for critical safety features is designing a fundamentally flawed system.
Is this really how driverless cars are being made or is the author just pulling things from his ass
[+] [-] verbatim|10 years ago|reply
Driverless cars will likely eventually communicate via some peer-to-peer wireless technology, but I would assume that would use a different set of protocols than our mobile phones do.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|10 years ago|reply
It wouldn't be a safety issue, though. The car would not start driving to the destination until it had everything it needed.
[+] [-] creshal|10 years ago|reply
Absolutely nothing for the next 20 years, seeing how my carrier just started deploying LTE (50 MBit, that is, not 300 MBit) at eye-watering costs ($20 a month for 5 gigabytes!).
[+] [-] eklavya|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelrunyon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rb808|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] post_break|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staticelf|10 years ago|reply
If you are using more than that on your mobile phone, something is wrong with you and not the data cap ;D
[+] [-] ojii|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ropiku|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|10 years ago|reply
> With 4G, downloading feature-length movies could take as long as eight minutes.
Am I wrong in thinking that an operator would prefer to keep their antenna busy for only 5 seconds instead of for 8 minutes? If this is the case, if they have enough bandwidth to the antenna, they should try to move people to 5G quickly.
But you still need 90 minutes to watch the movie and you probably reach the monthly cap with only a few movies, so maybe this is not the main use case for 5G. The reduced latency to 1 ms is much more interesting.
[+] [-] vpkaihla|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dineshp2|10 years ago|reply
We need to remember that the vast majority of people access the Internet primarily through mobile devices and broadband penetration is very low in developing nations.
So even though people have access to high speed internet though mobile networks, data caps act as a hindrance to utilize the service effectively.
The issue that needs to be addressed immediately is making unlimited data available at low costs.
[+] [-] ac29|10 years ago|reply
Unless you can make radio spectrum unlimited (you can't), data caps and/or throttling are going to be a reality for the foreseeable future.
[+] [-] jjp|10 years ago|reply
But will it move everybody back to download versus streaming. Be interested to know how much of streaming start time is network time to first byte versus authenticate/authorise/check geo-fence admin activities? So would be slightly faster start time and may be less likely to degrade. However, streaming operators if they switch to download are going to have to deal with sending bytes that are never watched. Would be interesting to know how much is downloaded from Amazon Video that is never watched.
> These machines will have to communicate almost in real time with everything around them to avoid cyclists and other obstacles. That can happen only if carriers offer one-millisecond latency, something that may become a lifesaver if autonomous cars become a reality.
Will only be possible if there is a guaranteed quality of service. Would be interesting to see how your EULA/T&C of mobile service are written/rewritten to cover life critical usage scenarios.
> ability to go online no matter where they are, forcing operators to extend their networks to practically every corner of a country.
What sort of frequencies are available to 5G and how will that propagate compared to other options?
[+] [-] amazon_not|10 years ago|reply
Each day that goes by will make streaming operators care less. A gigabyte costs a fraction of a penny to transmit at current IP transit prices.
[+] [-] roymurdock|10 years ago|reply
Worth noting that Nokia and NTT DoCoMo will be making efforts to get an outdoor 5G network in place in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
3/2/15: The companies said they have achieved super-fast data transmission speeds of higher than 2 gigabits per second in a joint indoor trial using Nokia Networks' radio technology operating in the 70 gigahertz spectrum band. [1]
Nokia demonstrated 5G on their commercially available Airscale base station at MWC this year. [2]
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-telecoms-mwc-ntt-docomo-id...
[2] http://networks.nokia.com/news-events/press-room/press-relea...
[+] [-] kbart|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_mitsuhiko|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoGravitas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mchahn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkrfox|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sealthedeal|10 years ago|reply
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