The scaling of wireless bandwidth is one of the under appreciated technological miracles of the 21st Century.
I wonder: Would even the most ambitious of telecommunications researchers in 1990 have thought it likely that in 2020 we’d be rolling out gigabit wireless speeds to handheld devices over nation-spanning networks?
The scaling of Moore’s Law was clear by then, and certainly fiber optics represented a practical path to near-unlimited wired bandwidth. What were the radio folks thinking at the time?
I still don't really get the point of 5G. It requires so many towers that you're basically building a wired network, but then it requires billions of dollars worth of wireless spectrum in order to get from what amounts to the street in front of your house to inside, even though there are already phone lines and coax going there that could be used. Even for wireless devices, that would get you close enough to use unlicensed spectrum (WiFi) and save billions of dollars worth of licensed spectrum.
The main benefit of cellular is when you're away from WiFi. But unless you're constantly traveling to places without WiFi, you get that from a $20/month plan and the existing cellular network.
Probably? There is a fair bit of overlap between cable/fiber and radio in that both are mostly QAM, multichannel based. Radio tends to have a worse SNR and a couple other tricky problems tacked on top.
First of all, this is an excellent explanation of 5G that anyone moderately technical can understand. Great article.
That said, do the numbers from the article concern anyone else at all? I'm generally all for progress, but more than 1 million devices per km2? And massive MIMO antenna arrays spraying EM waves in every part of the spectrum from 600 MHz to 50 GHz?
More than a million devices per km2 ~= 3 million devices per square mile. Am I the only one that thinks that's a bit crazy? I don't want everything from my toaster to my door to my water bottle to be transmitting massive amounts of information to who knows where all the time.
More concerning: the antennas. Current regular MIMO 4G towers are 2x2 or 4x4. Already, there are 5G towers installed today that are 128x128. These are planned to be spaced -extremely- densely in cities, and very close to people (on every floor of offices, on lampposts, etc.) This is a necessity due to the spectrum used. And not only that, but they're using new spectrum that hasn't been used before - instead of the MHz to low GHz range we all know and trust, 5G towers will be up to near 50 GHz (!). Especially the fact that millimeter wave/extremely high frequency is normally blocked by everything from drywall to glass, but now we're intentionally aiming massive amounts of EHF waves with hundreds of antennas in a small space.
Call me a luddite, but I'm more and more thinking that we need a high quality longitudinal study about any effects of this kind of stuff before we go from 2x2/4x4 at well known frequencies to putting 128x128 EHF antenna arrays every hundred feet.
I don't have a study on hand but I expect the effect to be less than lower frequency waves.
First thing to get out of the way, these are not ionizing radiation. Basically, the only thing electromagnetic waves up to visible light can do is heat. UV is borderline.
The question is what they heat. The general idea is that the lower the wavelength, the deeper the penetration. 2/3/4G frequencies will heat your insides, 50 GHz will only heat your skin. Of course the power is so that under normal conditions, the heating is negligible.
As for the effect of millimeter waves, while testing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System they subjected people to massive (100kW!) doses of 95 GHz radiation. High enough to actually burn you, and yet, the adverse effects were minimal.
If you are talking about technical problems, like interference, and how to deal with radio waves that are starting to act a bit like light. I guess that 5G is designed by people who know what they are doing. Simply that we are able to make it work is almost like a miracle to me.
Ok, so, for one, you're miss-understanding the MIMO designation, or at least miss-representing it's meaning. 128x128 means that both sender and receiver have 128 antennas. Not that it's an array of 128 * 128 antennas (16384).
Also, the 128x128 5G MIMO deployments I could find were distributed deployments, placing remote radio heads very densely at relevant indoor locations. I assume they're referring to places like large train stations or shopping malls.
Also, regarding the "massive amounts" part: there is little incentive to transmit more than a few hundred mW per channel, just because the mobile device needs to transmit at a similar level anyways, and there are battery and cooling considerations, even neglecting the cost of power amplifiers for these frequencies.
And, the 1 million devices per square kilometer is actually just a dense, standing crowd. It's the average density that can be reached over any sizable area (putting a school class's phones in a box until the end of the lesson would imply some insane density in that box, but there'd be a limit for how many boxes could be arranged into a dense grid).
So I posted this comment because I wanted to spark a discussion where intelligent people consider the safety implications of 5G, which is very hard to find on the internet. Unfortunately that hasn't happened so far, so I decided to dig a bit more on my own.
Step 1 so far has been Wikipedia, where I found the reassuring sentence "The scientific consensus is that 5G technology is safe.[99][100][101]" Unfortunately, after checking those sources it appears that one is a blog and the other two are news articles about the same event - a press release from the ICNIRP. Further research on the ICNIRP shows that it is a private organization that declared itself that it only considered the thermal dangers of RF in the cm-wave range, and any other dangers do not exist.
And that is the common path to "proving" 5G safety on the internet: "the only way that this could be bad is heating; there's no heating; bam, it's safe, we're done here."
The reality, of course, is that EM waves have many mechanisms of action. So far, we know of the following:
- Ionizing radiation (nuclear weapons, x-rays, etc) can easily kill you or give you cancer
- Non-UV visible light can increase skin aging, cause retinal injuries
- Tons of EM waves can burn you or increase body temperature causing other problems (tissue heating)
- Nerve disturbance from low-frequency RF
That's four methods of ways EM waves can hurt you. Everyone is in agreement about that - no matter how you slice it, there's a minimum of those four. But that's a minimum. Relatively few good quality longitudinal studies have been run about EM waves. "Hey, can we put this weird thing in your home and see if it gives you cancer?" is a hard sell, I guess.
But unfortunately there seems to be not one single high-quality, longitudinal study researching the effects of living with constant mm-wave sources. There are a few short-term studies, but most of these are on the order of hours (!) of exposure.
One interesting thing I did find was a Swiss study showing people living near high voltage power lines were more than two times more likely to get Alzheimer's than people living just 600m away. While that's a completely different type of EM than 5G, it does hint that there may be more harmful mechanisms of EM radiation than we currently know.
I'd be more concerned with the fact that the increased quantity and precision of the antennas allows collection of extremely fine-grained location information.
I have this irrational fear of 5G for some reason and I consider myself a rational person with a pro-technology bias.
This fear stems from a combination of factors leading to unknown unknowns:
1. Little benefit for consumers with 4G (this is admitted even by pro 5G side implementing the tech)
2. Thus leading to question - who benefits when your toaster joins road sensors in the internet of shit.
Webcams already are not doing too hot on the privacy front.
3. Lack of health studies
4. The feeling of being pushed down consumer throats.
5. Last not least the fight between 5G providers/implementers at a state level .
Yeah, I've been slightly concerned about those numbers for a while now. I am in the same boat as you; we think radio waves are totally safe, I get that. But the increase in background spectral density & energy is going to be huge. Makes me feel like we should up our certainty levels a bit more first.
One thing to note is that the frequency bands specified only apply to US 5G. Huawei's 5G spectrum uses a much lower frequencies: Around 3.8GHz. This falls in the mid-range spectrum, which makes it cheaper to deploy, because the waves travel further and you need fewer towers. That is the attraction of Huawei, for most countries (outside of the US).
This doesn't make a lot of sense.. There is no "Huawei 5G spectrum". Huawei equipment has to operate in whatever spectrum regulations exist for the country buying the equipment. Countries (including parts of the US) buy Huawei gear because it's cheap, not because there's any special spectrum benefits.
The millimeter wave stuff is in addition to this for downtown cores, stadiums, etc. 5G modulation itself adds max 15-20% throughput compared to 4G LTE so more spectrum is needed to deliver on the weird promises telcos made.
Excellent article - still I can't resist a rather large quibble.
The commonly stated assertion that spectrum is a limited resource is not quite accurate.
Spectrum is technically defined as a range of frequencies. That's all. In business parlance spectrum is also attached to large areas of land - this spatial dimension is more important than most people realize.
Radio signals themselves exist in space and time, not just in a range of frequencies. More radio signals - and data bandwidth - can be packed into a given space by shrinking the volume a given signal "occupies".
We can do this by reducing signal power and increasing cell density, in addition to other techniques described in the article. More cells, smaller cells. This is a big part of how 5G expands cell network capacity. But the telecoms have downplayed the effect of this relative to the the claim that spectrum is limited.
The mobile carriers have financial incentives to do this. These incentives are lower costs and monopoly control.
Fewer bigger cells at higher power are cheaper than many smaller cells at lower power. The monopoly part is exclusive use of spectrum on a given piece of land.
The problem is, the legal attachment of spectrum works with very large areas of land (where km^2 is a smallish unit) and large periods of time (years), relative to radio signals. Both attachments are grossly inefficient.
By shrinking cell size (power) and increasing cell density, several orders of magnitude more network bandwidth is possible, plenty even to share (modulo cost of physical infrastructure).
Spectrum scarcity is a myth. The current legal regime enriches monopolists and is otherwise a tremendous waste of potential. We pay higher prices for unnecessarily limited bandwidth.
Spectrum scarcity is also a function of our wasteful utilization.
What you describe (small cells) is one version of what we call spatial multiplexing. Basically, reuse spectrum in physically separate areas. But you can also do this in a way that doesn't sacrifice the centralized, large cell architecture.
Namely via beamforming. You don't have to share spectrum if you're not dumping power in all directions. Already cell towers are split into three sectors; you could continue to increase sectors, or dynamically point beams at individual users. Being suitably isolated from one another, each beam allows spectrum reuse.
It's not free obviously, it requires more expensive base station antennas, but I think a direction we'll be heading in.
Would anyone like to speculate on what new tech we will see that will take advantage of this? I can already stream (to my device) a 4K 60fps video while in a park, and at home I have gigabit fiber (up and down) which is barely ever used to it's full potential. What cool stuff will I be able to do in 10 years time when I have 10Gbps upload while sitting in a park?
Reminds me a bit of the alleged quote "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need on a computer"
It is difficult to know now, but I think the probability is very high that we will "need" the bandwidth down the line for something we will find useful.
One thing 5G should allow is getting a lot of data point to point wirelessly - specifically for things like oscilloscopes and such, I remember a guy from keysight saying their big push now is make everything work together on the network (which they can now do with things like 5G)
One isn't really supposed to ask these questions, and just assume:
- that every cellphone user in the world is going to just run out tomorrow and buy a phone that's $200-300 more expensive to replace the phones they have now, have been replacing less and less of in the past half a decade, that they barely utilize to its fullest if the network were just prevalent everywhere today
- that some measurable fraction of the towers spaced every 150ft will not be vandalized, broken and sold for scrap in many places in the world and have to be replaced in order to have the throughput as advertised, that the companies will be just excited to replace, whose total cost will be less or the same as current infrastructure costs
- that despite the junk rating of many of the biggest teleco corps, they are well capitalized with pay for such a network from the ever increasing profits they reap from current consumers and wont have to rely on more junk financing and will take great care of the infrastructure just like all the great care they have put into existing infrastructure. Nothing in the future could ever threaten their solvency
Actually, low range of high frequency signal is beneficial. The reason is, that even at relatively large transmission power the signal dissipates quite quickly meaning you can have stations service relatively small area.
This means the spectrum is shared by less users, the uplink is shared by less users, you can serve higher concentration of people.
No mention of unlicensed bands? After the demonstrated superior utilization of those tiny portions of this range allocated for ISM? My goodness, it's almost as if FCC works only to perpetuate outdated "giant telco" models to the detriment of all consumers!
Out here in the country we'll operate our own "small cells" without permission from ATTVZN and without paying FCC a cent. If anyone notices there will be "investigations" but mostly no one will notice because physics. Eventually industrial users of this tech will realize "hey we don't need those telco goofballs either!" and their lobbyists will muscle through some exceptions. Eventually everyone whose house has sheetrock walls will be so excepted.
This article wasn't about unlicensed/ISM radio, though there have certainly been advances there as well. I'm genuinely curious about which parts of the ISM range you see with "superior" utilization compared to cellular networks - I work with those type of radios for a living.
We should not listen to scientists about 5g health concerns?
5g highband is basically an always on radio that can pinpoint specific users. Like,you would be tracked as you move room to room and interact with people. Why is everyone ok with this? Especially when hardware killswitches are not the norm or legally required.
Massive MIMO is not a 5G only thing. 3GPP Rel 13 on 4G already had it for FDD-LTE. And for TD-LTE it was supported from Released 8 or 10 if I remember correctly. Massive MIMO in 5G only meant NR was designed with it in mind. Although mostly in the sense of TDD still, FDD Massive MIMO still has some on going work to do.
But yes, in many case 5G is more like 4.99G. It is pretty much a evolutionary step from 4G Rather than a big leap from 3G to 4G. And we should expect capacity to increase from 5x to 10x.
if anything 5G will put extreme pressure on more efficient computational paradigms to replace our half century old silicon approach ... biology evolved the human brain to run on 40 watts of power ... the massive additional carbon footprint of 5G will accelerate our escape from silicon
I thought the one lesson we all learned from Clippy is that this kind of interruption is more annoying than useful, I guess the new generation of developers have never experienced Clippy?
Also why would I need help when reading a blog post??
I would rather say that there will always be limits of our understanding and building equipment for usage in various mediums, even in a vacuum, we're still only probing our theoretical knowledge of null boundary interactions between photons[0].
> For example, a standard cellphone can fit an array of 72 antennas operating on the 39 GHz mmWave band. A similar 72 antenna array in the 700 MHz low-band frequency would be larger than a typical home door.
And what would it cost? In an environment where cellphone sales have been declining for at least 5 years now at least on the high end (all the games Apple has been playing with sales reporting…), which end users will be willing to bear the cost of the device now?
[+] [-] twoodfin|5 years ago|reply
I wonder: Would even the most ambitious of telecommunications researchers in 1990 have thought it likely that in 2020 we’d be rolling out gigabit wireless speeds to handheld devices over nation-spanning networks?
The scaling of Moore’s Law was clear by then, and certainly fiber optics represented a practical path to near-unlimited wired bandwidth. What were the radio folks thinking at the time?
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|5 years ago|reply
The main benefit of cellular is when you're away from WiFi. But unless you're constantly traveling to places without WiFi, you get that from a $20/month plan and the existing cellular network.
[+] [-] vvanders|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aoki|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owenversteeg|5 years ago|reply
That said, do the numbers from the article concern anyone else at all? I'm generally all for progress, but more than 1 million devices per km2? And massive MIMO antenna arrays spraying EM waves in every part of the spectrum from 600 MHz to 50 GHz?
More than a million devices per km2 ~= 3 million devices per square mile. Am I the only one that thinks that's a bit crazy? I don't want everything from my toaster to my door to my water bottle to be transmitting massive amounts of information to who knows where all the time.
More concerning: the antennas. Current regular MIMO 4G towers are 2x2 or 4x4. Already, there are 5G towers installed today that are 128x128. These are planned to be spaced -extremely- densely in cities, and very close to people (on every floor of offices, on lampposts, etc.) This is a necessity due to the spectrum used. And not only that, but they're using new spectrum that hasn't been used before - instead of the MHz to low GHz range we all know and trust, 5G towers will be up to near 50 GHz (!). Especially the fact that millimeter wave/extremely high frequency is normally blocked by everything from drywall to glass, but now we're intentionally aiming massive amounts of EHF waves with hundreds of antennas in a small space.
Call me a luddite, but I'm more and more thinking that we need a high quality longitudinal study about any effects of this kind of stuff before we go from 2x2/4x4 at well known frequencies to putting 128x128 EHF antenna arrays every hundred feet.
[+] [-] GuB-42|5 years ago|reply
I don't have a study on hand but I expect the effect to be less than lower frequency waves.
First thing to get out of the way, these are not ionizing radiation. Basically, the only thing electromagnetic waves up to visible light can do is heat. UV is borderline.
The question is what they heat. The general idea is that the lower the wavelength, the deeper the penetration. 2/3/4G frequencies will heat your insides, 50 GHz will only heat your skin. Of course the power is so that under normal conditions, the heating is negligible.
As for the effect of millimeter waves, while testing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System they subjected people to massive (100kW!) doses of 95 GHz radiation. High enough to actually burn you, and yet, the adverse effects were minimal.
If you are talking about technical problems, like interference, and how to deal with radio waves that are starting to act a bit like light. I guess that 5G is designed by people who know what they are doing. Simply that we are able to make it work is almost like a miracle to me.
[+] [-] namibj|5 years ago|reply
Also, the 128x128 5G MIMO deployments I could find were distributed deployments, placing remote radio heads very densely at relevant indoor locations. I assume they're referring to places like large train stations or shopping malls.
Also, regarding the "massive amounts" part: there is little incentive to transmit more than a few hundred mW per channel, just because the mobile device needs to transmit at a similar level anyways, and there are battery and cooling considerations, even neglecting the cost of power amplifiers for these frequencies.
And, the 1 million devices per square kilometer is actually just a dense, standing crowd. It's the average density that can be reached over any sizable area (putting a school class's phones in a box until the end of the lesson would imply some insane density in that box, but there'd be a limit for how many boxes could be arranged into a dense grid).
[+] [-] owenversteeg|5 years ago|reply
Step 1 so far has been Wikipedia, where I found the reassuring sentence "The scientific consensus is that 5G technology is safe.[99][100][101]" Unfortunately, after checking those sources it appears that one is a blog and the other two are news articles about the same event - a press release from the ICNIRP. Further research on the ICNIRP shows that it is a private organization that declared itself that it only considered the thermal dangers of RF in the cm-wave range, and any other dangers do not exist.
And that is the common path to "proving" 5G safety on the internet: "the only way that this could be bad is heating; there's no heating; bam, it's safe, we're done here."
The reality, of course, is that EM waves have many mechanisms of action. So far, we know of the following:
- Ionizing radiation (nuclear weapons, x-rays, etc) can easily kill you or give you cancer
- Non-UV visible light can increase skin aging, cause retinal injuries
- Tons of EM waves can burn you or increase body temperature causing other problems (tissue heating)
- Nerve disturbance from low-frequency RF
That's four methods of ways EM waves can hurt you. Everyone is in agreement about that - no matter how you slice it, there's a minimum of those four. But that's a minimum. Relatively few good quality longitudinal studies have been run about EM waves. "Hey, can we put this weird thing in your home and see if it gives you cancer?" is a hard sell, I guess.
But unfortunately there seems to be not one single high-quality, longitudinal study researching the effects of living with constant mm-wave sources. There are a few short-term studies, but most of these are on the order of hours (!) of exposure.
One interesting thing I did find was a Swiss study showing people living near high voltage power lines were more than two times more likely to get Alzheimer's than people living just 600m away. While that's a completely different type of EM than 5G, it does hint that there may be more harmful mechanisms of EM radiation than we currently know.
[+] [-] oakwhiz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sireat|5 years ago|reply
This fear stems from a combination of factors leading to unknown unknowns:
1. Little benefit for consumers with 4G (this is admitted even by pro 5G side implementing the tech)
2. Thus leading to question - who benefits when your toaster joins road sensors in the internet of shit. Webcams already are not doing too hot on the privacy front.
3. Lack of health studies
4. The feeling of being pushed down consumer throats.
5. Last not least the fight between 5G providers/implementers at a state level .
Why not at least do some health studies?
[+] [-] ip26|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sumanthvepa|5 years ago|reply
Ref: https://www.huawei.com/en/about-huawei/public-policy/5g-spec....
EDIT: Fixed typos.
[+] [-] mNovak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superkuh|5 years ago|reply
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-expands-flexible-use-c-band... "Makes 280 Megahertz of the 3.7-4.2 GHz Band Available for 5G Services While Relocating Existing Satellite Operations to the Upper Part of the Band"
The millimeter wave stuff is in addition to this for downtown cores, stadiums, etc. 5G modulation itself adds max 15-20% throughput compared to 4G LTE so more spectrum is needed to deliver on the weird promises telcos made.
[+] [-] o-__-o|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barryaustin|5 years ago|reply
The commonly stated assertion that spectrum is a limited resource is not quite accurate.
Spectrum is technically defined as a range of frequencies. That's all. In business parlance spectrum is also attached to large areas of land - this spatial dimension is more important than most people realize.
Radio signals themselves exist in space and time, not just in a range of frequencies. More radio signals - and data bandwidth - can be packed into a given space by shrinking the volume a given signal "occupies".
We can do this by reducing signal power and increasing cell density, in addition to other techniques described in the article. More cells, smaller cells. This is a big part of how 5G expands cell network capacity. But the telecoms have downplayed the effect of this relative to the the claim that spectrum is limited.
The mobile carriers have financial incentives to do this. These incentives are lower costs and monopoly control. Fewer bigger cells at higher power are cheaper than many smaller cells at lower power. The monopoly part is exclusive use of spectrum on a given piece of land.
The problem is, the legal attachment of spectrum works with very large areas of land (where km^2 is a smallish unit) and large periods of time (years), relative to radio signals. Both attachments are grossly inefficient.
By shrinking cell size (power) and increasing cell density, several orders of magnitude more network bandwidth is possible, plenty even to share (modulo cost of physical infrastructure).
Spectrum scarcity is a myth. The current legal regime enriches monopolists and is otherwise a tremendous waste of potential. We pay higher prices for unnecessarily limited bandwidth.
[+] [-] mNovak|5 years ago|reply
What you describe (small cells) is one version of what we call spatial multiplexing. Basically, reuse spectrum in physically separate areas. But you can also do this in a way that doesn't sacrifice the centralized, large cell architecture.
Namely via beamforming. You don't have to share spectrum if you're not dumping power in all directions. Already cell towers are split into three sectors; you could continue to increase sectors, or dynamically point beams at individual users. Being suitably isolated from one another, each beam allows spectrum reuse.
It's not free obviously, it requires more expensive base station antennas, but I think a direction we'll be heading in.
[+] [-] fyfy18|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nursie|5 years ago|reply
You'll have lower energy use modes available for battery powered IoT devices.
You'll be able to be in a very dense crowd and have your services still work.
It is also lower latency that 4G, so things like gaming over your 5G connection become more possible.
These may not matter to you, but they are use-cases that 5G allows.
[+] [-] baxtr|5 years ago|reply
It is difficult to know now, but I think the probability is very high that we will "need" the bandwidth down the line for something we will find useful.
[+] [-] jotm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeZah7Ux|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MintelIE|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cinquemb|5 years ago|reply
- that every cellphone user in the world is going to just run out tomorrow and buy a phone that's $200-300 more expensive to replace the phones they have now, have been replacing less and less of in the past half a decade, that they barely utilize to its fullest if the network were just prevalent everywhere today
- that some measurable fraction of the towers spaced every 150ft will not be vandalized, broken and sold for scrap in many places in the world and have to be replaced in order to have the throughput as advertised, that the companies will be just excited to replace, whose total cost will be less or the same as current infrastructure costs
- that despite the junk rating of many of the biggest teleco corps, they are well capitalized with pay for such a network from the ever increasing profits they reap from current consumers and wont have to rely on more junk financing and will take great care of the infrastructure just like all the great care they have put into existing infrastructure. Nothing in the future could ever threaten their solvency
I wish them all the best!
[+] [-] lmilcin|5 years ago|reply
This means the spectrum is shared by less users, the uplink is shared by less users, you can serve higher concentration of people.
[+] [-] jessaustin|5 years ago|reply
Out here in the country we'll operate our own "small cells" without permission from ATTVZN and without paying FCC a cent. If anyone notices there will be "investigations" but mostly no one will notice because physics. Eventually industrial users of this tech will realize "hey we don't need those telco goofballs either!" and their lobbyists will muscle through some exceptions. Eventually everyone whose house has sheetrock walls will be so excepted.
[+] [-] ac29|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|5 years ago|reply
I had the hope, 5G would finally solve the coverage problems in rural areas. sounds like it's just a vanity project after all...
[+] [-] badrabbit|5 years ago|reply
We should not listen to scientists about 5g health concerns?
5g highband is basically an always on radio that can pinpoint specific users. Like,you would be tracked as you move room to room and interact with people. Why is everyone ok with this? Especially when hardware killswitches are not the norm or legally required.
[+] [-] ksec|5 years ago|reply
Massive MIMO is not a 5G only thing. 3GPP Rel 13 on 4G already had it for FDD-LTE. And for TD-LTE it was supported from Released 8 or 10 if I remember correctly. Massive MIMO in 5G only meant NR was designed with it in mind. Although mostly in the sense of TDD still, FDD Massive MIMO still has some on going work to do.
But yes, in many case 5G is more like 4.99G. It is pretty much a evolutionary step from 4G Rather than a big leap from 3G to 4G. And we should expect capacity to increase from 5x to 10x.
[+] [-] donclark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtomicOrbital|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m000z0rz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehsankia|5 years ago|reply
Also why would I need help when reading a blog post??
[+] [-] nine_k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihsw|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] T3RMINATED|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 5gisbad|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] cinquemb|5 years ago|reply
I would rather say that there will always be limits of our understanding and building equipment for usage in various mediums, even in a vacuum, we're still only probing our theoretical knowledge of null boundary interactions between photons[0].
> For example, a standard cellphone can fit an array of 72 antennas operating on the 39 GHz mmWave band. A similar 72 antenna array in the 700 MHz low-band frequency would be larger than a typical home door.
And what would it cost? In an environment where cellphone sales have been declining for at least 5 years now at least on the high end (all the games Apple has been playing with sales reporting…), which end users will be willing to bear the cost of the device now?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH7OGkEZX7I