Samsung Testing 5G Phones With 1gbps Download Speed 128
Gumbercules!! writes "While many smartphone users are still on 3G and are waiting for 4G to be available, Samsung is now testing 5G networks, capable of getting speeds up to 1gbps. Obviously, we're years away from seeing these in the wild (the company is shooting for 2020) but it's still an amazing improvement over what many people are experiencing now."
Spectrum? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wouldn't a small amount of these phones flood a wireless spectrum? It would not take many people in an area until the speed is chopped down significantly.
Or do they have poor range and expect femtocells everywhere? But why not just WiFi at that point?
Ya well the ITU is a little silly with this (Score:4, Interesting)
The standard set for 4G was way too high. It isn't like you can just say "We want something to work at this speed!" It is complex, and it is getting harder with wireless because you are working in an environment where you only have so much frequency and shitty SNR. You can't just throw more spectrum at the problem generally.
The thing is 4G, as it is marketed today, or 3GPP LTE as the ITU would like it is a big step up. If you've played with it on a network that implements it well, it is major. I was amazed at how much faster things were when Verizon turned it on in my area (I already had a phone that was ready for it). It is a generational kind of upgrade, not an incremental one, to consumers. So it makes sense to call it something they understand.
Remember labeling isn't all just "marketing" it is also about having shit people can understand. The concept of a wireless "generation" got introduced with 3G phones and people understood it pretty well: 3G phones were a lot faster than their old phones that they now knew were 2G. Makes sense. So it also follows that 4G phones will be faster still.
I really don't like it when new standards get set arbitrarily high and then there's a hissing match over naming and so on. Part of naming should be something to keep it clear to consumers. Don't ask them to go do a ton of research and understand arcane acronyms and so on.
I think it is reasonable to say "Every time we have a big increase in speed due to a change in technology for mobile phones, we'll call it a 'G' increase." LTE really is a new generation of phones. It is much faster, requires new consumer equipment, requires new tower equipment, etc. That it wasn't as fast as the ITU hoped is kinda silly.
Re:5G with 10GB/mo cap (Score:4, Interesting)
I use a Yupana, it does calculations with the help of Fibonacci numbers and it doesn't make any noise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus#Native_American [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yupana [wikipedia.org]
Re:Ya well the ITU is a little silly with this (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny you should say that, since the entire point of LTE is that it is a Long-Term Evolution platform. It isn't that the "standard was set too high" - it's more that the standard was designed to support high speeds so the wheel would not have to be re-invented as technology progressed.
You can either create a new set of supporting standards and technologies every few years, or you can develop a set of standards that scales up as hardware allows better speeds. So it's only if one entirely misunderstands the purpose of LTE, that the standard would appear to be set too high. The gradual progression that Samsung demonstrates in the article is what LTE-Advanced was all about and is still firmly in 4G territory. 5G is just horrible marketing.