EU, South Korea Collaborate On Superfast 5G Standards 78
jfruh writes The European Commission and the South Korean government announced that they will be harmonizing their radio spectrum policy in an attempt to help bring 5G wireless tech to market by 2020. While the technology is still in an embryonic state, but one South Korean researcher predicts it could be over a thousand times faster than current 4G networks.
a THOUSAND times faster than 4G? (Score:0)
Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5G (Score:0)
What the fuck are they talking about? We don't even have 4G yet, and they are already talking about 5G?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5 (Score:0)
What does LTE stand for anyway? Lighter Than Earth ? Less Than Europe ? Limited Transfer Environment ?
Re:Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5 (Score:2)
What does LTE stand for anyway? Lighter Than Earth ? Less Than Europe ? Limited Transfer Environment ?
It stands for 'Long Term Evolution.' Seriously.
Re:Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5 (Score:0)
Well it obviously wasn't intelligently designed.
LTE is 4G Lite (Score:2)
Re:Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5 (Score:4, Informative)
So now we are talking about 5g or 6g but we do not actually have 4g availability yet.
Comment removed (Score:1)
Re:Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5 (Score:0)
That's enough to market it as a next generation technology, irrespective of what 3GPP thinks.
Firstly: That's enough for 3GPP to market LTE as a next generation technology, irrespective of what ITU thinks. And secondly: That's not enough.
Re:Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5 (Score:3)
What the fuck are they talking about? We don't even have 4G yet, and they are already talking about 5G?
I'm holding out for 6G.
Re:Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5 (Score:2)
Re:Roll out some real 4G first, then we can talk 5 (Score:0)
Fuck everything, we're doing 5Gs.
Re:a THOUSAND times faster than 4G? (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe the "could be" part, if it's just 10% faster s/he's right.
And an attempt by 2020 means more like 2026, and the US will have an incompatible slower version around 2030.
Jaded, I am.
Re:a THOUSAND times faster than 4G? (Score:3)
I believe the "could be" part, if it's just 10% faster s/he's right.
And an attempt by 2020 means more like 2026, and the US will have an incompatible slower version around 2030.
Jaded, I am.
You're being too damn optimistic.
Re:a THOUSAND times faster than 4G? (Score:2)
Huh? 10% faster is 1000 times faster? How do those mathematics work?
Re:a THOUSAND times faster than 4G? (Score:2)
It's lingual, "could be 1000 times faster" includes every portion thereof. Heck, "could be 1000x faster" includes 2000x faster too.
Gotta' watch those conditional possibilities. ;-)
Re:a THOUSAND times faster than 4G? (Score:0)
It's lingual, "could be 1000 times faster" includes every portion thereof. Heck, "could be 1000x faster" includes 2000x faster too.
Gotta' watch those conditional possibilities. ;-)
You're interpreting "could be" as "up to" which are two completely different things. Could be is lame hedge against a binary YES or NO possibility. The technology possibly could be 1000x, or it won't be. The won't side of the condition has zero implication as to what other speed possibilities might be acceptable. So if the resulting 5G standard is10% faster, then the "could be" result is "Sorry, we hoped it could be, but reality intruded on our exaggerated dream." Now had the report said "up to 1000x" then your interpretation makes sense, as "up to" implies a range from the origin up to (and possibly including) the end point.
Re:a THOUSAND times faster than 4G? (Score:2)
It's lingual, "could be 1000 times faster" includes every portion thereof. Heck, "could be 1000x faster" includes 2000x faster too.
I always preferred the phrasing "up to 1000 times faster, or more!" Totally devoid of meaning.
Re:a THOUSAND times faster than 4G? (Score:0)
Unfortunately,
At the rate North America is going, we're never going to get 5G because the carriers can't recoup their costs of building out the 4G networks by then. We might see some limited rollouts in congested areas like NYC and LA, but it will only appear in world devices. Everyone look back at how many times Sprint has invested in the wrong technology.
It's become a liability for communications companies to be so vertically integrated, and it would be in everyones best interests if they were either broken up and nationalized, with the backhaul and wireless interconnections opened up to all companies in leiu of ever having to have another spectrum auction or tearing up any more roads for dark fiber. OR force the communications companies to divest content and backhaul from their last-mile business.
Re:a THOUSAND times faster than 4G? (Score:3)
The problem you US folks have in one problem that's going to plague in many areas for decades to come: low population density. Even your cities are empty by Western European or Asian standards. The cost per capita to deliver services will thus be far higher than in other parts of the world.
How much more can we squeeze? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's only so much theoretical bandwidth on the broadcast range e/m spectrum. How much gets reserved for non-consumer purposes? How many towers/area can we afford? There's gotta be a theoretical fundamental limit, somewhere, right? Like there is with Moore's law?
Re:How much more can we squeeze? (Score:5, Informative)
The limit you are looking for, the Shannon limit is explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:How much more can we squeeze? (Score:0)
We have had schemes to hit the shannon limit for as long as the limit has been known. It's not a limit to the tech because the limit applies to the channel only (which is different than bandwidth or spectrum). Thus all new tech focuses on improving the channel to increase capacity, there simply is nothing you can do to improve the coding scheme and get better bandwidth.
Re:How much more can we squeeze? (Score:2)
We have had schemes to hit the shannon limit for as long as the limit has been known.
Practical schemes are much more recent, but yes we do have ones now that are so close it makes very little difference. Then there is the finite BW issue:
different than bandwidth or spectrum
Which is where our old buddy Nyquist comes in. Of course you can overcome that with more complex constellations, but then Shannon becomes more of a problem. Between these two guys they've really got us constrained.
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:How much more can we squeeze? (Score:2)
Though the biggest problem on modern wireless networks is not "noise" in the traditional sense but interference between cells. The combination of such interference (which looks and acts similar to noise given modern modulation techniques) with the fading inherent in mobile microwave devices makes it very hard to achive more than a few bits/sec/hz on average across the celll.
Conventional MIMO helps a little but the close spacing of the antennas means the channels have low independence limiting the gains.
So that gives a couple of options. One is to move to higher frequencies where there is more bandwidth available and where signal strength tends to fall off quicker. Downsides are the cost of the hardware and if the signal falls off too quickly that limits the environments in which it can be delployed to very high density ones. The other one would be to implement cross-cell MIMO but that would require a heck of a lot of backhaul work.
Re:How much more can we squeeze? (Score:0)
MIMO is used to improve reception and has no effect on bandwidth. I believe spread spectrum is what you're referring to.
Re:How much more can we squeeze? (Score:2)
No, he's right. MIMO can make several effective communications channels out of the same slice of spectrum by using the multople antennae as a phase array.
Re:How much more can we squeeze? (Score:3)
Having more MIMO SM layers (i.e. concurrent channels) is not practical. The complexity of a MMSE decoder isO(L^3) with L the number of layers, so it gets ugly quickly. Today MIMO SM is typically limited to 2 layers in practice, with 4 likely coming and 8 the practical limit (and that may not be so practical really...).
Using very high frequencies (above 10 GHz) gives access to a lot of free spectrum, but the higher one go the lower the reach for a given power budget. To compensate for the high attenuation this is coupled with massive multi-antennas, the talk for 5G is 64 to 256. This is split between a few very costly MIMO SM layers and the rest for cheap beam-forming. So for example 256 antennas would behave like four 64 patches BF antennas for 4 layers MIMO. Of course with that many antennas and RF transceiver you have to compromise in cost and quality. So it's a lot of poor receive chains, vs. a few very high quality ones today. But there's still the potential to gain overall.
It has challenges though: it will still be for small cells (low reach) and rather low mobility (the beam steering cannot track high speed mobiles, plus small cells don't work wall for highly mobile devices: too many handovers). But because most people are low speed and the places where capacity is most needed are urban centers where small cells are ok, it still can be a win.
But as one can see, high speed 5G won't be universal like 4G is. By this I mean that 4G can (and will) completely replace 2G and 3G in time, while this high frequencies / massive BF 5G could only complement 4G is high density urban places, but will never be suitable for lower density parts (rural) where 4G would stay.
And then there's the elephant in the room: a lot of the improvements in telecoms have been riding on Moore's law. With the scaling problems that start now to be more openly discussed, how much more processing power we can use for 5G and what the users are prepared to pay (cost and power) for all these improvements are interesting questions.
Re:How much more can we squeeze? (Score:2)
Moore's law is a terrible example as it's not based on any theory or math. It's more like "Moore's Observation that has held fairly true for a few decades".
5G (Score:0)
I haven't even experienced 4G yet but horry herr yes!
Wow... (Score:0)
Now you can blow through your 2GB of data at $30 (Score:5, Insightful)
no roaming at $15-$20 an meg when you go to (Score:2)
no roaming at $15-$20 an meg when you go to EU and South Korea from the USA.
Do you have $30K+ for each 30 seconds of use and how long before you get cut off? You may be able to hit 500K + in a day before the system has time to cut you off.
I thought 4G was 'Superfast' (Score:0)
Re:I thought 4G was 'Superfast' (Score:2)
We're gonna need plaid cases for our future phones.
It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet... (Score:5, Insightful)
It all sounds a little weird to me: Isn't a dedicated cable always much more reliable and capable than a wireless connection? That's what I thought at least.
I guess it's cheaper to deploy antennas every few hundred meters than to wire every home
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:2)
I somehow doubt that wireless will be faster, but for the cost of scale infrastructure, antennas and base stations aren't cheap, but the will probably serve many more customers (each with a monthly subscription) than a DSLAM or Coax (or fiber) deployment, so the costs probably will have a better ROI.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:0)
Trufax. It is physically impossible for wireless speeds to be greater than wired speeds. Signal attenuation from distance, plus congestion from other subscribers on the same tower are just two factors that degrade speeds. Usually advertised speed metrics are under best-case scenarios with no other handsets on a tower and within a few hundred feet of it.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:2)
Plus the SNR is so much better when you use proper cables and shielding, and many things besides antennas do a great job of absorbing microwave signals.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:3)
Somehow, I doubt it actually will be faster.
The cell companies will throttle, and continue to massively over-subscribe.
Pretty much every advancement they've touted as bringing faster, better, cheaper has translated into "not much faster", "slightly better (for them)", and in no way at all cheaper.
I have very little faith that most wireless companies will do anything but squeeze us for money money and more profits, while giving us the same service (or worse) than we already have.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:2)
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:3)
Don't forget that the link speed between your phone and the tower doesn't make one single shit of difference if they don't upgrade the backhaul from the tower to the switching office.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:0)
Verizon is already saying they don't need to upgrade their infrastructure in some areas, becauase 4G is considered high speed Internet.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:2)
...is consistently faster than our wired home connections.
My VDSL connection (Belgacom) is slower than my 4G-LTE connection (Belgacom).
Nope, nut funny, really.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:2)
My upload speed already is faster for LTE than for my cable modem (Oregon, USA). Download is about 1/2.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:0)
When? Ha, for most people in the Seattle area, they already are! My iPhone with AT&T downloads at 6.5 Mbps while my home DSL is 896 kbps. My phone is over seven times faster than the fast available home connection where I live. It's slow, but for many of my friends, they would kill to have a connection that fast since they're still on dial-up. The fifty+ year-old phone wiring here and lack of access to cable TV since Comcast has a government-granted monopoly but refuses to provide service to all of the city means that cellphones are faster than wired access. The state of Internet access is a joke in this country. When the tech capital of the world doesn't have the option for above 1 Mbps, you know things are screwed-up.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:0)
my home DSL is 896 kbps
Napoleon Dynamite voice, "Lucky!"
I've lived several places in the Seattle area that couldn't get DSL. The fastest connection I've had here was 3 Mbps almost fifteen years ago. Since then, the four other places where I've lived haven't been able to compete with that. To people outside of Seattle that might sound like I move a lot, but with rising rents here and large-scale gentrification, you have to move pretty often to be able to afford a place to live. I'd love to get Comcast despite all of their problems because they're so much faster, but I haven't lived anywhere here yet that they offered service. They have the monopoly so they have no incentive to provide service since no one else can.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:1)
> tech capital of the world
Wrong. Seattle continues to elect CONservatives to rule over them. Even the person who claims to be a socialist voted against raising the minimum wage. When you live in a place where even the socialist party hates workers and actively fights to see that they starve, and starve we will because of rising rents, then you know you live in a conservative hellhole. Also, they are very anti-technology and anti-Internet like the rest of their kind. They have never once acted to force Comcast to provide Internet access. Also, they have never made CenturyLink fix their phone wiring. Thousands of households don't even have access to DSL. At home I have 1 Mbps, and it works most nights after about 9pm. In the middle of the day, it never works at any speed, and it costs me nealry $70/month. I still pay it because it is the only option we have here in Seattle. The rulers here are hard-core conservative.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:2)
You clearly live in a city. I can't see my neighbors where I live. No, it's not cheaper to deploy antennae every few hundred meters.
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:1)
My wireless at home offers speeds in excess of a standard 10/100 connection.
*however*
In most places you will have multiple cabled 10/100 connections, with a backplane that's capable of an aggregate >100MBps. The wifi, on the other handle, gets slower as more people pile on.
I'd imagine that the same applies to cellular wifi VS gigabit etc. I've also noticed that while cellular often has fast download speeds, the connection setup is often much slower than on ethernet etc
Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet (Score:2)
My 4G internet on my phone is already faster than my home broadband connection, due to the fact that they haven't connected my street to the rest of the Fiber network in Dublin. Thanks to unlimited download, I regularly use it to downloads my Steam games and TV episodes. I'm tempted to get rid of the landline altogether.
5G (Score:5, Funny)
5G is about 49 meters per second per second
Re:5G (Score:2)
I see what you did th--SPLAT!--
Re:5G (Score:0)
Capitalization fail. That's 5g.
5G is about 3.3 X 10^-11 N / (m^2 kg^2).
Re:5G (Score:0)
Really really bad. I mean 3.3 X 10^-10 N m^2/kg^2.
It won't matter anyway (Score:2, Interesting)
I have 4G now, and it is still as slow as 3G, which is as slow as 2G, which is as slow as 1Xrtt when everyone is using their phones and the pipe to the tower is full. I often see 10 - 30 Kbps during peak times.
During the middle of the night, 1 bar will get me 1.3 - 1.9Mbps on 3G, and 3 - 5 Mbps on 4G, but during the day, I struggle to get 100Kbps on 3G or 4G, even with 5 bars.
I can watch my download speed increase as everyone goes to bed. It's funny (sad) to graph my download speed and see it jump up on the hour, and jump a little less on the half hour as the pipe opens up.
Cheers
Re:It won't matter anyway (Score:2)
I've downloaded 200MB of stuff in about 5-10 secs on 4G here, but I imagine that there's a pretty serious infrastructure hereabouts.
Re:It won't matter anyway (Score:0)
Get a better carrier/phone/reception/place with less oversubscription. or suffer your consequences.
Re:It won't matter anyway (Score:0)
> 100Kbps on 3G or 4G
I'm in downtown Seattle, and I just got 6.53 Mbps with speedtest.net at 9:45 am local time. I've traveled all of the country, and I haven't seen anywhere with 4G as slow as what you claim. We use a lot of 4G in the office beause our 640 kbps DSL line is so overloaded. Over half of the eningeers have unlimited data plans with AT&T. The latency to our servers is a little worse (70ms for 4G versus 50ms for DSL), but it is still much more pleasant to use than the fastest available wired connection we have available here in Seattle. The city government granted a monopoly to Comcast for our block, and Comcast refuses to provide service so we have no other options other than DSL. CenturyLink has no pressure to provide > 1 Mbps connectivity here because there is no competition.
Re:It won't matter anyway (Score:0)
I'm in Bellevue near Seattle, and I wish we could get 640 kbps in our office! The building we're in uses a universal SLIC. It takes a group of N incoming analog lines and multiplexes them into about 4*N outgoing analog lines. Because of that our phone lines are busy several hours each week. Also, it means we can't get DSL in the building because the SLIC is analog only. Also, the city granted a monopoly to Time-Warner on this block. They haven't installed equipment in our building yet so we can't get access unless we pay for it. They want $45k installation plus a minimum commitment of $750 per month. The installation fee can be divided up among other tenants, but so far we haven't found anyone else that will help pay for it. I've used their access in a neighboring building, and it is spectacular, but we just can't afford it.
The hack we use to get access is a 24 dB gain dish antenna on the roof pointing at an employee's roof that has a 2 Mbps CenturyLink connection about a quarter of a mile away. It has some packet loss, but it's better than the 26.4 kbps (slower than 56k because the extra analog to digital and back to analog conversion in the SLIC) connection we lived with for almost a year. It's sad just how bad Internet access is in the Seattle area.
Re:It won't matter anyway (Score:2)
Wow. I'm in a small city (43,000 inhabitants) in New Zealand, and have fibre at home. NZD99/mo, 30Mbps down, 10Mbps up, really unlimited, no "fair use clause." I could pay another NZD30/mo if I wanted 100Mbps down, 50Mbps up, and those prices are likely to come down pretty soon. The government is funding a rollout of the fibre network to most of the country's urban population.
If I wasn't in a fibre area there's a 50% chance (providing I was urban) I could get VDSL. And if not, I'd still be able to get 10Mbps ADSL2 unless I was somewhere semi-rural, at which point the speeds degrade to what you're getting in Seattle.
I've been to the USA. Your cellular networks have terrible reception -- I remember having no reception in a restaurant in downtown San Francisco -- and are far too expensive. Just as your ISPs are capping your previously unlimited fixed-line connections, ours are uncapping theirs.
Re:It won't matter anyway (Score:2)
That's not what we need in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
In the US, we need cheaper wireless, not faster. I've been passing thru some of Verizon's XLTE areas lately where my speeds have topped out at 69/19Mbps. That's pretty darn fast but completely useless for the vast majority of their customers with their piddly 1-10 gig caps.
Re:That's not what we need in the US (Score:2)
Look at T-Mobile, Sprint, various MVNOs. If you want one of the Big Two you pay Big Prices.
Re:That's not what we need in the US (Score:2)
Look at their fine print. They all reduce your speed (or cut data completely) after x.x gigs of data. And they throttle certain types of traffic regardless of your usage.
Re:That's not what we need in the US (Score:2)
If you want uncapped prices, you pay an uncapped bill.
Re:That's not what we need in the US (Score:2)
Show me one current uncapped option that doesn't have fine print limiting the amount of data you can use or how you use it. Meaning a contract that allows me to tether to my laptop and move hundreds of gigs of data. I have that now but those data plans are no longer available and have been unavailable for 4+ years.
You've just told me to pay for an option that no longer exists.
YAAAAWN (Score:1)
Wake me up when we have unlimited cell phone data instead.
Re: YAAAAWN (Score:2)
Re: YAAAAWN (Score:0)
As a T-Mobile customer, wake me up when T-Mobile gets reasonable coverage. In an average month, I get about 30 minutes during which my phone is on 4G LTE.
Re:YAAAAWN (Score:2)
This article is about EU and South Korea, where we already have unlimited 4G available on multiple networks.
Sounds like big guvment (Score:2)
Oh good! (Score:2)
That means we can consume our ridiculously small bandwidth quotas within 30 seconds, rather than than the 2 hours it takes now.
5G? (Score:2)
but one South Korean researcher predicts it could be over a thousand times faster than current 4G networks.
Maybe in every other country in the world, but here in the US the companies will buy enough politicians that they can have 5G legally defined as somewhere between 3G and where 4G is supposed to be.
Re:5G? (Score:2)
If we but allow the several remaining cell phone companies to merge, the efficiency of scale will enable them to bring us infinite, affordable bandwidth. It is only our law against monopolies that prevents OUCH (One Ultra Cell Honcho) from delivering everthing we deserve.
Data Limits (Score:2)
Cool, so I can blow through my 2GB in a matter of seconds!