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.
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What does LTE stand for anyway? Lighter Than Earth ? Less Than Europe ? Limited Transfer Environment ?
It stands for 'Long Term Evolution.' Seriously.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Huh? 10% faster is 1000 times faster? How do those mathematics work?
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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. ;-)
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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.
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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]
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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.
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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 t
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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.
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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".
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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...is consistently faster than our wired home connections.
My VDSL connection (Belgacom) is slower than my 4G-LTE connection (Belgacom).
Nope, nut funny, really.
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My upload speed already is faster for LTE than for my cable modem (Oregon, USA). Download is about 1/2.
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> 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 fo
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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.
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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
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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
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I see what you did th--SPLAT!--
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 t
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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.
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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
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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.
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Look at T-Mobile, Sprint, various MVNOs. If you want one of the Big Two you pay Big Prices.
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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.
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If you want uncapped prices, you pay an uncapped bill.
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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)
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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.
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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!