Jeff Richardson, iPhone J.D.:
Yesterday, T-Mobile and Sprint announced that they will merge. If the government approves, then we will have only three major wireless companies in the United States. In the communications that I have seen from the two companies, including a joint website that went live yesterday, one of the main themes was that this merger would promote 5G, the next generation of wireless technology. This makes me wonder, what will 5G bring us, and when can we start to use it on the iPhone?
And:
The CTIA, a trade organization for the wireless industry, says that 5G can be 100 times faster than 4G, and a chart on its website predicts a transition from 100 Mbps download speeds to 10 Gbps. 5G will also feature low latency that can make the internet five times more responsive when you initiate each request.
All very interesting, but the most interesting nugget in the piece?
To date, wireless cell technology has been based on huge towers with antennas 125 feet in the air which would provide service for several miles. But it turns out that 5G will be different. 5G is much faster, but the signal doesn’t go nearly as far. So instead of a smaller number of tall towers, 5G will work with a large number of microcells placed around 500 feet apart, often on streetlights or utility poles.
But it won’t just be that microcell on a utility pole. As reported by Allan Homes earlier this year in the New York Times, “[m]uch of the equipment will be on streetlights or utility poles,” but it will often be “accompanied by containers the size of refrigerators on the ground.”
That’s a pretty significant infrastructure requirement. Which, to me, means we’ll only see 5G in the most urban settings.
The whole article is fascinating, suggests we’ll first see 5G iPhone/iPad support in 2020.
If 5G signals really have that shorter of a range. Its likely a no-go. Especially if each one requires a fridge sized container.
And even in urban areas it’ll be tough, as getting sufficient towers for 3G and 4G has been tough in cities with very NIMBY based zoning and building rules (hello, San Francisco!)
Great. Another technology that will leave us rural folks behind.
I cringe at what a densely deployed 5G array would do to our health in urban areas like NYC.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cellphone-5g-health-20160808-snap-story.html
I’m sincerely going to miss wireline when it’s gone.
Makes me wonder what the backhaul channel is, too.
10gbit doesn’t help much if the backhaul can’t handle a fraction of that, and obviously people can’t colo at every 500ft cell…
Nothing.
Microwave-band EM continues to be as harmless as it ever has been, in power levels low enough to not cause physical heating damage.
I guess time will tell. Just don’t want to be the test case.
Wow. Refrigerator sized ground containers for microcells placed every 500 feet. Isn’t that basically just WiFi with much bigger towers/infrastructure?
That implementation sounds dead on arrival. People honestly could care less about speeds FASTER than LTE. LTE is already faster than our home WiFi. What people really want is more bandwidth. Either eliminate data caps, or add substantially more bandwidth for the same price.
I can almost guarantee if you surveyed wireless customers, bandwidth would be much higher on the list than 10gbps speeds that will obliterate your data cap/throttle threshold in less than 1 minute.
Sounds to me like telecoms are chasing after the wrong rabbit.
I would settle for 3G in terminal A at George Bush Intercontinental. 😉
Regarding the “refrigerator” closets – ‘NIMBY’ opposition to those “unsightly” thing dotting sidewalks and yards was the exact thing that played a big part in delaying and in some cases entirely blocking the rollout of AT&T’s meager attempt at fiber-to-the-node Internet service, U-Verse, many years ago. They still only have penetration of speeds over ~12Mbps in the most urban areas. People fight the installation of the boxes.
Now, if there was a proper fiber network in place you probably wouldn’t need those things, or nearly as many of them, but of course this is US telecoms we’re talking about so… not holding my breath.
There already HAVE been test cases. This isn’t harmful radiation. You are being bombarded with waves of all kinds of frequencies already, many of them from non-man-made sources. AM, FM, TV, Wi-Fi. These things haven’t caused people to turn into zombies or break out in tumors all over.
This is one of those things where when you don’t know enough about the subject area to understand the research, you may as well not form an opinion, especially an alarmist one. If it bothers you so much, talk to a real scientist about it and learn about what radio waves are.
Yeah, it sounds highly suspicious, since right now “100 times” what LTE usually delivers would be north of 5Gbps. WAT. I can’t even get 1Gbps Internet service wired at my house, so where the hell is the fiber — and capacity for peering to the backbones — for people to be pulling down 5Gbps from multiple phones on the same cell at any random place in town? By 2020? Maybe by 2200, more like.
Yeah, that’s really weird. I mean, maybe it’s getting lost in “translation” to the “layman’s” terms because if the link from the cell is faster, maybe it can serve more people at once and thus make the telcos less stingy with data? All I know is that I agree, people would definitely prefer 10-20x the data at the same price, over data being somewhat faster, in super dense urban areas.
The only time I get mad at my phone is when it’s getting sub-3G speeds. LTE is still great — when it’s available.
I can do my own research. Your OPINION has been noted.
yeah. when they can get it to the point of a small box, perhaps buried in the ground, things will be better. if they can add solar charging to that might really take off, especially if it could also charge the street lights
it’s probably no worse than all the shit we are exposed to already, including the sun
Clearly your research consists of reading alarmist articles on the Internet. That’s not research. I meant actually doing science. With experiments, and disprovable hypotheses.