
What 5G Will Mean for You - timmilton
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/technology/what-5g-will-mean-for-you.html
======
jasonkester
Personally, I'm just hoping that 3G will eventually make it to England. That
seems more realistic, though I don't doubt that the Bay Area will be happily
basking in this 5G niceness by the time it happens.

I just got back from 3 months in Southeast Asia, and it's just baffling to me
how I could get fast data to my phone in virtually unlimited quantities, out
in the sticks of rural Cambodia, for five dollars. But coming back to England,
my town of 25,000 people has neither working DSL nor cellular data.

I keep a 3G router in the desk drawer to battle the bi-weekly half-day outages
that BT routinely delivers, but that also will happily drop down to 300 baud
if anybody else in town decides to use the internet at the same time.

It is certainly solvable. But the monopoly internet supplier doesn't seem to
have it as a priority to supply internet.

~~~
sgt101
Curious - which town are you in? I have 4g and 200mbs-1 fttp and I live in a
field in the middle of suffolk.

~~~
jasonkester
The North. Kendal, specifically.

One day Virgin will route a cable our way, and life will be good. Until then
we're stuck with BT and their 200 year old copper (and a few cell towers
without enough power to drill through the stone buildings in town, let alone
the little hills around it).

~~~
buro9
Maybe Kendal should come together and investigate building your own
[http://b4rn.org.uk/](http://b4rn.org.uk/)

Actually you're right on the edge of the coverage area, why not contact them
and see what it would take to extend it.

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condescendence
4G definitions are still largely being fought over, and you're gonna try and
jam "5G" down my throat?

The entire article is complete speculation, and the sad part is that they
don't even talk about the cooler ideas they're coming up with for the
specification.

For anyone wondering about 5G I think the coolest thing they've discussed so
far is breaking down the different use cases (people in home, people traveling
on trains, vs working in an office building) because these put completely
different types of strain on a network. They're trying to come up with sub
specifications to encompass more types of network use cases rather than
thinking "xG is for cellular phones" it'll be more like 5Gx is
spectrum/protocol for home internet, 5Gy is the spectrum/protocol the phone
uses. Although from a marketing prospective this will sound like "Bring 5G to
your home."

Honestly I'm surprised that didn't happen with 4G, I know there are things
like Clearwire (I think they were bought by sprint?) but it wasn't a huge move
from physical infrastructure.

For some more realistic info on what's happening:

[https://www.ngmn.org/uploads/media/NGMN_5G_White_Paper_V1_0....](https://www.ngmn.org/uploads/media/NGMN_5G_White_Paper_V1_0.pdf)

EDIT:

On a small note, this is "finalized" pdf but in reality it will change when
implementation occurs.

~~~
f00fc0d3
This is totally wishful thinking. No one in industry has a slightest idea what
5G will be. We keep throwing fancy terms like eNodeB virtualization and then
we have a reality check - LTE userplane cannot be virtualized due latency and
performance reasons (LTE PHY on x86 - yeah, right...).

Same goes to those mm waves with beamforming - no DSP (IP core) can handle it
now and even soon. You need to stick with very expensive FPGAs. Besides that
there is WiGig coming and you can offload traffic from LTE to Wifi - investing
in those mm wave small cells seems rather pointless.

Beside that you can get those multi-Gbps with new Rel13 LTE carrier
aggregation (up 32 CC).

~~~
kristoffer
It is possible to do compliant LTE phy on x86, of course it is not so energy
efficient. Also x86 + fpga SoC is coming soon and could be interesting for
that kind of purpose. Though I don't think baseband virtualisation will be
something big in the near future.

And LTE CC is not the necessarily a good way to get multi-Gbps due to radio
complexity.

~~~
f00fc0d3
I have seen such projects - real LTE PHY algorithms are much more complex than
stuff in 3GPP. You can write something 3GPP compliant in some simplified
cases, but it would be totally useless in real network.

Secondly you don't really want to use FPGA for majority DSP processing in LTE
PHY. Design cycles on FPGA are too slow and HLS techniques are still not
trusted. Beside that x86+fpga are some kind of specialized stuff - you could
just put a PCIe accelerator with some major wireless SoC.

~~~
kristoffer
Modern x86 is quite competent as DSP using AVX. I think you are exaggerating.
I have worked with LTE baseband as well, but admittedly never done an x86 LTE
PHY. pCell claims to be doing quite complex network mimo LTE stuff on x86,
still mostly vaporware though.

Regarding FPGA, of course you don't do the complete implementation in it, you
accelerate the low level stuff, FFTs, coding, etc, as are already done in all
baseband dsps.

~~~
f00fc0d3
Yep, AVX is nice, but still it is far from current DSP chips. I ported a
subset of PHY to real AVX2 CPU and AVX512 sim. It is (sometimes) comparable to
c6x (which is a crap DSP) if you take (much) higher clock into account, but
comparing to current DSP IP cores it is a joke.

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jtmarmon
> Driverless cars with extremely fast response times

Seems like relying on low network latency for critical safety features is
designing a fundamentally flawed system.

Is this really how driverless cars are being made or is the author just
pulling things from his ass

~~~
verbatim
Surely it's the latter. Driverless cars that rely on Internet access would not
be feasible, for obvious reasons.

Driverless cars will likely eventually communicate via some peer-to-peer
wireless technology, but I would assume that would use a different set of
protocols than our mobile phones do.

~~~
kristoffer
Even LTE is including Vehicle 2 Vehicle (v2v) communication and Vehicle 2
infrastructure (v2x) and so will whatever 5g becomes of course (5g will be the
continued evolution of LTE + mmwave physical layer basically)

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creshal
> What 5G Will Mean for You

Absolutely nothing for the next 20 years, seeing how my carrier just started
deploying LTE (50 MBit, that is, not 300 MBit) at eye-watering costs ($20 a
month for 5 gigabytes!).

~~~
joelrunyon
Switch to T-Mobile. Unlimited data + LTE.

~~~
navait
As a happy T-mobile customer, I do understand that limited coverage makes it
unfeasible for many. For example, I live in rural New England and cannot
reliably get signal (even for SMS) in certain towns nearby. I've never gotten
signal in Vermont.

~~~
joelrunyon
In major cities - I've found it's better than AT&T was for me.

Still a problem when I end up back in Indiana from time to time, but most of
my time is in the cities or international (where they have free data + texting
included in the plan).

------
post_break
It seems like it will just mean you can hit your data cap faster.

~~~
ojii
Agreed. I've got 4G at the moment and it's plenty fast, since I can only use
it for moderate surfing/etc since I'd otherwise hit my monthly cap in a week.
If I had super fast 5G, I could accidentally burn through my cap in a day.

~~~
kalleboo
I had a prepaid Telstra SIM in Australia. I speedtested 130 MBit/s on their
LTE network. On prepaid, data costs a bit over AU$8/GB. So you can burn
through 8 dollars in a minute.

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pmontra
> With 5G, downloading feature-length movies could take less than five
> seconds.

> With 4G, downloading feature-length movies could take as long as eight
> minutes.

Am I wrong in thinking that an operator would prefer to keep their antenna
busy for only 5 seconds instead of for 8 minutes? If this is the case, if they
have enough bandwidth to the antenna, they should try to move people to 5G
quickly.

But you still need 90 minutes to watch the movie and you probably reach the
monthly cap with only a few movies, so maybe this is not the main use case for
5G. The reduced latency to 1 ms is much more interesting.

~~~
vpkaihla
What's a monthly cap?

~~~
StavrosK
It's that small hat that you're supposed to change every 30 days.

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dineshp2
The development of the 5g standard and it's deployment is something to look
forward to, but one issue that remains is data caps.

We need to remember that the vast majority of people access the Internet
primarily through mobile devices and broadband penetration is very low in
developing nations.

So even though people have access to high speed internet though mobile
networks, data caps act as a hindrance to utilize the service effectively.

The issue that needs to be addressed immediately is making unlimited data
available at low costs.

~~~
ac29
> The issue that needs to be addressed immediately is making unlimited data
> available at low costs.

Unless you can make radio spectrum unlimited (you can't), data caps and/or
throttling are going to be a reality for the foreseeable future.

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jjp
> With 5G, downloading feature-length movies could take less than five
> seconds. With 4G, downloading feature-length movies could take as long as
> eight minutes.

But will it move everybody back to download versus streaming. Be interested to
know how much of streaming start time is network time to first byte versus
authenticate/authorise/check geo-fence admin activities? So would be slightly
faster start time and may be less likely to degrade. However, streaming
operators if they switch to download are going to have to deal with sending
bytes that are never watched. Would be interesting to know how much is
downloaded from Amazon Video that is never watched.

> These machines will have to communicate almost in real time with everything
> around them to avoid cyclists and other obstacles. That can happen only if
> carriers offer one-millisecond latency, something that may become a
> lifesaver if autonomous cars become a reality.

Will only be possible if there is a guaranteed quality of service. Would be
interesting to see how your EULA/T&C of mobile service are written/rewritten
to cover life critical usage scenarios.

> ability to go online no matter where they are, forcing operators to extend
> their networks to practically every corner of a country.

What sort of frequencies are available to 5G and how will that propagate
compared to other options?

~~~
amazon_not
> However, streaming operators if they switch to download are going to have to
> deal with sending bytes that are never watched.

Each day that goes by will make streaming operators care less. A gigabyte
costs a fraction of a penny to transmit at current IP transit prices.

------
roymurdock
> negotiations are expected to persist until at least 2019, so 5G cellphone
> networks will not become widespread in the United States or elsewhere until
> well into the next decade.

Worth noting that Nokia and NTT DoCoMo will be making efforts to get an
outdoor 5G network in place in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

3/2/15: _The companies said they have achieved super-fast data transmission
speeds of higher than 2 gigabits per second in a joint indoor trial using
Nokia Networks ' radio technology operating in the 70 gigahertz spectrum
band._ [1]

Nokia demonstrated 5G on their commercially available Airscale base station at
MWC this year. [2]

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-telecoms-mwc-ntt-docomo-
id...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-telecoms-mwc-ntt-docomo-
idUSKBN0LY0FD20150302)

[2] [http://networks.nokia.com/news-events/press-room/press-
relea...](http://networks.nokia.com/news-events/press-room/press-
releases/nokia-is-first-to-run-5g-on-a-commercially-available-base-station-
mwc16)

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kbart
It won't matter much because there's not much you could do with 5G that you
can't do with 3/4G. Internet connection speed is rarely a bottleneck for
casual usage now (browsing, watching steaming videos, chatting etc.) For IoT
it won't matter too, because for most telemetry/control means even <3G was ok
and WiFi/Bluetooth/ZigBee is still preferable solution as all these xG modems
cost way too much. To sum up, unless we start steaming virtual reality, I
really don't see many benefits of 5G for few/several years to come.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
That is very wrong. There is for instance a lot you can do with 4G that was
not possible with 3G. With 3G the more devices the worst the throughput for
all. LTE time slices and runs qos for all devices so it does not degrade with
increasing device count. However there is a general linit in the the cell
which is hard to raise making it uninteresting as a replacement for fiber.
Future standards want to remedy this.

~~~
kbart
I agree that there a lot of technological advances and infrastructure will be
much more efficient and robust, but I assume this article was what 5G means
for _me_ , not my carrier. Currently (good) carriers solve congestion problem
by installing more and smaller cells which is costly solution and that's why
their drive to 5G is understandable.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> but I assume this article was what 5G means for me

Why would that not be for "you"? When LTE rolled out in my country my usage
pattern shifted. I paid up for higher/unlimited data allowance and can truly
work remotely now unhindered. That includes data and latency critical tasks.

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NoGravitas
You'll be able to burn through your monthly data cap in seconds rather than
the hours that it takes with LTE. Progress!

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mchahn
Is 5G becoming a spec by some standards body or will it be the same marketing-
only type of term 4G was?

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mkrfox
I'm quite happy with existing speeds. The problem is data caps.

