
5G, the Long Road Ahead - techenthusiast
http://cellularinsights.com/5g/
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walrus01
One of the major things not really addressed in the article is backhaul for
each 4.5G/5G cell site or small cell site. More air spectrum and better radio
modulation/MIMO for the cell-to-handset is very important, but that's only a
piece of the puzzle...

There's still a lot of locations out there without fiber, or that are
currently fed by a 250-400Mbps capacity PTP microwave link. Cellular carriers
are aggressively spending money to bring dark fiber to tower sites, of course,
with the minimum connectivity for a new site being a single 10GbE circuit.
This is one of the things driving the growth of outside-plant fiber
construction and dedicated-purpose dark fiber network operators (example:
Zayo's ongoing new builds spending $$$$$ in major metro areas in Texas).

The other part of the puzzle is much higher capacity new PTP microwave to feed
sites, some of which will be logically downstream of newly fiber-fed sites.
These new links will be at 1 Gbps to 5Gbps+ capacity.

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milan03
Walrus01, you brought a very interesting topic. In NYC market for instance,
operators provision their cell sites between 100 and 400Mbps. Verizon for
instance has 45MHz of aggregate downlink radio capacity, which in today's 2x2
MIMO configuration means 337.5Mbps potential throughput per sector, times
three sectors per site and you're at 1Gbps requirement. Yet, their sites are
mostly provisioned at 150 or 200Mbps PER SITE, and then shared between three
sectors. Most of their sites have 1Gbps capable cards too...

It's been an opex saving trend for all operators which will allows them to
"control" incremental capacity gain at their discretion, without a truck roll.

I definitely plan on addressing that in the future posts, it's an annoying
issue from the consumer perspective, that's for sure.

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vardump
As much as I like progress, one of the big hurdles 5G has is that 4G is mostly
good enough.

The improvement from 3G to 4G was significant, but even then most people
didn't care much. You got sub 20ms latency (my non-scientific tests show
14-19ms), much less jitter than 3G and sufficient bandwidth for most
applications.

Why would people upgrade to 5G if they don't get any perceptible performance
improvement?

4G is already good enough you can simply run remote desktop over it and get
near local performance.

When the remote end is connected with an 1 Gbps+ link, who cares how much
packet data bandwidth you got?

