
Stockholm first city to get mobile 5G network in 2018 - imartin2k
http://www.thelocal.se/20160123/stockholm-first-to-get-mobile-5g-network-in-2018
======
johansch
Even the PR people from Telia and Ericsson (who are partnering to do this
again, just like how they launched "the world's first 4G network in Stockholm
in 2009") say (when interviewed by Swedish media) that this will be similar to
the 4G preview/test. So what we can expect to see is city-wide coverage and a
few thousand heavily subsidised end-user 5g terminals (probably USB 3.0 modems
at first - at the 4G preview in 2009 they came from Huawei.) Making
Stockholm/Tallinn-wide coverage a reality with that few users isn't super
costly.

Ericsson are happy because they get a realistic field test of usage, handover
between base stations etc. They also get a credible proof of concept for
further sales.

Telia are happy because they get to project the apparance that they are ahead
of the curve to their customer base.

Telia and Ericsson have had this symbiosis thing going on for 100+ years now,
btw. It seems to be working quite well for them both.

------
reustle
I wonder if, like 4G, it actually won't be 5G [1]

[1] 2010 [http://gizmodo.com/5680755/the-dirty-secret-of-
todays-4g-its...](http://gizmodo.com/5680755/the-dirty-secret-of-
todays-4g-its-not-4g)

~~~
jakub_g
Anecdata: long long time ago (~2005), living in central Europe, I used to use
a direct-connect p2p client where you could connect to the "hubs", see the
members and see the actual file lists of those members. I quickly learnt that
Swedish hubs and people with [Telia] prefix in their nick were the best bets -
getting stuff from them was like downloading on a LAN.

I believe those guys are able to deliver it.

~~~
johansch
Hehe. And we (Swedes) felt the opposite when getting connected to people from
the rest of Europe. :)

(I'm only slightly confused that you learned to recognize the Telia prefix
rather than the B2/BBB/Bredbandsbolaget prefix. Telia was predominantly ADSL
with like 15/1 and B2 was Ethernet with either 100/10 or 10/10.)

~~~
Strom
From my experience, Telia was always known as quality, and BBB as the lowest
tier crap. The routing quality difference was huge. Although yes, the Telia
connections were business/edu class.

~~~
johansch
Strange.

BBB actually (sorry, I simplied above) had two types of customers, ADSL and
Fiber/Ethernet. Maybe the routing to eastern Europe was different.

Hmm, actually: I do know that Telia Networks invested quite a lot in eastern
Europe during the past two decades. Perhaps what you were seeing was a result
of that.

------
zanny
I still want to see the potential of 4G realized. In most places its illogical
to want to run fiber to the home to everyones house when you could just setup
cell towers at the 20-40mb rates 4G usually gets and provide everyone with
Internet that way.

For most people, their phone really should be their router and gateway.
Getting new-classification broadband to everyone would be so incredibly cheap
if all we had to do was give everyone 4G modems and let them use unlimited
40mb/s data over them, but its blatantly apparent the spectrum mafia is
holding technology back - we need vastly more spectrum liberated for public
consumption, especially that which is corporate controlled today, so that we
can better provide the world with wireless connectivity. Right now the
allocated spectrum is like a tap barely open where if regulation would let us
we could get so much more bandwidth out of if archaic ideas about the private
ownership of mathematical patterns would go away.

~~~
nitrogen
What kind of latency would people get on 4G vs. fiber? People don't know what
to call it, but they _do_ care about lag in voice/video calls and games.

~~~
zanny
Having used 4g for calls all the time, that has never been a problem.
Conferencing is fairly latency tolerant.

Games are always the exception, but I'm not sure how many would truly value
low latency in games over the aggregate savings of millions not having to
supply and support wired uplinks in the last mile.

But I'm not really talking about places you already get 20+ mbps by wire - I'm
talking about places like my grandmothers town in rural PA where 4G coverage
and speed can be up to 10x faster than the low rate dsl / cable options
available to her ranging from 1.5 to 10 mbit. Whenever I visit sprint 4g is
50mb/s and her best landline option is 10mbit residential cable from the
township.

~~~
nitrogen
_Conferencing is fairly latency tolerant._

It's easy to say this until you've experienced six remote people all trying to
say something and, because of the latency, nobody knows who actually started
first :). Also when you haven't tried something like Mumble.

[http://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page](http://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page)

~~~
zanny
I run my own mumble server and regularly conference with people from Europe
(and my server and I are in the US). In my experience, 4G doesn't have the
insane latency variance 3G does - its usually only around 200-300ms. If you
are having half second or more delay it gets really hard to hold a
conversation, but there is also the factor that people adapt fairly alright to
asynchronous verbal communication - people with good manners get in the habit
of waiting for responses. People on my server usually get 150-200ms just from
the hop across the bay.

------
mafribe
As far as I understand, 5G will require IPv6 support. That will drive IPv6
adoption.

~~~
yeukhon
Even so, it doesn't mean web servers have to adopt IPv6 IPs. They can stay
with IPv4 addresses as they do now.

~~~
mafribe
Sure, but as more and more phones go 5G, they may see their traffic drop.

------
towb
So, what is 5G anyway?

~~~
nabla9
5G requirements:

\- 1-10Gbps connections to end points in the field (i.e. not theoretical
maximum)

\- 1 millisecond end-to-end round trip delay (latency)

\- 1000x bandwidth per unit area

\- 10-100x number of connected devices

\- (Perception of) 99.999% availability

\- (Perception of) 100% coverage

\- 90% reduction in network energy usage

\- Up to ten year battery life for low power, machine-type devices

[http://networks.nokia.com/news-events/insight-
newsletter/art...](http://networks.nokia.com/news-events/insight-
newsletter/articles/5g-is-moving-beyond-the-hype)

Many new industries like automation outside factories (self driving cars,
drones, smart grids, etc.) want more reliability, flexible adaption, lower
latency and more coverage, everyone wants more bandwidth.

~~~
swalsh
Do you know how they're accomplishing higher bandwidth? Is it adding more
frequencies (such as bands used by the navy when there's no ships around?) or
is it more complex than that?

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
I am not sure but the way from UMTS to LTE was purely technical. In UMTS the
sender just spams out the signal for all receivers and you need to retransmit
more because the error correction keeps kicking in. So the more devices in a
cell the higher the latency, variance and lower the bandwidths.

With LTE each device is measured by the tower about how well it can receive
data and the tower time slices specifically for this device. So when the tower
sends there, it does not send to any other device.

(That's my understanding of the situation)

