
5G Network end-to-end demonstration by Ericsson - MaurizioP
https://www.ericsson.com/news/2079365
======
callesgg
These days with 4G i do find that it is not the technology that is the
bottleneck. It is the carierers trying to hold on to their business model.

I would prefer if we aimed our research on increasing coverage.

~~~
rhino369
The technology is still a bottleneck, but the business model just isn't
tightly fitted to the limitations of the bottle neck.

4G cannot viably stream 1080p netflix into the number of homes in America that
use it at any given time (unless you use an unrealistic number of cell sites).

Some sort of rationing has to occur otherwise cells would be overrun.

Carriers should bring back free nights and weekends.

~~~
zanny
Free nights and weekends is exactly anti-net-neutrality.

I have always been an advocate for more, open, spectrum, and simple laws to
outlaw intentional interference. We are not operating dumb radios - we can
dynamically change or allocate spectrum channels to load balance congestion
and avoid making it worse.

To legally cordon off everyone into separate silos is a hatchet solution to a
nuanced problem with much better solutions if you could just incentivize good
behavior and punish bad in commons.

I do not believe for a second we cannot technologically transfer h265 video
via radio to every individual in even the highest population densities if we
had full access to building infrastructure around all of the spectrum of light
we use for communications.

~~~
rhino369
I can't think of a reason why free nights and weekends would be anti-net
neutrality.

~~~
untog
"Net neutrality" is a problematic term because it seems to mean different
things to different people depending on their perspective/motive. For
instance, I've seen arguments that T-Mobile not charging for SD video streams
is net neutral because any company is allowed to get into the program.

In its strictest (and IMO, most useful) sense, "net neutrality" is the concept
that data is data is data. It doesn't matter whether it's carrying video or
whether it's carrying text, whether that comes from Google or whether it comes
from the server in your basement, or whether it's being transferred at 11am or
at 11pm.

IMO that definition is the most useful because it's the clearest - anything
else ends up getting into some debate about why _this_ applies and _that_
doesn't. I'd very much like to keep my neutral internet connection - the
creeping preferentialism on my cellphone connection is not welcome.

------
bogomipz
Spectra efficiency and even faster data rates are nice but I wonder are
carriers going going to upgrade backhaul link and IP core network to allow
customers to take full advantage of 5G air interface? This a huge capex
spending. I wonder if customers willing to pay even more exorbitant prices for
5G plans for their phone?

With those speeds 5G could be an alternative/replacement for cable/DSL for
home internet access. I'm not sure the carriers would be on board with that
tough as its its easier to oversubscribe mobile devices than home internet.

~~~
endless1234
>With those speeds 5G could be an alternative/replacement for cable/DSL for
home internet access.

Though 3/4G already is, it's what many people use instead of wired internet
here (Finland) and it's often marketed as such. I rarely get under 25mbps in
our clubroom that only has 4G internet access.

~~~
bogomipz
Wow so carriers have really built out their networks in Finland it sounds
like. I think this is probably true of all the Nordics no? There are no caps
on your 4G? I am curious are you using a mobile router? My experience with
these has been that there were data caps attached to them and the plan, as
opposed to a 4G unlimited plan on my phone.

~~~
mstade
I can't speak for Finland, but in Sweden I don't think there are any plans
with unlimited data anymore, that weren't grandfathered. There used to be when
3G was the norm, but now that 4G is available pretty much everywhere you'll be
capped most likely. My plan for instance is capped at 100gb I believe, for
which I pay about 500-600 SEK / month. (This includes all domestic voice and
texts too.)

~~~
ptaipale
In Finland 4G data contracts tend to be limitless. I pay 30 € per month for a
package of 2 SIM cards which both have unlimited 4G data (no voice or SMS
services packed in). The other one for a pad, the other one is my home's fixed
network with appliances and WLAN connected.

I'm not entirely happy with current operator, though; I used to get 15 Mbit/s
downlink but now it's often 3 Mbit/s at home, which is not enough. I might
switch operator.

(At work I get 25 Mbit/s with the pad so the limit is clearly in poor coverage
of operator DNA in my residential area, at work it is OK.)

------
muterad_murilax
> took place in Sweden [...] at Ericsson’s laboratory at Krista.

Should probably be Kista:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kista](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kista)

------
rdtsc
Joe Armstrong had a fun talk about the general setup how it works in 2014:

[https://youtu.be/rQIE22e0cW8?t=603](https://youtu.be/rQIE22e0cW8?t=603)

Then it was still in the labs as a prototype. He talks about some of the
limitation, the history (3G, 4G, 5G) and how it all set up. It is mostly in
the context of building reactive systems and this was just the intro bit.

Also fun fact: since Ericsson controls more than half of the market in
smartphone <-> internet gateways and most of those run Erlang. If Erlang stops
working, no more cat videos for anyone on their phones.

------
neom
I hope that the network vendors and the IoT vendors sit down and think about
how the devices and the network can work to mitigate things like large-scale
IoT DDoS etc. Even if this mean new protocoling or whatever. I'm not sure I'm
thinking about this exactly correctly, but I feel there is something in there?

~~~
yaantc
Cellular IoT doesn't really have the problem seen with Mirai & co DDoS
attacks. A cellular device is attached to a cellular network first, and for
many application are not even on the Internet.

In 3GPP cellular IoT (2G/GPRS, 3G/UMTS to HSPA, 4G/LTE) it is very common for
devices to be on what's called a private APN. It's a private IP network, and
the cellular operator provides a VPN access to this private network to let the
managing company access the devices from their application servers. Only the
application servers can access the devices, which are not on the Internet. In
practice this removes the risk of remote attacks on the devices (if you either
hacked the telco or service operators and can get to the devices, you already
could get to more interesting stuff like aggregated data). This has been
available since GPRS and will also apply to 5G --- no difference at this
level.

Of course the flip side of this model is that the end customer must go through
the device associated service provider to get to the device. It may not be
acceptable to all, but when it is using a private APN is really a very
effective way to kill remote attacks on cellular IoT devices.

Even for devices not using a private APN but having Internet access, the
operator is still in between and could do ad-hoc filtering if called for.
Another factor is that tier 1 telco operator tend to require support for FOTA
(Firmware update Over The Air), so cellular IoT devices can be remotely
upgraded.

With all this cellular IoT is in a much better situation for security than
LAN-based IoT. It's also more expansive.

~~~
neom
That was my point, in a massive IoT deployment devices are maybe safer when
they stay off LAN.

------
nathcd
I'm really interested in the potential for p2p networking in 5G. But I've been
disappointed that LTE Direct[1] hasn't really become a normal thing since a
couple years ago when Qualcomm announced it. A cursory googling of 5G shows
that some amount of 5G research has focused around device-to-device, mostly
for IoT purposes[2][3]. Link [3] in particular talks about the challenge of
incentivizes:

> Besides the technical challenges, there is the very practical problem of
> incentivizing users to lend their devices to serve as relays for the traffic
> of others, especially since these connections will consume bandwidth,
> storage, and battery power on the relay. Again, the appropriate class of
> solutions depends upon the D2D design.

If this D2D does become a central part of 5G, I'm really curious about whether
users will be able to use 5G not (only) with a carrier's towers, but as a part
of a mesh network (and as a Bluetooth- or wifi-like tool for local
networking). It could be a great way to chip away at the power of carriers and
ISPs (which might be one reason LTE Direct is nowhere to be seen, and why D2D
5G capabilities could be gimped in end-user devices).

I'm a complete layman in this area, so I'm curious to hear others' thoughts.

[1] [https://www.qualcomm.com/invention/research/projects/lte-
dir...](https://www.qualcomm.com/invention/research/projects/lte-direct)

[2] [https://www.ericsson.com/research-blog/5g/device-device-
comm...](https://www.ericsson.com/research-blog/5g/device-device-
communications/)

[3] [http://www.comsoc.org/ctn/device-device-
communication-5g-cel...](http://www.comsoc.org/ctn/device-device-
communication-5g-cellular-networks-challenges-solutions-and-future-directions)

------
rodionos
As an end-user, I'm ok with current 4G/LTE link speeds. What would be great is
they could minimize TTFB on mobile devices. It takes a second or two for the
first bits of content to appear in the browser/mail, especially after the
phone has been in sleep mode.

~~~
kalleboo
The only reason the speeds seem fine is because due to data caps people are
too afraid to actually use the data. With more capacity in the networks, data
caps can rise, and usage will go up. I don't want to have to mess around with
connecting to coffee shop WiFi networks all the time. Every computer should
have a wireless chipset that simply uses the WWAN when a WLAN is not
available, without you worrying about that OS update downloading in the
background.

~~~
intrasight
The rising capacity will be offset by rising average page size. What the
network giveth, the browser taketh away.

~~~
goda90
Its just like building highways to alleviate traffic.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Bandwidth caps exist to destroy demand, and they do the job well (no different
then London's congestion charge).

------
nickbail3y
This is great. If only we could get true 4G in the US...

~~~
kiwijamo
When I went to the US two years ago I got LTE in the Baltimire, Washington DC
and Los Angeles areas so you guys do have true 4G. The issue is more the
amount of LTE coverage avaliable which isn't that great outside of the main
cities (or at least it wasn't at the time I visited).

------
fudged71
Does anyone else restrict their phones to 3G because 4G (real 4G) eats through
your data cap too fast?

If I accidentally load a large video/gif/website, It's easier to back out then
let it eat my data.

I'm also noticing that with similar usage, my same apps are eating much more
data than they used to a couple years ago. Twitter, Facebook, Maps. I could
live on 500MB/mo, now 2GB/mo is not enough.

~~~
petra
4G saves your battery. you could limit the speed through an app:

[http://www.phonearena.com/news/Bandwidth-Ruler-for-
Android-l...](http://www.phonearena.com/news/Bandwidth-Ruler-for-Android-lets-
you-manage-your-internet-and-tethering-connections-with-custom-boosting-and-
throttling_id73558)

------
djrogers
> The 5G New Radio (NR) used 800MHz bandwidth, running on 15GHz

Wow, 15Ghz signals are going to really suck for building penetration...

~~~
yaantc
Yes. The issue is mitigated by massive beam-forming. Thanks to the high
frequency antennas are small and it's possible to use many of them to steer a
narrow beam toward the device. The antenna gain compensates for the pretty
tough link budget at those high frequencies.

For the number of antennas, I've seen anything from 64 to 1024 (amazing...).
Even then millimeter waves are only for short distances (< ~300m).

Of course, a very narrow beam makes life very interesting with mobile devices
;) But one of the first application of mmWaves should be last mile access,
where this is not an issue. With this, fiber is required close to the home but
the most costly last hundred meters can use wireless. This should reduce cost
while still supporting very high throughput. TBC.

------
CodeSheikh
Where does LTE sit between 4G and 5G? Was it the true 5G? 4.5G?

~~~
kiwijamo
It's 4G.

------
ryanmarsh
15GHz? Jesus.

~~~
sorenjan
And 800 MHz bandwidth. I wonder what kind of bandwidth carriers will use in
real life.

------
mtgx
No end-to-end encryption though. Oh well, maybe for 6G?

~~~
kristoffer
Even 4G (LTE) is typically end to end encrypted. Unsure what you are trying to
say or if you're just trolling.

~~~
pjc50
Isn't it just mobile station to base station encryption, not true E2E
encryption of calls (which would never be allowed)?

~~~
kristoffer
No the core network uses IPSec. Of course there is support for "lawful
interception" though.

~~~
kristoffer
Or rather has support for IPSec, not all operators chose to deploy it
properly.

