It needs to work backwards, much like Video Codec and ask what do the stakeholders really want or need?
We are closing in to rolling out the last / final phase of 5G. And yet none of the Massive MIMO on FDD is happening. We are still stuck on 32T32R, hardly that impressive considering we have that in LTE already. Not to mention the insane complexity increase from 4G to 5G. And judging from the previews of 6G that seems to be event worst.
If you ask an average user, they will tell you they don't feel much different between 4G and 5G. Yes there are capacity increase and other things. But at this stage I don't think the benefits outweigh the cost of switching. That is both from MNOs and End user perspective.
I've seen an interesting corollary: 4G on an airplane at the gate is much faster than the 5G microcells inside the terminal.
If I'm downloading podcasts for a flight, I do it on WiFi beforehand or on 4G on the plane. 5G in the terminal is really useful at getting you some service, but it's slow.
Probably a side effect of not enough backhaul speed.
4G used clever ideas to get much better practical spectrum efficiency than people thought was possible... At the cost of very expensive infrastructure. The biggest selling point to carriers was standalone 5G networks that were cheaper to build but paradoxically carriers are prone to frame 5G as a feature customers pay more for.
The area where wireless networks fall short is coverage. Obviously many homes and businesses are difficult to cover with wireless technology. Also many "IoT" and public service situations need wide coverage, and a network that works in 92% of places is "close but not cigar." There are few obvious answers rather than "lots of fiber and very cheap small cells" and "satellite technology" but it's what it takes to address wireless use cases that currently aren't addressed.
e.g. Notably several major carriers in India skipped 3G entirely and went to 4G directly because it was cheaper per subscriber. Which implies less expensive equipment per unit performance?
Most of what passes for 5G in the US is the same old but full duplex with wider channels.
Calling that 5G obscures the fact that millimeter wave 5G standalone is a totally different beast, and a huge network engineering challenge.
It may seem bureaucratic to regulate what people can call 5G, but US consumers get ripped off thinking they're on an advanced network when in fact you could call it the long-term evolution (see what I did there?) of the existing network.
In Germany I notice a massive difference in 4G and 5G. If I see 4G on my phone and know I can put it away again if it's not some kind of an emergency because it's basically unusable. I am not sure what is going on here, probably the telcos that are limiting the bandwidth.
There’s always a gradual refarming of the spectrum into the next G. Usually the most penetrating frequencies (ie lowest) are kept on the lower G to maximize legacy support.
For a while I had my phone stick to 3G, which doesn’t support emergency alerts, because my jurisdiction kept sending them out for joint custody disputes at 3AM 1000km away. It was fine But the 3G became unbearable and they tightened up the alert criteria.
The difference between 4G and (non-SA) 5G is fairly small compared to earlier generations. They use the same core network, and it’s actually quite possible to be connected to 4G and still see the 5G logo.
These tricks are less common in Germany though, as far as I’ve seen, so seeing 5G can serve as a weak proxy for “the carrier has at least touched this base station in the last few years”, which increases the chance they’ve upgraded its spectrum or backhaul a little bit.
Really depends on the concrete situation, though. Having a small 4G cell with 20 MHz of spectrum to yourself beats an overloaded large 5 MHz rural 5G site any day.
I’d you have a 5G phone and plan but see 4G, that usually means you are at the very edge of coverage. Thats not the experience 4G was or still is if you are in a well covered area (which would have 5G available as well)
My pessimistic take is it’s being optimized for the “numbers” users benchmark with. The 5G repeater towers that display on your phone as full-bars but the tower itself is constrained, to juicing the speedtests. Apple even changed how the RSSI translates to the bars. There are engineers doing great work, and the marketing teams muddle the waters (like ATT’s “5Ge”).
3G has been shut down in several countries to free up frequencies. 2G was also shut down in several countries, it seems to be still up in most european countries with shut downs being scheduled in the next few years up to 2030.
'best' is relative here; lower bands travel further, which is great for maximizing coverage footprint, but not great for high-density. Each node can only handle so much traffic, and you can pack them in more densely with short-range spectrum. mmWave really is the best frequency for very high density, high capacity networks, but the bottleneck is you have to deploy all the extra nodes to get the coverage.
I’m not in the industry, so I can’t speak intelligently on this, but as a user, literally the only change I’ve actually noticed in my day-to-day is that when they removed 3G, I lost a shitload of connectivity. I live probably half a mile from the capital building in a greater metro region of over a million people and I still get shit connection at home on TMo. Maybe physics is the problem, but why waste time making things insanely fast in a lab setting? Work on making it fucking usable in the real world, like in a neighborhood with trees.
I do not give a shit if I can download at 500mbps while resting my phone on a wireless router. I need to be able to USE it.
More likely, data usage has increased greatly in your area since 3G was still available and your carriers spectrum or backhaul hasn’t caught up. 4G/5G make things more efficient but ultimately can’t fight physics.
Ive never heard a single person say they don't see a difference between 4G and 5G, atleast in the USA.
Ive switched my entire home internet setup to 5G and haven't had an outtage in two years. Whereas it was once a week with fiber. I also can fallback with duel sims.
5G has legitimately changed my quality of (digital) life.
That’s most likely because of the massive amounts of midband spectrum that became available for 5G use in the US and less so due to any inherent advantage of 5G.
Exactly. This is far outside my professional field, but lately I've found that one of the better ways to read the tea leaves of the next decade is to look at the boring 3GPP/ETSI material rather than the consumer-facing "6G/7G" discussion.
The interesting part of 6G doesn't seem to be faster downloads so much as sensing. ISAC is basically about making the network capable of sensing the physical environment as well as communicating.
Some of the current work is already discussing the "six sensing modes", involving different combinations of the network and UEs transmitting and receiving signals reflected from objects, and even how users might be incentivized to let their devices participate
That feels potentially much more consequential than another speed bump. 3G/4G didn't just make phones faster; they enabled an entire ecosystem that was hard to predict beforehand. My guess is that sensing could be a similar pivot for 6G.
Also if I had a dollar for every end user residential consumer (as a person who runs ISPs) that confuses "5G" with "5 GHz wifi". Like, when your install techs have to explain to a customer why they're getting shit performance in the default 20MHz wide 2.4 GHz channel, and to reconfigure all their devices in a house to talk to a 802.11ax/802.11be 3x3 or 4x4 80 MHz channel AP in the 5.x GHz band.
Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now.
No it is not. 2G->3G->4G->5G refer to real changes in technology and system architecture, as detailed in the Wikipedia page you linked to.
3GPP releases are more fine-grained than that. E.g. rel. 99 introduced 3G/WCDMA, rel. 8 introduced 4G/LTE, etc. Other releases only add features.
In the industry Gs are used all the time to refer to the technology/architecture, then releases are used to refer to specific features, though generally noone supports all the features of a release.
Tell that to the cellular industry marketing people who decided to put "4.5G" on things. Also not everything that is marketed "5G" is equal in capability, there's a myriad of different bands in different regulatory regimes in the world, some of which go through material like brick/concrete much better than others. You'll see "5G" connections that have speed tests in an urban area that top out at 50 Mbps downstream and others where you'll have 850 Mbps.
Even within a category such as "4G" there have been significant advances in some radio capabilities since it was introduced, like MU-MIMO, vs early "4G".
There's a very large number of different things that are all being marketed as "5G" now, so it's really a drastic oversimplification to try to say that all 5G is the same thing. Do you not remember the very early days of "3G" when cellular carriers were trying to market EDGE/GPRS as if it was 3G?
Increasingly less so. 2G to 3G was a very clear cut on the radio side (TDMA to CDMA); 4G changed both the radio side (OFDMA) and the core (no more circuit switching, more Internet-standards-like).
5G is already much less clear: 5G non-SA literally depends on 4G for signaling and uses 5G-NR (which itself is still OFDMA) only for user data. 5G SA changes the core network again, but isn’t even supported in many networks worldwide.
There are huge jumps in bandwidth within a generation too. 3G started out with circuit-switched-ish 384 kbit/s and ended with 40+ Mbit/s on HSPA+. The jump from that to early LTE was much smaller in comparison.
So in a way, the model of “every once in a while, the carriers and manufacturers bundle up a bunch of optional extensions and call it (n+1)” seems to be coming for 3GPP just like it already has for e.g. 802.11.
For building penetration you need low frequencies but those low frequencies have less bandwidth available because the bands are smaller. At the same time bandwidth needs rapidly go up, making those low bands fuller. Because there's a limit to how many bits per second you can get out of a Hz of spectrum.
What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters. A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally. This could be incorporated into the standard. Then establishments could easily include a booster just like many of them offer free WiFi now.
>A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally.
They're still readily available.
But yeah think this would need a legislative push to solve. Force high rises to host multi provider relays as you say and hook it into their fiber links.
> What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters.
But that's also a physics thing. Plain same-frequency boosters hamper frequency reuse on neighbor cells, so less bandwidth for you. And if boosters run on a separate band, you'd need to do frequency planning for them just like it's done for cells now.
Wireless is finicky, we should really avoid using it everywhere wired can be used instead.
Hopefully, they’ll move to reporting versioning as an explicit value rather than tying it to a constant that the general population might not know about. (I.e. 6g = 58.86; 7g = 68.67).
I think we should use hex for brevity since consumers get confused by long numbers. We should also add adjective noun pairs to make them more memorable. And we can also add a paid sponsorship slot.
Ex 6G = 8B.9 verizon cool blue and 7G = A0.D costco ultra red or similar.
When has technology ever stopped? I remember being told copper wires would never go above 2400 bps. I see people here saying 4G is all they need, sounds an awful lot like "640k is all you need". You have no idea what the future holds and how much bandwidth it will need but there's still tons of ideas what could happen with faster connections.
5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?
I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM.
Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are famous for suffering this much.
These industries are pipelined. When generation N is in operation, N+1 hardware and software must be in development, N+2 specifications must be in endless committee discussions phase, and N+3 techs must be worked on in labs, etc.
This is an underrated point. PCIe, DRAM, and WiFi standards are similar. I watched a YouTube video about how PCIe 6.0 was developed, and, damn, the pipeline is long and very complex. Even test equipment has a separate/parallel pipeline.
I'm in Slovakia. We have 4 networks here and they basically have hidden non-compete agreements where no-one launches new tech for masses without at least one other providing it launching it too, sometimes they even coordinate the launch so that all 4 of them launch at the same time...
This same shit happened with launches of 5G NSA, eSIM, Apple Watch eSIM, RCS, and lots of other telco technologies...
At this point all the operators have 5G SA networks up and running for parts of Slovakia (Telekom even claims it covers 99% of Slovak population with 5G SA), but it's only available for business customers in private networks...
They all claim the same stupid reason for this - "most customer phones don't support it, and there are additional benefits for businesses"...
And there are rumors from all of them that they plan to launch it for regular customers by the end of this year...
I mean come on... In a fair market competition the first one to upgrade its network would launch first and heavily claim that they're the fastest innovator in marketing...
And when the network is up and running, why not open it up to regular people? And why it's always the same bullshit type of excuse that's basically trying to say "people don't want/need this"?
The 5G standard is a bit of a mess. In the US we heavily rolled out 5G NSA, which means you still have a 4G network core with both 4G and 5G radios at the edge. You get a chunk of the performance benefits without having to replace the network core first.
This usually has similar (in practice) performance characteristics to LTE Advanced.
5G SA is an actual, end to end 5G network. The two biggest wins here for an end user are reduced latency (a big focus in 5G) and reduced power usage (the phone doesn’t need a simultaneous 4G connection).
They created an option to use just the 5G radio modem parts with 4G tower equipment to run them in the "Non-StandAlone" mode, so that telcos can start deploying 5G before even it matures. And the modem parts and their specs are called "5G New Radio", which is one of names of all time.
> 5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?
Talking is one of the steps towards making things available to the broad masses. You have to start these things ahead of time so they are ready to deploy when the time comes.
Well, I suppose the rolling out of 5G must happen at some point, but otherwise his/her take in Section III.A is spot on and the most important takeaway.
5G seems pretty widly available here in Sweden in my experience, even in the countryside. Not that the speeds are actually better than 4G, but the indicator say 5G as I'm writing this in a tent in the middle of nowhere. :)
On raw coverage of 5g, only a few much denser countries are better. You live in basically the best 4g and 5g covered, sparsely populated country on earth :) most countries are not just further behind.
Yes, and even in Europe. The demand-led need was badly misunderstood or anticipated in my opinion as operators were hesitant to invest (and some big ones still are). In this sense, 7G is a pipe dream (but of course worth researching as such).
Don't just look at the indicator on your phone though. Providers are free to scheme with those. Some honestly show the icon when you are on 5G. Others use the option of showing it when you are on 4G (not even 5G NSA) but the network offers 5G on the cell.
The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.
With 5G in particular I think it's important that people talk about which specific technologies they're referring to.
In the US at least, low-band or extended range 5G is widely available and has been for some time (and I'm talking about the "real" 5G low-band, not the BS marketing speak AT&T used for a while). Mid and high band 5G, or 5G ultra capacity, is much less available but if course it only really makes sense in dense cities.
I'm surprised that low band 5G isn't widely available in most 1st world countries, as again it's been here in the US for many years now.
We really need a hybrid short-haul standard designed for short-range transmission. Something that uses low-frequency spectrum currently allocated to 5G but isn't locked to a single carrier and the protocol can be shared between WiFi and Cellular. Staking out some new frequencies would be great too.
Could there come a limit to the G-cycle? Like either a) marginal gains slow/stall progress or b) more connectivity simply not being better? Curious to hear from folks in this field if this question has been raised.
There is no reason you can't have phased array antennas of tens of elements on the handset and thousands on the masts, to give a massive bandwidth increase.
It will take a lot of generations to get to the limit physics sets.
Yes, why working on something that "may" be beneficial in the far future?
This is like inventing a 128-bit CPU architecture. Nobody would be able to utilize like even 1% of that, even with AI.
According to the paper, 6G deployment is planned for 2030 and the "earliest plausible" deployment of 7G is listed as 2039-40. You'll have plenty of time to upgrade.
Unlikely. 5G hit the wall on UWB (Ultra Wide Band; 10-100GHz) because geniuses who were doing marketing for its transfer speeds did not realized that such high frequencies are disrupted with minimal amount conductive material in the air - so surprise surprise, 5G UWB does not work when you are behind a wall, it does not work when your big head full of water is in the way of BTS and most perplexing for common folk, it does not work behind a glass because regular glass is full of iron - so forget on 5G UWB on a train, tram or bus, unless somebody put mini BTS inside the vehicle.
So 5G for most folks is just marginally better LTE and that's about it. Any higher frequencies like 6G (30GHZ~3THz) or 7G (???) won't achieve much of anything outside of laboratory, because they will hit exactly same walls like 5G UWB.
Well mmWave was never for large areas. It's for ultra high density like in stadiums with 100k people. You know those cases where current networks are completely unusable because they saturate.
Its extremely limited range and penetration is a benefit there because you can put up thousands of cells without them interfering with each other.
It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
The speeds thing was just marketing BS as usual but mmWave did have benefits in niche scenarios.
> It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
It did not took off because the whole sales pitch was utter nonsense. Why would anyone put 3rd party 5G BTS inside their buildings and then pay for data, when they can use WiFi for free + they control the network so they can decide how data are shared between stations and which stations are allowed to be logged in.
I can see that 6G is pitching... exactly same thing. Which predictably is going to fail... on exactly same issue.
Ultra Wide Band (UWB) has nothing to do with Extremely High Frequency (mmWave). UWB is usually in the 6-8.5 GHz band but with 500 MHz wide frequency, while mmWave is above 24 GHz.
There was full team that found out that did the test that 26ghz doesn't work IRL. It didn't even work across a street corner. But they were ignored in favour of some well, career pushers.
In india, jio is using 26ghz for wifi now instead. It's a service called airfiber. This don't even use any 5G. It's a weird custom hybrid solution where all the frames are wifi. Density here means that it's feasible to put the receiver on the rooftop of apartment buildings wherever you can get LoS. So in some sense it's been salvaged and those bands are actually being used. It's a fairly popular service.
URLL failed because it's main immediate usecase was supposed to be vehicle to vehicle comms. And auto didn't want telcos middlemanning there. But there is still hope here.
It needs to work backwards, much like Video Codec and ask what do the stakeholders really want or need?
We are closing in to rolling out the last / final phase of 5G. And yet none of the Massive MIMO on FDD is happening. We are still stuck on 32T32R, hardly that impressive considering we have that in LTE already. Not to mention the insane complexity increase from 4G to 5G. And judging from the previews of 6G that seems to be event worst.
If you ask an average user, they will tell you they don't feel much different between 4G and 5G. Yes there are capacity increase and other things. But at this stage I don't think the benefits outweigh the cost of switching. That is both from MNOs and End user perspective.
Something I've noticed is that a phone is actually usable at a stadium or concert when 3g or 4g felt essentially useless at that density.
I've seen an interesting corollary: 4G on an airplane at the gate is much faster than the 5G microcells inside the terminal.
If I'm downloading podcasts for a flight, I do it on WiFi beforehand or on 4G on the plane. 5G in the terminal is really useful at getting you some service, but it's slow.
Probably a side effect of not enough backhaul speed.
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I thought that's why many large venues offer free WiFi.
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AT&T has figured out a way to monetize that. If you have a "Turbo" plan or add-on, your phone will work in crowded cells.
If you don't, good luck with that.
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and that has definitely improved everybody's experience at concerts /s
4G used clever ideas to get much better practical spectrum efficiency than people thought was possible... At the cost of very expensive infrastructure. The biggest selling point to carriers was standalone 5G networks that were cheaper to build but paradoxically carriers are prone to frame 5G as a feature customers pay more for.
The area where wireless networks fall short is coverage. Obviously many homes and businesses are difficult to cover with wireless technology. Also many "IoT" and public service situations need wide coverage, and a network that works in 92% of places is "close but not cigar." There are few obvious answers rather than "lots of fiber and very cheap small cells" and "satellite technology" but it's what it takes to address wireless use cases that currently aren't addressed.
This doesnt seem to match reality?
e.g. Notably several major carriers in India skipped 3G entirely and went to 4G directly because it was cheaper per subscriber. Which implies less expensive equipment per unit performance?
Most of what passes for 5G in the US is the same old but full duplex with wider channels.
Calling that 5G obscures the fact that millimeter wave 5G standalone is a totally different beast, and a huge network engineering challenge.
It may seem bureaucratic to regulate what people can call 5G, but US consumers get ripped off thinking they're on an advanced network when in fact you could call it the long-term evolution (see what I did there?) of the existing network.
5G mm is vaporware. Virtually no one uses it (especially globally) and it is expected to be stripped out within a generation or two.
sure but is anyone deploying mmwave outside of maybe sports stadiums? I'm not exactly going to get it on my commuter train or at work.
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My phone clearly shows me when I'm on 5G vs 5G mmWave.
In Germany I notice a massive difference in 4G and 5G. If I see 4G on my phone and know I can put it away again if it's not some kind of an emergency because it's basically unusable. I am not sure what is going on here, probably the telcos that are limiting the bandwidth.
There’s always a gradual refarming of the spectrum into the next G. Usually the most penetrating frequencies (ie lowest) are kept on the lower G to maximize legacy support.
For a while I had my phone stick to 3G, which doesn’t support emergency alerts, because my jurisdiction kept sending them out for joint custody disputes at 3AM 1000km away. It was fine But the 3G became unbearable and they tightened up the alert criteria.
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The difference between 4G and (non-SA) 5G is fairly small compared to earlier generations. They use the same core network, and it’s actually quite possible to be connected to 4G and still see the 5G logo.
These tricks are less common in Germany though, as far as I’ve seen, so seeing 5G can serve as a weak proxy for “the carrier has at least touched this base station in the last few years”, which increases the chance they’ve upgraded its spectrum or backhaul a little bit.
Really depends on the concrete situation, though. Having a small 4G cell with 20 MHz of spectrum to yourself beats an overloaded large 5 MHz rural 5G site any day.
I’d you have a 5G phone and plan but see 4G, that usually means you are at the very edge of coverage. Thats not the experience 4G was or still is if you are in a well covered area (which would have 5G available as well)
Interesting; in Australia I'm using exclusively 4G with no problems
My pessimistic take is it’s being optimized for the “numbers” users benchmark with. The 5G repeater towers that display on your phone as full-bars but the tower itself is constrained, to juicing the speedtests. Apple even changed how the RSSI translates to the bars. There are engineers doing great work, and the marketing teams muddle the waters (like ATT’s “5Ge”).
ATT did a lot of this, android has a ‘feature’ they utilize to inflate the signal bar: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
The thing that changed with 5G is that my iPhone 13 Pro‘s battery has been draining 30% faster. Enable the hotspot and it gets burning hot.
I think it’s also because the best frequencies are already occupied by 2g/3g and 4g so it’s hard to provide good 5g coverage over large areas.
3G has been shut down in several countries to free up frequencies. 2G was also shut down in several countries, it seems to be still up in most european countries with shut downs being scheduled in the next few years up to 2030.
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'best' is relative here; lower bands travel further, which is great for maximizing coverage footprint, but not great for high-density. Each node can only handle so much traffic, and you can pack them in more densely with short-range spectrum. mmWave really is the best frequency for very high density, high capacity networks, but the bottleneck is you have to deploy all the extra nodes to get the coverage.
I’m not in the industry, so I can’t speak intelligently on this, but as a user, literally the only change I’ve actually noticed in my day-to-day is that when they removed 3G, I lost a shitload of connectivity. I live probably half a mile from the capital building in a greater metro region of over a million people and I still get shit connection at home on TMo. Maybe physics is the problem, but why waste time making things insanely fast in a lab setting? Work on making it fucking usable in the real world, like in a neighborhood with trees.
I do not give a shit if I can download at 500mbps while resting my phone on a wireless router. I need to be able to USE it.
More likely, data usage has increased greatly in your area since 3G was still available and your carriers spectrum or backhaul hasn’t caught up. 4G/5G make things more efficient but ultimately can’t fight physics.
Ive never heard a single person say they don't see a difference between 4G and 5G, atleast in the USA.
Ive switched my entire home internet setup to 5G and haven't had an outtage in two years. Whereas it was once a week with fiber. I also can fallback with duel sims.
5G has legitimately changed my quality of (digital) life.
That’s most likely because of the massive amounts of midband spectrum that became available for 5G use in the US and less so due to any inherent advantage of 5G.
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Note that "G" generally is a marketing term for consumers, the actual tech is 3GPP rev-whatever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP
Like 3GPP release 15 or 16 is what we currently know as a lot of in production LTE/LTE-Advanced stuff.
Exactly. This is far outside my professional field, but lately I've found that one of the better ways to read the tea leaves of the next decade is to look at the boring 3GPP/ETSI material rather than the consumer-facing "6G/7G" discussion.
The interesting part of 6G doesn't seem to be faster downloads so much as sensing. ISAC is basically about making the network capable of sensing the physical environment as well as communicating.
Some of the current work is already discussing the "six sensing modes", involving different combinations of the network and UEs transmitting and receiving signals reflected from objects, and even how users might be incentivized to let their devices participate
That feels potentially much more consequential than another speed bump. 3G/4G didn't just make phones faster; they enabled an entire ecosystem that was hard to predict beforehand. My guess is that sensing could be a similar pivot for 6G.
Also if I had a dollar for every end user residential consumer (as a person who runs ISPs) that confuses "5G" with "5 GHz wifi". Like, when your install techs have to explain to a customer why they're getting shit performance in the default 20MHz wide 2.4 GHz channel, and to reconfigure all their devices in a house to talk to a 802.11ax/802.11be 3x3 or 4x4 80 MHz channel AP in the 5.x GHz band.
Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now.
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Over 5G you need specialized suits, like fighter pilots have.
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No it is not. 2G->3G->4G->5G refer to real changes in technology and system architecture, as detailed in the Wikipedia page you linked to.
3GPP releases are more fine-grained than that. E.g. rel. 99 introduced 3G/WCDMA, rel. 8 introduced 4G/LTE, etc. Other releases only add features.
In the industry Gs are used all the time to refer to the technology/architecture, then releases are used to refer to specific features, though generally noone supports all the features of a release.
Tell that to the cellular industry marketing people who decided to put "4.5G" on things. Also not everything that is marketed "5G" is equal in capability, there's a myriad of different bands in different regulatory regimes in the world, some of which go through material like brick/concrete much better than others. You'll see "5G" connections that have speed tests in an urban area that top out at 50 Mbps downstream and others where you'll have 850 Mbps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequency_bands
Even within a category such as "4G" there have been significant advances in some radio capabilities since it was introduced, like MU-MIMO, vs early "4G".
There's a very large number of different things that are all being marketed as "5G" now, so it's really a drastic oversimplification to try to say that all 5G is the same thing. Do you not remember the very early days of "3G" when cellular carriers were trying to market EDGE/GPRS as if it was 3G?
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Increasingly less so. 2G to 3G was a very clear cut on the radio side (TDMA to CDMA); 4G changed both the radio side (OFDMA) and the core (no more circuit switching, more Internet-standards-like).
5G is already much less clear: 5G non-SA literally depends on 4G for signaling and uses 5G-NR (which itself is still OFDMA) only for user data. 5G SA changes the core network again, but isn’t even supported in many networks worldwide.
There are huge jumps in bandwidth within a generation too. 3G started out with circuit-switched-ish 384 kbit/s and ended with 40+ Mbit/s on HSPA+. The jump from that to early LTE was much smaller in comparison.
So in a way, the model of “every once in a while, the carriers and manufacturers bundle up a bunch of optional extensions and call it (n+1)” seems to be coming for 3GPP just like it already has for e.g. 802.11.
The "G" marketing gets especially confused in the US where carriers branded EDGE as "3G" and HSPA+ as "4G"
There will always be new Gs...marketing teams require it.
I hope they go into the direction wifi is taking though - stability rather than speed.
I never think about cell speeds being slow anymore but irritation at lack of coverage is still frequent. Esp in urban jungles where buildings block it
That's more of a physics thing.
For building penetration you need low frequencies but those low frequencies have less bandwidth available because the bands are smaller. At the same time bandwidth needs rapidly go up, making those low bands fuller. Because there's a limit to how many bits per second you can get out of a Hz of spectrum.
What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters. A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally. This could be incorporated into the standard. Then establishments could easily include a booster just like many of them offer free WiFi now.
>A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally.
They're still readily available.
But yeah think this would need a legislative push to solve. Force high rises to host multi provider relays as you say and hook it into their fiber links.
> What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters.
But that's also a physics thing. Plain same-frequency boosters hamper frequency reuse on neighbor cells, so less bandwidth for you. And if boosters run on a separate band, you'd need to do frequency planning for them just like it's done for cells now.
Wireless is finicky, we should really avoid using it everywhere wired can be used instead.
Hopefully, they’ll move to reporting versioning as an explicit value rather than tying it to a constant that the general population might not know about. (I.e. 6g = 58.86; 7g = 68.67).
/s
I think we should use hex for brevity since consumers get confused by long numbers. We should also add adjective noun pairs to make them more memorable. And we can also add a paid sponsorship slot.
Ex 6G = 8B.9 verizon cool blue and 7G = A0.D costco ultra red or similar.
(/s)
When has technology ever stopped? I remember being told copper wires would never go above 2400 bps. I see people here saying 4G is all they need, sounds an awful lot like "640k is all you need". You have no idea what the future holds and how much bandwidth it will need but there's still tons of ideas what could happen with faster connections.
5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?
I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM.
Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are famous for suffering this much.
These industries are pipelined. When generation N is in operation, N+1 hardware and software must be in development, N+2 specifications must be in endless committee discussions phase, and N+3 techs must be worked on in labs, etc.
This is an underrated point. PCIe, DRAM, and WiFi standards are similar. I watched a YouTube video about how PCIe 6.0 was developed, and, damn, the pipeline is long and very complex. Even test equipment has a separate/parallel pipeline.
I'm in Slovakia. We have 4 networks here and they basically have hidden non-compete agreements where no-one launches new tech for masses without at least one other providing it launching it too, sometimes they even coordinate the launch so that all 4 of them launch at the same time...
This same shit happened with launches of 5G NSA, eSIM, Apple Watch eSIM, RCS, and lots of other telco technologies...
At this point all the operators have 5G SA networks up and running for parts of Slovakia (Telekom even claims it covers 99% of Slovak population with 5G SA), but it's only available for business customers in private networks...
They all claim the same stupid reason for this - "most customer phones don't support it, and there are additional benefits for businesses"...
And there are rumors from all of them that they plan to launch it for regular customers by the end of this year...
I mean come on... In a fair market competition the first one to upgrade its network would launch first and heavily claim that they're the fastest innovator in marketing...
And when the network is up and running, why not open it up to regular people? And why it's always the same bullshit type of excuse that's basically trying to say "people don't want/need this"?
I'm not sure what the "SA" part means but my phone says it's on 5g right now and has done most of the time for a couple of years now.
The 5G standard is a bit of a mess. In the US we heavily rolled out 5G NSA, which means you still have a 4G network core with both 4G and 5G radios at the edge. You get a chunk of the performance benefits without having to replace the network core first.
This usually has similar (in practice) performance characteristics to LTE Advanced.
5G SA is an actual, end to end 5G network. The two biggest wins here for an end user are reduced latency (a big focus in 5G) and reduced power usage (the phone doesn’t need a simultaneous 4G connection).
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5G SA means real 5G. 5G NSA means 4G over 5G NR.
They created an option to use just the 5G radio modem parts with 4G tower equipment to run them in the "Non-StandAlone" mode, so that telcos can start deploying 5G before even it matures. And the modem parts and their specs are called "5G New Radio", which is one of names of all time.
SA means standalone meaning real 5G.
NSA is non stand alone meaning basically 4G with some 5G backwards compatible improvements.
Just because your phone shows 5G doesn't mean it's connected to a 5G station. It also can only be a signaled flag from a 4G station.
And companies are selling electric cars even though not everyone has a petrol car…
I remember people saying the same thing about 4G relative 3G and 5G relative 4G.
2G -> 3G -> 4G were all massive jumps that all enabled new use cases.
I doubt majority of phone users who have a decent 4G connection would notice the difference if they upgrade to 5G.
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> 5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?
Talking is one of the steps towards making things available to the broad masses. You have to start these things ahead of time so they are ready to deploy when the time comes.
I sure hope not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_the_End_of_the_World
On the plus side, we won't have to worry about COVID-19 anymore /s. https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2020/opinion/5g-and...
Well, I suppose the rolling out of 5G must happen at some point, but otherwise his/her take in Section III.A is spot on and the most important takeaway.
5G seems pretty widly available here in Sweden in my experience, even in the countryside. Not that the speeds are actually better than 4G, but the indicator say 5G as I'm writing this in a tent in the middle of nowhere. :)
I guess other countries are further behind?
On raw coverage of 5g, only a few much denser countries are better. You live in basically the best 4g and 5g covered, sparsely populated country on earth :) most countries are not just further behind.
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> I guess other countries are further behind?
Yes, and even in Europe. The demand-led need was badly misunderstood or anticipated in my opinion as operators were hesitant to invest (and some big ones still are). In this sense, 7G is a pipe dream (but of course worth researching as such).
Lucky you. On some parts of my commute, in an urban area of 10M people, I am happy if I get some 3G.
Don't just look at the indicator on your phone though. Providers are free to scheme with those. Some honestly show the icon when you are on 5G. Others use the option of showing it when you are on 4G (not even 5G NSA) but the network offers 5G on the cell.
The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.
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With 5G in particular I think it's important that people talk about which specific technologies they're referring to.
In the US at least, low-band or extended range 5G is widely available and has been for some time (and I'm talking about the "real" 5G low-band, not the BS marketing speak AT&T used for a while). Mid and high band 5G, or 5G ultra capacity, is much less available but if course it only really makes sense in dense cities.
I'm surprised that low band 5G isn't widely available in most 1st world countries, as again it's been here in the US for many years now.
This reminds me of a sign I saw advertising "GLP-2s". Twice as good as GLP-1s!
Both the abstract and the introduction score a 100% on Pangram. What’s going on there?
Looks like 100% AI (https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2609.01877) except for citations?
Working on everything from 1G to 6G, I can tell you for sure there will be a 7G whether we need it or not...
7G? Man I hope not. I watched a fine documentary a few years ago about what happens when they try rolling 7G out...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_the_End_of_the_World
We really need a hybrid short-haul standard designed for short-range transmission. Something that uses low-frequency spectrum currently allocated to 5G but isn't locked to a single carrier and the protocol can be shared between WiFi and Cellular. Staking out some new frequencies would be great too.
WiFi Passpoint (Hotspot 2.0)
Ironically for mobile data, I've liked and found 4G to be more consistent. Not always as fast, but it never drops for me or fails to load.
Could there come a limit to the G-cycle? Like either a) marginal gains slow/stall progress or b) more connectivity simply not being better? Curious to hear from folks in this field if this question has been raised.
Not soon there won't be.
There is no reason you can't have phased array antennas of tens of elements on the handset and thousands on the masts, to give a massive bandwidth increase.
It will take a lot of generations to get to the limit physics sets.
Yes, there will be, to deliver two minute hates to the telescreens.
Can't answer this question as I know basically nothing.
I'd be perfectly happy with less headline speed increases and just a real world busy tower speed improvement. That or efficiency gains.
What would RF native computing involve ?
I'm surprised that Starlink didn't try and steal the branding. If anything would count as a new Generation in radio communication...
I sure hope we see 7G one day soon!
Only if enough people don't get cancer from 6G.
I'm still waiting for faster SMS. SMPP needs a performance update. This is important everyone.
This is the first I've heard of any plan for 6G….
Run the abstract through pangram.com; this is AI slop: https://www.pangram.com/history/49f81c92-a2f4-46f6-91b3-e185...
We've already got the G7.
4G just works.
The right question:
Will 7G be needed?
I say no for the next 15 years. Because there are 1425235 other things that are way much important than this.
Right and society only works on one thing at a time
Yes, why working on something that "may" be beneficial in the far future? This is like inventing a 128-bit CPU architecture. Nobody would be able to utilize like even 1% of that, even with AI.
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The paper lists the "earliest plausible" deployment of 7G as 2039-40, so only 1-2 years off your estimate...
It may not be needed, but it will certainly be rolled out.
Do we even need 6G?
I'm concerned because my 5G microchip is still going strong. Will the next advances be compatible?
According to the paper, 6G deployment is planned for 2030 and the "earliest plausible" deployment of 7G is listed as 2039-40. You'll have plenty of time to upgrade.
There will always be a faster technology, regardless of what it's called.
Unlikely. 5G hit the wall on UWB (Ultra Wide Band; 10-100GHz) because geniuses who were doing marketing for its transfer speeds did not realized that such high frequencies are disrupted with minimal amount conductive material in the air - so surprise surprise, 5G UWB does not work when you are behind a wall, it does not work when your big head full of water is in the way of BTS and most perplexing for common folk, it does not work behind a glass because regular glass is full of iron - so forget on 5G UWB on a train, tram or bus, unless somebody put mini BTS inside the vehicle.
So 5G for most folks is just marginally better LTE and that's about it. Any higher frequencies like 6G (30GHZ~3THz) or 7G (???) won't achieve much of anything outside of laboratory, because they will hit exactly same walls like 5G UWB.
Well mmWave was never for large areas. It's for ultra high density like in stadiums with 100k people. You know those cases where current networks are completely unusable because they saturate.
Its extremely limited range and penetration is a benefit there because you can put up thousands of cells without them interfering with each other.
It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
The speeds thing was just marketing BS as usual but mmWave did have benefits in niche scenarios.
> It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
It did not took off because the whole sales pitch was utter nonsense. Why would anyone put 3rd party 5G BTS inside their buildings and then pay for data, when they can use WiFi for free + they control the network so they can decide how data are shared between stations and which stations are allowed to be logged in.
I can see that 6G is pitching... exactly same thing. Which predictably is going to fail... on exactly same issue.
Ultra Wide Band (UWB) has nothing to do with Extremely High Frequency (mmWave). UWB is usually in the 6-8.5 GHz band but with 500 MHz wide frequency, while mmWave is above 24 GHz.
There was full team that found out that did the test that 26ghz doesn't work IRL. It didn't even work across a street corner. But they were ignored in favour of some well, career pushers.
In india, jio is using 26ghz for wifi now instead. It's a service called airfiber. This don't even use any 5G. It's a weird custom hybrid solution where all the frames are wifi. Density here means that it's feasible to put the receiver on the rooftop of apartment buildings wherever you can get LoS. So in some sense it's been salvaged and those bands are actually being used. It's a fairly popular service.
URLL failed because it's main immediate usecase was supposed to be vehicle to vehicle comms. And auto didn't want telcos middlemanning there. But there is still hope here.
even the moon only has 4G
well if they ever get the lander upright, you'd think they'd learn to put crashbags that self-inflate to upright landers by now
* https://www.wired.com/story/nokia-4g-network-on-the-moon/
yes