Updated 07/16/2019 – Qualcomm released the Snapdragon 855 Plus. It features a Kryo 486 CPU Prime core with a clock speed of 2.96 GHz and a 15% faster Adreno 640 GPU. Qualcomm claimed in a presser, the 855 Plus would deliver better coverage and all-day battery life in 5G devices.
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AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), Sprint (S), and other carriers are hyping 5G. But what exactly is 5G? If you believe the hype, it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. 5G will improve our homes, make our cities safer, our machines smarter, our cars driverless, our entertainment mobile and our phones faster. So what is the tech behind the hype?
When 5G really gets here will bring three improvements to current wireless: greater speed, lower latency, and more connections. The real advantages of 5G will come in massive capacity and lower latency. The standards bodies involved are aiming at 20Gbps speeds and 1ms latency.
Work on 5G started 10-15 years before anything went commercial. Marcus Weldon, CTO, and president of Nokia Bell Labs told FierceWireless. Finally, in 2017, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, the standards body that writes the rules for wireless connectivity, agreed on the first specification for 5G. The Non-Standalone Specification of 5G New Radio standard covers 600 and 700 MHz bands and the 50 GHz millimeter-wave end of the spectrum. But, as followers of the Bach Seat know, a standard doesn’t mean that it will work the same, or what applications it will enable.
The G in this 5G means it’s a generation of wireless technology. PC Magazine says, most wireless generations have technically been defined by their data transmission speeds, each has also been marked by a break in encoding methods, or “air interfaces,” that make it incompatible with the previous generation. The earlier G’s were:
- 1G was analog cellular.
- 2G technologies, such as CDMA, GSM, and TDMA, were launched in 1991 the first generation of digital cellular technologies without much concern for data transmission or the mobile Web.
- 3G technologies, such as EVDO, HSPA, and UMTS, brought speeds from 200kbps to a few megabits per second. It focused on applications in voice telephony, mobile Internet, video calls, and mobile TV.
- 4G technologies, such as WiMAX and LTE, were the next incompatible leap forward, and they are now scaling up to hundreds of megabits and even gigabit-level speeds. 4G was designed to better support IP telephony, video conferencing, and cloud computing, as well as video streaming and online gaming.
The actual 5G radio system, known as 5G-NR, isn’t compatible with 4G. But for the foreseeable future, all US 5G devices will need 4G to set up 5G connections where it’s available. That’s technically known as a “non-standalone,” or NSA, network. Later 5G networks will become “standalone,” or SA, not requiring 4G coverage to work.
Like other cellular networks, 5G networks use a system of cell sites that divide their territory into sectors and send encoded data through radio waves according to PCMag. Each cell site requires a network backbone connection, whether through a wired or wireless backhaul connection. 5G networks use a type of encoding called OFDM.
5G is designed to carry higher speeds by using much larger channels than 4G. While most 4G channels are 20MHz, bonded together into up to 160MHz at a time, 5G channels can be up to 100MHz, with Verizon using as much as 800MHz at a time. That’s a much broader highway, but it also requires larger, clear blocks of airwaves than were available for 4G. PCMag cites Qualcomm (QCOM) claims that 5G will be able to boost capacity by four times over current systems by leveraging wider bandwidths and advanced antenna technologies.
5G primarily runs in two kinds of airwaves: below and above 6GHz. Low-frequency 5G networks, which use existing cellular and Wi-Fi bands, take advantage of more flexible encoding and bigger channel sizes to achieve speeds 25 to 50 percent better than LTE, according to a presentation by T-Mobile (TMUS) exec Karri Kuoppamaki.
Those networks can cover the same distances as existing cellular networks and generally won’t need more cell sites. Rural networks will likely be stuck with low-band 5G, because low-frequency bands have a great range from cell towers.
To get super-high, multi-gigabit speeds, carriers are turning to newer, much higher frequencies, known as millimeter wave (mmWave). In the existing cellular bands, only relatively narrow channels are available because that spectrum is so busy and heavily used. But up at 28GHz and 39GHz, there are big, broad swathes of spectrum available to create big channels for very high speeds.
The 28GHz and 39GHz bands have previously only been used for backhaul. But they haven’t been used for consumer devices before, because the handheld processing power and miniaturized antennas weren’t available. Millimeter wave signals also drop off faster with distance than lower-frequencies, and the massive amount of data they transfer will need more connections to landline internet. So cellular providers will have to use many smaller, lower-power base stations rather than fewer, more powerful macrocells to offer the multi-gigabit speeds that millimeter wave networks promise.
There’s a third set of 5G airwaves being used overseas. These frequencies, ranging from 3.5GHz to 7GHz. These are slightly above current cellular bands but have quantities of the spectrum (speed) that approaches mmWave. The US is falling behind other countries in the mid-band spectrum because over here, it’s being used for satellite communications and the Navy.
Bell Labs’ Weldon, described his idea of a true 5G network for FierceWireless;
… you need a low band that gives you nationwide coverage—higher efficiency on it; a mid-band for high-capacity, relatively locally; and millimeter-wave for super high-capacity, extremely locally, and if you blend all those together, you’ve got a network that really is significant.
Some believe that mmWave 5G will not work. T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray wrote that millimeter-wave won’t be able to deliver on the promise of 5G because it doesn’t travel far. Jeffrey Moore, principal analyst at Wave7 Research told FierceWireless. “…there are definitely some concerns about the economics of 5G.”
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5G is an investment for the next decade. It is unlikely that the next big application will drop in 5G until 2021 or 2022. It is likely that a true 5G iPhone won’t appear until later 2020 and Qualcomm will not release its second-generation Snapdragon X55 5G modem until late 2019. The new chip will support all major spectrum types and bands. Qualcomm claims it is capable of 7Gbps downloads. Until then, the wireless carriers will jockey for customers and mind share.
The providers desperately need 5G to boost smartphone sales. The smartphone market is saturated. Deloitte found (PDF) that 80% of people in developed nations now own a smartphone and wait up to 4 years to replace their device – a significant increase from the 2-year refresh rate in 2011-12.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
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