The Future is 5G

Written by Brooks Canavesi on May 16, 2018. Posted in IoT, Mobile App Development, Technology trends

The very first mobile telephone call was made in 1973 by a senior engineer working for Motorola. A lot has changed since then, and we now use mobile phones for a lot more than making phones. In fact, mobile phones no longer even have a monopoly on mobile communication.

Today, we rely on a number of different cellular- and internet-connected devices (Internet of Things – IoT) to stay productive, and we’re rapidly moving toward a connected future where nearly every electronic device wirelessly sends and receives information to offer various smart features / insights.

As our needs and personal electronic devices change, the infrastructure we rely on needs to change as well. A new generation of cellular technology is introduced to the world approximately every 10 years, with the current generation, 4G, having been first commercially deployed in 2009. The time is right for the next generation of cellular technology to come and replace 4G, and we already know what it will offer.

BLUF:

1.    Horsepower – How does 10Gbps – 20Gbps sound? That is 100x faster than LTE and 10x faster than the fastest home internet connection today from a fiber provider like Verizon FiOS. Conservative estimates show expected latency to be 1/4th of LTE at 5ms from 20ms.

2.    No Cables Required – Cable companies are in trouble and will be scrambling to have a cellular presence, which can be seen with Comcast Xfinity Mobile. If you live in a major metropolitan market and are building a new home in 2019+, forget about installing coax cable.

3.    Telco Data Dwarfs Google’s – If a majority of phone, home entertainment, and IoT device internet access is funneled through 5G networks, the wireless providers of 5G will have more data access than any single technology vendor such as Facebook, Google or Apple.

4.    2020 – target for most major markets, rural areas should not hold their breath as the infrastructure priorities will continue to be major metro regions initially.

What Is 5G?

The chances are that you’ve already heard of 5G. Major carriers including Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint are testing 5G in cities around the country, and chipmakers like Qualcomm and Intel are working hard developing 5G hardware to bring the fifth generation of cellular networking to consumers worldwide.

But despite all the buzz around 5G, there’s actually no official “5G” yet. Instead, there are several definitions of 5G, each of which includes slightly different specifications.

Arguably the most common definition of 5G is the 3GPP Release 15. 3GPP is the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, a collaboration between groups of telecommunications standards association. Apart from the 3GPP Release 15, there’s also the more rigorous ITU IMT-2020 definition from the International Telecommunication Union, a specialized agency of the United Nations that is responsible for issues that concern information and communication technologies.

“If anyone tells you they know the details of what 5G will deliver, walk the other way,” noted former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler. “Our proposal is the final piece in the spectrum trifecta of low-band, mid-band and high-band airwaves that will open up unprecedented amounts of spectrum, speed the rollout of new-generation wireless networks and redefine network connectivity for years to come. I’m confident these actions will lead to a cornucopia of unanticipated innovative uses and generate 10s of billions of dollars in economic activity.”

Even though hardware manufacturers, regulatory bodies, and governments have yet to paint a clear picture of what 5G is, we already have a pretty clear idea about what some of its most important components will be. But before we take a closer look at them, it’s helpful to first walk through the evolution of cellular technology and consider how each impacted the mobile landscape.

How We Got Here?

1G

The first generation of mobile networks was introduced in the 1980s and allowed for wireless voice calls. This was the time of the Motorola DynaTAC series of cellular telephones, which took around 10 hours to charge, lasted only for 30 minutes of talk, and featured a tiny LED display that consumed as much battery power as entire smartphones do today. During the reign of 1G, the only people that could afford mobile phones were one-percenters as the Motorola DynaTAC, and many other phones, cost thousands of dollars.

2G

With the introduction of 2G, mobile networks shifted from fully analog systems to digital ones. 2G networks were commercially launched on the GSM standard in 1991 and offered encryption, much higher signal penetration, and data services for mobile, including SMS and MMS. Cellular data was enabled by GPRS, which offers a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 50 Kbps, and EDGE, which offers a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 1 Mbps.

3G

The third generation of wireless mobile telecommunications technology offered even faster data rate than 2G, which allowed it to find application in wireless voice telephony, mobile Internet access, fixed wireless Internet access, video calls, and mobile TV. It was based on the IMT-2000 standards and first made available in Japan in 1998. By June 2007, which is when the first iPhone was released, the 200 millionth 3G subscriber had been connected to the network.

4G

The requirements for the 4G standard were specified by the International Telecommunications Union-Radio communications sector (ITU-R) in March 2008, and it offered maximum data transfer speeds of 1 Gbps for low mobility communication, such as pedestrians and stationary users. However, most mobile users hadn’t been able to enjoy truly fast data transfer speeds until the arrival of 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology and the launch of LTE services by carriers many years later. Even today, there are entire regions where 4G coverage is non-existent, and it’s highly likely that the rollout of 5G will follow a similar pattern.

Features of 5G Networks

The members of ITU have agreed on 5G performance requirements for 5G, calling for a minimum of 20 Gbps downlink and 10 Gbps uplink per mobile base stations. “The IMT-2020 standard is set to be the global communication network for the coming decades and is on track to be in place by 2020. The next step is to agree on what will be the detailed specifications for IMT-2020, a standard that will underpin the next generations of mobile broadband and IoT connectivity,” said François Rancy, Director of ITU’s Radiocommunication Bureau. ITU’s draft report also specifies extremely low latency of 5 ms, which is a significant improvement compared to 4G LTE’s 20 ms. High data transfers speeds and low latency are essential not only for mobile content consumption but also for emerging applications such as driverless cars. Beyond these foundational improvements, 5G also includes a suite of new technologies, including small cells, millimeter waves, massive MIMO, and beamforming, just to name those that are most likely to make it to consumers.

Small Cells

5G relies on high frequencies with low wavelengths that have difficulty penetrating solid objects. To ensure strong signal in densely populated areas, carriers will deploy many portable miniature base stations that require minimal power to operate to form a dense network that acts as a relay team. “This radically different network structure should provide more targeted and efficient use of spectrum. Having more stations means the frequencies that one station uses to connect with devices in one area can be reused by another station in a different area to serve another customer. There is a problem, though—the sheer number of small cells required to build a 5G network may make it hard to set up in rural areas,” explains IEEE Spectrum.

Millimeter Waves

If you’ve ever tried to set up a WiFi network in a large apartment building, you probably know how crammed the WiFi frequency spectrum is. The situation is similarly grim in the radio frequency spectrum, which is why 5G is experimenting with broadcasting on millimeter waves. Millimeter waves are broadcast at frequencies between 30 and 300 gigahertz, allowing for massive amounts of data to be transmitted without any interference issues. But millimeter waves have one huge drawback: they can’t easily travel through obstacles. That’s why they’re a good fit for massive MIMO.

Massive MIMO

Base stations today support only up to eight transmitters and four receivers. 5G cell towers of the future will support about a hundred ports, increasing the capacity of mobile networks by a factor of 22 or greater. The name of this technology is massive MIMO, and it’s the next evolutionary step from MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output), a method for multiplying the capacity of a radio link using multiple transmit and receive antennas to exploit multipath propagation.

Beamforming

According to IEEE Spectrum, “Beamforming can help massive MIMO arrays make more efficient use of the spectrum around them.” This technology can be found in today’s high-end Wi-Fi routers, and it identifies the most efficient data-delivery route to a particular user, allowing engineers to achieve the high throughput and low latency required for 5G even when there are obstacles in the way.

When is 5G coming?

5G technology debuted at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, where it was used by Samsung and Intel to stream live VR coverage of sporting events. As exciting as such early demonstration of the next-gen mobile technology may be, regular mobile users will have to wait at least a few more years before they’ll be able to enjoy 5G connectivity. Intel, Qualcomm, and Samsung have all announced chipsets with 5G support, but carriers will set the pace of 5G adoption. Densely populated metropolitan areas will be covered first, while rural places may have to get by with 4G or even 3G for several more years.

Conclusion

“These next-generation networks and standards will need to solve a more complex challenge of combining communications and computing together. With 5G, we’ll see computing capabilities getting fused with communications everywhere, so trillions of things like wearable devices don’t have to worry about computing power because network can do any processing needed,” Keddy told Quartz in an interview ahead of the 2017 Mobile World Congress. The next-generation mobile technology is taking shape, promising to support billions of connected devices. From smart cities to driverless cars to augmented and virtual reality to the internet of things, 5G use cases are numerous and its impact on the world as we know it will be profound. Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. This article expresses my own opinions not those of my company. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it.