AT&T, Verizon, and other carriers will start to launch 5G networks this year. But let’s step back and review wireless progression.
Progression
- 1G was analog cellular.
- 2G technologies, such as CDMA, GSM, and TDMA, were the first generation of digital cellular technologies.
- 3G technologies, such as EVDO, HSPA, and UMTS, brought speeds from 200kbps to a few megabits per second. The networks are dropping 3G soon. Some now, the rest by next year. Those phones won’t work.
- 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.
- 5G brings three new aspects to the table: greater speed (to move more data), lower latency (to be more responsive), and the ability to connect a lot more devices at once (for sensors and smart devices).
- 6G is undefined, but Trump is ready.
4G phones appeared in 2010 but significant apps did not come out for several years. Snapchat came out in 2012 and the Uber App appeared in 2013.
Verizon will initially use 5G as a home internet service. The other carriers are focused more on faster and more reliable smartphones.
5G Is (Barely) Real
PC Magazine notes 5G Is (Barely) Real
Verizon and AT&T both launched preliminary 5G services in late 2018, but neither is broadly available nor meaningful for much more than bragging rights. The real race to 5G, the new cellular system that will potentially transform our world, starts now.
Here’s what we do have. Verizon has a “5G” home service in small parts of Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Sacramento, delivering fiber-like home internet speeds over wireless. AT&T is running friendly user trials with mobile hotspots in 12 cities, but it looks like it will be a few months before regular folks can buy and use the carrier’s 5G hotspots.
The actual 5G radio system, known as 5G-NR, isn’t compatible with 4G. But all 5G devices in the US, initially, will need 4G because they’ll lean on it to make initial connections before trading up to 5G where it’s available. That’s technically known as a “non standalone,” or NSA network. Later, our 5G networks will become “standalone,” or SA, not requiring 4G coverage to work. But that’s a few years off.
ATT started to call its 4G network “5G Evolution,” because it sees improving 4G as a major step to 5G. It’s right, of course. But the phrasing is designed to confuse less-informed consumers into thinking 5G Evolution is 5G, when it isn’t.
Verizon’s home service, which is a nonstandard form of 5G, has led its competitors to claim that it’s not really 5G. But given that it offers multi-gigabit wireless speeds and will be swiftly transitioned over to the standard version, I’m willing to give Verizon a pass.
The goal is to have far higher speeds available, and far higher capacity per sector, at far lower latency than 4G. The standards bodies involved are aiming at 20Gbps speeds and 1ms latency, at which point very interesting things begin to happen.
Driverless Cars
Driverless cars will use 5G in a big way. 5G will not be needed for a driverless launch but soon enough everything will be communicating with everything else.
The first generation of driverless cars will be self-contained, but future generations will interact with other cars and smart roads to improve safety and manage traffic. Basically, everything on the road will be talking to everything else.
To do this, you need extremely low latencies. While the cars are all exchanging very small packets of information, they need to do so almost instantly. That’s where 5G’s sub-one-millisecond latency comes into play, when a packet of data shoots directly between two cars, or bounces from a car to a small cell on a lamppost to another car. (One light-millisecond is about 186 miles, so most of that 1ms latency is still processing time.)
US Has No Plan
Trump is ready and so am I. Not so fast says Wired Magazine.
Wired believes China Will Corner the Market and the “US has no Plan”.
China is on track to control most of the world’s flow of high-capacity online services—the new industries, relying on the immediate communication among humans and machines, that will provide the jobs and opportunities of the future.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative, supporting infrastructure and investment projects in nearly 70 countries, will have profound consequences for 40 percent of the world’s economic output. Crucially, each of the many trans-Eurasian rail lines that are part of this mammoth project will be accompanied by fiber-optic cables carrying impossibly huge amounts of data across thousands of miles without delay. According to Rethink Research, China is also planning to deploy fiber-optic connections to 80 percent of the homes in the country.
China’s ambitious deployment of fiber will have several consequences. In communicating with Russia and Europe, it won’t have to rely on undersea fiber-optic cables running through the Indian Ocean that might be subject to surveillance by the US. Even more important, it will have access to a giant market of consumers and businesses across an enormous terrestrial area that ties Central Asia even more closely to Russia as well as China.
What’s new about China’s massive deployment of fiber, both in its own territory and in its global market along its planned Belt and Road, is that China is likely to permit only 5G equipment made by Huawei and a handful of other Chinese companies to connect to that fiber.
You can bet that Huawei, already the world’s largest maker of telecommunications equipment, will be looking for exclusivity in its geographic territories. And so Huawei, and perhaps a couple of other Chinese companies, will control which data-rich services (think logistics, telemedicine, education, virtual reality, telepresence) are allowed to reach China’s global market over 5G. This means China, through the actions of its 5G carriers, will be able to exclude US companies from that market.
The risk to the US of China’s plans is obvious: American companies don’t stand a chance in this context. China, not America, will be the place where new online services are born. Although the US came up with the idea of the internet, we don’t have a sandbox to play in, a giant market in which to test new high-capacity services. That’s because we haven’t committed ourselves to keeping up with Asia and the Nordics by upgrading the ends of our networks, the “last-mile” network section that reaches homes and businesses, to fiber-optic cable.
Above all, we need a plan. Right now we don’t have one.
Public Grid
Wired wants “publicly controlled fiber-optic cables” to form a “street-grid available for lease under nondiscriminatory terms to private operators who sell services.”
That has a bad ring to it, but I an not positive exactly what Wired proposed. It did add, “Government doesn’t need to control connectivity; we are not China.”
That I can endorse 100%.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
5G is not safe.
I dont want ultra high frequency waves with a range of a few 100m been beamed endless everywhere for this ‘connectivitt’
EMF is not benign.
This article has problems.
The company that supplies the equipment does not control it after it is sold and installed. The purchaser does. China already examines every data packet and censors what it does not like. Building more infrastructure does not change that. The countries that the equipment resides in will regulate it. Unless…..
It is hard to say what building long haul fiber has to do with 5G, except that 5G is a cheaper distribution system than FTTP and to networked autos, etc. 5G is not well suited to portable devices at this point because it is a power hog. Elon Musk needs to come through with the 5x stronger batteries until low power technology catches up. In any case, some of 5G’s power needs are limited by the laws of physics, and won’t be overcome. 4G will be around for a long time to support the handset market.
Verizon has a better view of 5G’s capabilities, and will take on the cable companies with a technology that provides a faster connection than cable without that nasty and expensive cable run to each house. Fiber to the curb will be obsolete as well, Comcast and the rest of the cable industry will have real competition.
China building highways across Eurasia for foreign governments makes me a bit worried. The purpose and structure for the Autobahn and the US interstate system as well as the internet are not lost on the Chinese. Roads can carry troops and munitions as well as consumer goods. The web-like network nature of these makes them hard to disrupt. Beware gift horses!
Don’t forget that the interstate system is formost a military system of transportation that the public gets to use when there is no emergency and the internet started as a DARPA project.
5G for the last mile is going to be the primary driver to build out the network. But because of the extremely small cell size it won’t be like other cellular network rollouts, where a single tower might cover several square miles. So the wireless companies will deploy in well-to-do neighborhoods, much like Verizon FiOS and Google Fiber did. Telemetry between autonomous vehicles won’t be much, but latency will probably be important, so 5G using lower frequency bands and narrow bandwidth will be just fine, as it will be for handsets. But the multi-gigabit speeds on millimeter wave that has all the press lately will only be used for the FTTH products, not everything.
Diminishing returns. 5G is going to cost too much and the payback is going to be poor. Glad I wont be around to see the era of everything on the internet. Hackers are going to wreak havoc. Oddly there is a reason the transfers the Fed does use old analog dialup between client and server.
I am both lucky and unlucky to have FTTP internet at home. Lucky in that it is really fast, and unlucky in that there isnt much competition to provide the service, so the price is high.
From what I can see, for the average person, the speed is quite high enough already. Faster speeds bring diminishing returns for people like me, so please dont spend more money bringing a faster service that I and most people dont need and dont want to pay for. Maybe let China waste their resources on their plan if they want to.
Once you can watch high-quality video, why improve speed? What needs to be improved is price competition.
You need reliably lower than currently widespread latency, in order to remote control an eighteen wheeler, loaded with explosives, driving through Manhattan, from your couch in an Oklahoma trailer park.
First: Someone clearly composed that for him. It’s lucid, and there are no threats or complaints.
Second: Why not 7G? If we want to lead, we can’t be working on the NEXT big thing! China already is! We need to work on the NEXT NEXT big thing if we want to be leaders in technology. 7G is the way forward, and old people like Trump are so out of touch they’ve never even CONSIDERED 7G.
they got elon musk’s starlink project that will provide cheap and fast internet by filling Low earth orbit with thousands of satellite flying low to to provide low latency. Of course that means one satellite can only cover an area for limited time before needing handoff to other satellite due to low orbit..
these are the future of SpaceX , tied to a foolish satellite internet business that projected to bring 70% revenue to spaceX in 2024..
look at spaceX today and study their capability of space launchs per year , are they insane when projected need for starlink constellation satellites are more than 5000 just for north america alone ?
If China locks the best and most efficient providers of infrastructure out of it’s latest 5 year plan, it’s China who suffers from it. Not the rest of the world. After all, they still get to buy best and most efficient. The Soviet car industry did the lock others out thing. It wasn’t Westerners who had to suffer through sucky, non existent cars.
Trump may well be dumb enough to honestly not understand that, but he does have people in his employ who do. Their concern isn’t that better, more efficient US producers will be locked out of this latest five year hobgoblin. But rather that US producers are no longer better and more efficient than Huawei.
It’s American tech companies who can no longer compete on an even footing with the Asians, and who is clamoring for protections and government interventions. Not the other way around. This has been an ongoing trend visible since at least the 90s, and accelerating ever since. And for entirely obvious causes: Back when the Soviet communists launched their 5 year plans, America was a freer country than the Soviet Union. Businesses were less burdened over here, than over there. Hence could out innovate and out produce their Soviet brethren. Now that the Chinese communists are wiping the dust off the same old trite infrastructure plans, America no longer is. Hence American business no longer can.
It seems President Trump is channeling his inner Elon Musk.
Anyhow, none of us will have to worry about 6G if 5G kills all the insects and spiders:
Basically the US tech industry committed suicide by staffing itself heavily with foreign national H-1Bs instead of hiring the hoardes of highly qualified US citizens who fill their inboxes with resumes each and every day by the thousands. The amount of talent in the US is amazing, but the tech firms simply aren’t interested in anything other than cost containment. Most Silicon Valley tech workers, even engineers, earn less than local police officers. That alone tells you pretty much everything you need to know.
Engineering degrees are tough. Four years of college plus about 7 years of experience, and those four years of college don’t really allow for leisure opportunity. Many simply don’t want to put in the effort required.
FYI, police officers earn an incredible amount of $$ now, get plenty of overtime, and get to retire early.
Letting Einstein work at Princeton, wasn’t what killed the US.
Printing up enough money and handing it to, at best, mediocrities, so that they, rather than intelligent people capable of designing and building something more useful than frivolous lawsuits, HR policies, “exit strategies,” Buy Here Pay Here financing rackets and unnaturally and unsustainable high rents for anyone involved in a competitive industry, is what killed America. The Auto industry, tech industry… All of it. There simply is no room for competitive industry, in a place where every productive worker and company, has to support ten abject leeches in ever greater mandated splendor.
The O-1 visa is for best and brightest foreign national talent. H-1B is just a cheap labour visa.
H1B employees are good for the country. We should import the best and brightest from all over the world. A rising tide lifts all ships. Stuki has the problem identified. Too much regulation and high taxes make it very difficult to have a successful business here.
Right now, there is a world wide shortage of talent. If US citizens can’t find employment, they need to look at themselves.
But will it roll out to all 57 states?
“… uh, because, you know, i-i-it is just wonderful to be back in Oregon, and over the last 15 months we’ve traveled … uh to every corner of the United States. Uh, I’ve now been in fifty … ss-seven? states. I think one left to go. Uh, one left to go — eh, Alaska and Hawaii I was not allowed to go to, even though I really wanted to visit but my staff would not, uh, justify it.”
— obama
I think obama meant to say 47. 47+1+HI+AK. But most americans dont understand math.
Understanding math?
Like Medicare for all, open borders, retrofitting every house, banning all fossil fuels, eliminate nearly all cars, eliminate air travel, banning meat and a guaranteed job even if you don’t want to work.
How is this for math.
Bernie endorsed this plan and got $6 million within 24 hours.
Yep, also killings thousands of people in their homes, “policing” the world, spending trillions on weapons, putting sanctions.
Sad. You can find missteps for anyone online these days if you look hard enough. For our dear leader, you simply wait for his daily tweet. Honestly, I could fill an encyclopedia with moronic statements from Trump in about a month. Try harder.