Millimeter-wave 5G Modem Coming Mid-2018 With 5Gbps Peak Download (arstechnica.com) 39
Qualcomm is promising to launch its first 5G modem in 2018, even though basic standards for 5G have yet to be established, nor even which part of the radio spectrum it will use. From an ArsTechnica report: Dubbed the Snapdragon X50, the San Diego chipmaker says its new modem will be able to deliver blindingly fast peak download speeds of around 5Gbps. The X50 5G will at first operate with a bandwidth of about 800MHz on the 28GHz millimetre wave (mmWave in Qualcomm jargon) spectrum, a frequency that's also being investigated by Samsung, Nokia, and Verizon. However, the powers that be have far from settled on this area of the spectrum, with 73GHz also being mooted. In the UK, Ofcom is investigating several bands in a range between 6GHz and 100GHz. As the industry as a whole is a long way from consensus, this could be Qualcomm's bid to get the final frequency locked down well before 2020 -- the year that 5G is expected to reach any kind of consumer penetration. "The Snapdragon X50 5G modem heralds the arrival of 5G as operators and OEMs reach the cellular network and device testing phase," said Qualcomm exec veep Cristiano Amon. "Utilising our long history of LTE and Wi-Fi leadership, we are thrilled to deliver a product that will help play a critical role in bringing 5G devices and networks to reality. This shows that we're not just talking about 5G, we're truly committed to it."
How's this gonna work? (Score:1)
You're getting damn near infrared at those wavelengths and they will be blocked by anything you can see and are completely line of sight.
Re:How's this gonna work? (Score:5, Informative)
A few things will offset this. One is the trend towards a larger number of smaller base stations, whether these are just compact towers or microcells. Rather than a huge tower fed by a bundle of copper and dedicated fiber pairs, there can be smaller pole mounted cells fed by GPON.
Another thing is the fact that these wavelengths will reflect and bounce around and the new technology will use that with beam forming and MIMO. All of the 5g experimental antennas I've seen are actually arrays of a large number of small antennas that are modulated independently.
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irrelevant. (Score:3)
What's the point of a 5Gbps connection if it only causes you to exceed your monthly bandwidth allowance in 8 seconds?
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Or just use QoS to prioritize popular speedtest websites while cutting on everything else.
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And don't forget the manufacturer installed applications, they need bandwidth to do things you don't need to know about.
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Very relevant, just think how much more money companies can earn selling you extra allowance!
Remember than companies are more important than mere consumers...
and how many towers will get the 5G/5G fiber link? (Score:2)
and how many towers will get the 5G/5G fiber link?
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Many of them got a 10gbe link for the LTE rollout. The rest got 1gbe links, but those can be upgraded to 10G by swapping optics on both ends.
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Anything above 10GHZ really starts getting affected by local conditions
Why? (Score:2)
And why, exactly, would I want that? So I can hit my monthly data cap in a mere 16 seconds?
Oh, but the carriers will increase caps accordingly? Bullshit. My cap went from "nonexistent" before 3G, to "10GB EVDO throttled down to unlimited 1xRTT" with 3G, to "10GB +$10/GB" with 4G. I don't see the carriers as likely to give up easy money just because new tech means we can rack up overage charges even faster.
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I don't see the carriers as likely to give up easy money
Well they have to milk the rest of the world for as much as they can get away with since pesky EU legislation prevents them from milking EU countries for as much as they'd like to.
BURDEN OF PROOF (Score:2)
A) You can place the burden of proof on the public and decades of evidence proving something is unhealthy. Naturally, there will be corporate influence undermining progress like big tobacco which delayed progress for at least 20 years if not 30.
OR
B) You can place the burden of proof on the industry and government to show evidence something is NOT harmful.
New tech now with unknown harm to millions or delayed tech with less harm. It is your government decides which path to go down.
Re: BURDEN OF PROOF (Score:2)
Basic high school level physics can show you that RF is non-ionizing. In fact you are hit with light rays which are of much higher frequency and it hasn't done anything. Until you start getting into UV, RF is harmless.
5Gbps? (Score:2)
That's the limit of the usb 3.0 standard.
Come on we should be using at least usb 3.1 for a 5G modem in 2018!
Things happeing now (Score:2)
Several companies have come out with 60GHz WISP gear that give full gigabit speeds now. At least one offering complete links for under $2k. They will have to go to some very high frequencies (millimeter wave) to get enough spectrum to do these things. 2.4GHz is over congested and 5GHz is getting that way.
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I'm not up on the tech. Is there any way they could improve latency rather than bandwidth?
No. Unless you count the fact that it will only travel within a room, rather than to a base station a kilometer away. The speed of light being constant and all.
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Actually, it's usually high packet loss and upstream saturation that causes the latency. LTE has sub-100 millisecond latency, and even 3g typically is under half a second. Yes, by networking standards, that's huge, but not unusable. What causes cellular communication to be horrible is when you get into multi-second latency because three-quarters of your packets never make it to the tower, either because of over-the-air congestion, saturated upstream pipes, or multipath interference, all of which are cau
Excuse my ignorance... (Score:2)
What in fact are they "testing" where it comes to the different frequency bands? Aren't the properties of electromagnetic waves pretty well understood by now? Shouldn't they be able to predict which frequency bands will work?
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Bet $40 billion they didn't miss something? (Score:3)
Yes, they can predict pretty well.
The phone companies can then spend $40 billion rolling out 5G nationwide.
Before spending $40 billion, do you think it might make sense to spend $1 million testing to make sure your prediction was right? A million dollar test is literally less than 1/100th of 1% of the cost of full deployment. Like spending $1 to test drive a car before buying it.
If you don't see that's obviously smart to do an extremely cheap test before spending tens of billions of dollars, I wonder, are y