Tag: 4G

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When is 5G Not Really 5G?

If you’re one of those consumers who likes to have the latest technology in your technology “toys,” the cellular carriers continue to make that more difficult as they periodically redefine the meaning of the term “5G”. As I noted in one of my earlier blogs, 5G isn’t really a single frequency band or a single technology. In reality, it is principally the “evolution” of cellular communications to the next level of technology. It does include some new frequency spectrum, but it also shares much of that with the 4G networks.

Traditional vs Dynamic Cellular Rollouts

In that earlier post, I noted that the term “5G” covers a rather broad distribution of frequencies from millimeter waves at the many tens of gigahertz all the way down to several hundred megahertz signals “reclaimed” from the old UHF TV band. This is an enormous range of frequencies and the characteristics of the “5G” that employs these frequencies varies dramatically over that range. To say it simply, the 5G implemented using Band 71 in the 617-698 MHz range will be rather different in performance from the 5G implemented in the region of 25 GHz, and it will require different technology to broadcast and receive it. 

How Carriers are Quickly Implementing 5G 

You may have noticed that in October Verizon made a big advertising splash about somehow increasing the size of its 5G network and when you can expect to be able to access it. You might have thought that Verizon had made a huge investment in new towers and hardware to bring this new capability to you. No, what Verizon had done was to redefine some of its 4G frequency spectrum to be 5G, something that is called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS). 

One of the big drawbacks of millimeter wave 5G is that it does require new towers and hardware and its characteristics result in needing many more towers per square mile of coverage area than does LTE 4G operating at <2 GHz. By using DSS, cellular carriers can provide a “version” of 5G using their existing 4G infrastructure. The benefits of DSS to the carriers are shown in the first figure. DSS implementation is faster and much cheaper for the carriers. 

Cellular Resource Allocation – Sourced from Nokia

So how do the carriers manage to combine two different technologies on the same towers? They accomplish this magic by “slicing and dicing” both time and frequency space as shown in the second illustration. It’s not essential for us to totally understand how this is done, but the key concept is that the frequencies and “block” of time will be shared by the 4G and 5G signals. The concept is significant because it means that as 5G phones become increasingly available, they find that 5G signals are readily available. This is essentially because they have been “invisibly” integrated with the 4G signals that have been there all along. 

Despite Verizon having a big splash about this last month, DSS isn’t something that is limited to Verizon. For the past year T-Mobile has been actively rolling out Band 71 in two phases, a 4G phase and a 5G one. T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint gave it a large “chunk” of frequencies in the 2.5 GHz region which is ideal for 5G DSS implementation.   

Similarly, AT&T had previously announced an expansion of its 5G coverage to include 28 additional cities using DSS technology, principally focused on the 850 MHz band. 

So, all three major carriers are now employing DSS to speed up 5G implementation and reduce their capital costs. Many phones currently being introduced into the market, such as the iPhone 12 and the Pixel 5, are equipped to receive both mm wave 5G and what we’ll call “DSS 5G”. 

Setting Real-world Expectations for the Near Future 

That should be a big win for the consumer, right? We’ll get 5G sooner than we expected to, right? Well, we will, and we won’t! DSS 5G will be an improvement over 4G, but it will not be the very high-speed technology improvement many of us have been waiting for. Part of the reason for this is simply physics; lower frequency signals can’t carry as much information content as can higher frequency signals. So, the information content of a 600-800 MHz DSS transmission can’t match the information content of a 25 GHz transmission. Furthermore, by sharing the existing lower band structure between 4G and 5G no new bandwidth is being created. Therefore, the information content of the network as a whole doesn’t increase. In fact, there’s a slight capacity decrease because of it, because with DSS, you need to have 4G signaling and 5G signaling in the same band. Therefore, that signaling takes up a little bit of the capacity. So, if one is a bit cynical, they could say that the carriers are actually taking away some bandwidth from users so they can crow about deploying 5G in lots of places! To say it differently, everyone will have a bit less available bandwidth to share because some users will have some form of 5G to use! 

Average 5G Download Speeds in US – Sourced from Opensignal

The 5G that consumers are going to see, at least for a while, is what we might call “5G Lite.” The following figure dates from January 2020 and shows the download speeds provided by several implementations of 5G technologies. Note that because the figure pre-dates the Verizon press release about its DSS activity, that information isn’t included. Notice that the bars labeled mm wave 5G provide the super-fast speeds that have been touted for 5G. However, the bars representing lower-band 5G (600 MHz and 850 MHz) provide only a modest improvement over currently available 4G speeds. The 5G implementation at 2.5 GHz is nearly as good as the mm wave examples because it utilizes some “new” spectrum which doesn’t have to be shared with 4G.   

Making Informed Decisions About Upgrading Hardware 

So, what does this all mean to us, the consumers? In my opinion, it means that you shouldn’t throw out your 4G phones and hotspots unless you have another reason to do so. For a number of years, the incremental benefit of switching to 5G-compatible hardware will be modest at best, and that’s assuming that you have 5G DSS service in your part of the country. As more mid-band (<6 GHz) 5G gets built out, overall network speeds will increase, but that’s not going to happen overnight. Millimeter wave 5G will continue to expand in urban areas where population density makes the investment worthwhile. But 4G service will continue to be the backbone of the rural cellular network for quite some time to come, and the routers and modems you purchase today are likely to have many years of service life before they are overtaken by technology advancement.   

 
References: 

5G Networks.net, 5G Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS), 7/24/2020 

Chaim Gartenberg, Verizon announces its nationwide 5G network, The Verge, 10/13/2020 

Linda Hardesty, The 5G of T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T all rank badly for different reasons, Fierce Wireless, 3/3/2020 

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4G. 5G, 5G+!!! Gee, why do I care?

Written by WiFiRanger Ambassador, Joel Weiss “docj”

To the average person, today’s cellular data marketplace is a jumble of technobabble. Carriers continuously boast of the capabilities of their networks while also claiming that even better service is soon to be available. At the same time several companies planning to establish satellite-based internet systems claim that users will be better off with those (when they exist)! If only there was a way to sift through the “Geek speak” to better understand what the situation actually is!

The acronym 4G LTE actually stands for 4th Generation Long Term Evolution and, believe it or not, it is even a registered trademark. It pertains to cellular transmission standards that were first proposed all the way back in 2004. To be called 4G LTE a cellular system has to be capable of providing at least 100 Mbps capability. 4G LTE is in use essentially all over the world and LTE phones can, with some specific exceptions, be used in most countries. 4G LTE replaced the 3G CDMA network used by some US carriers and that network will be shut down in the near future.

Even though people (and advertisers) use the terms 4G and LTE as if they are synonyms, in reality, the term LTE encompasses futures evolution beyond 4G.

So if LTE is what we have today, what comes next? I’ve heard people talk about Advanced LTE; is that the same as 5G?

Advanced 4G LTE is an improvement on “regular” 4G LTE but it doesn’t represent a whole new technology…For properly equipped cell towers and receivers (phones) Advanced 4G, sometimes called LTE+ in ads, can provide increased download speeds, up to ~300Mbps. To enable this, the cellular network essential permits a receiver to make multiple simultaneous connections to the network. It’s as if you phone or hotspot had two or more parallel connections to the same cellular tower. In “Geek speak” this is called carrier aggregation!

For carrier aggregation to work, the modem in your phone (the device that actually talks to the cellular network) has to be of an advanced type and it has to be communicating with a tower that has the proper hardware on it. Suffice it to say that at present, most of your phone and hotspots won’t yet support this capability and it is not uniformly available in the US.

To make matters even more confusing, some marketing flacks at AT&T decided to create a non-existent standard that they called “5Ge” which is nothing more than AT&T’s implementation of 4G LTE+. Irrespective of anything you hear in an ad, 5Ge is NOT 5G

So, if we don’t yet even have LTE+ why are we worrying about 5G? What would be different about 5G?

The 5G cellular system will be a completely new cellular implementation that will enable users to experience download speeds up to the Gbps range. Although, the actual speed obtained by users on any specific tower will probably be less than that, on the average most people will see download speed improvement of factors of at least 10 to 100. In addition, one of the advantages of 5G will be greatly reduced “ping times” (the time it takes for your “click” to reach the computer on the receiving end.) That would mean that a cellular connection would have plenty of bandwidth to support multiple video streams and/or to engage in real-time gaming

5G technology actually will come in three “flavors” and the implementation you encounter will depend significantly on which carrier you subscribe with and where you live. Different carriers have purchased the rights to use different sets of frequencies for their own 5G implementation. Furthermore, 5G implementation will be different in different parts of the country depending on the population density.

The following graphic depicts a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and how our current and proposed communications networks fit together. The orange oval in the 0.8-2 GHz region is where today’s cellular phones and hotspots operate. The red oval shows the general spectral region called millimeter wave where the highest performance 5G systems will operate.

At the high performance end of the 5G spectrum there will be very high frequency 5G using what some people refer to as “millimeter waves.” The good news is that systems using mm waves will be capable of download speeds in the ~10 Gbps range. These transmissions will use frequencies of around 25 GHz. The bad news is that these wave are easily blocked by the walls of buildings, trees, rain and other obstacles and there will have to be many small “towers” to serve an area compared with the relatively small number of large towers we have today. Most people expect that this high frequency 5G will mostly be limited to urban and/or suburban environments.

At somewhat lower frequencies, in the 1-6 GHz range, there will be other implementations of 5G. Sprint had made investments in this frequency spectrum and other carriers are expected to use it also. Signals at these slightly lower frequencies will penetrate buildings and other obstacles better than do mm waves, but they won’t have quite as much penetration capability as we are used to with cellular signals today. The download speeds provided by 5G systems operating at these frequencies will be somewhat less than those made possible in the mm wave region.

At the lower end of the spectrum, there will be “low frequency” 5G and the carrier most aggressively pursuing this approach is T-Mobile which made a large investment in frequencies around 600 MHz, the so-called Band 71. T-Mobile is already using Band 71 for 4G LTE service, but later in 2020 it is expected to begin 5G operations using the same band . However, existing phones and hotspots that can receive Band 71 will not, in general, be able to receive 5G broadcasts on Band 71.

Furthermore, the physics of low frequency transmissions, however, limits 5G using these low frequencies to download speeds of ~100 Mbps. That might not compare with the Gbps speeds of higher frequency approaches, but it is sure a lot faster than the 1-10 Mbps speeds many of us live with today!

Wow, that’s a lot of information. When will all this happen?

5G is currently being rolled out by all the major carriers and is available in quite a few major metro areas. Here’s an interactive map of where you can already get 5G: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/5g-availability-map/

It will probably take a number of years before the mix of technologies being offered by different carriers shakes out completely. Since I live in a relatively rural area, I doubt I’m going to see much of anything any time soon! But, no doubt our grandchildren will grow up in a word in which everything is wireless. “Grandpa, what’s that funny dish-like thing on the roof of your RV?”