5g is here except maybe innocent and carriers don't agree on what it actually is one thing is certain though your phone will get faster and less it doesn't for now let's dive in welcome to upskilled our explainer show where we break down the tech that is making your gadgets better
today I want to discuss about 5g. a new set of wireless technologies that promise blazingly fast data connections to your phone right now with the right phone in the right city you can get download speeds of over 1 gigabit per second which is 20 to 30 times faster than typical 4G LTE.
5G Network Deployment
today I want to discuss about 5g. a new set of wireless technologies that promise blazingly fast data connections to your phone right now with the right phone in the right city you can get download speeds of over 1 gigabit per second which is 20 to 30 times faster than typical 4G LTE.
5G Network Deployment
The key part there is right phone and right city 5g isn't remotely widespread and the array of technologies that make it up are still kind of a mess and array of technology is key because 5g isn't one thing it's a collection of various improvements including antenna design cell towers and a wider set of radio spectrum and it's still unclear which changes there will make the most difference with different carriers focusing on different tech.
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Your experience of 5g may also vary widely so when it comes to 5g what's the good the bad and the realistic but first let's answer abates a question what actually is cell network well a cell phone is so named because the networks are divided up into chunks like cells in a honeycomb.
Let's imagine for a second a fictional early cell network your phone would connect with a tower via a specific radio frequency like a slice of the available spectrum and each tower has a limit to the number of people who can connect to it one for each slice so to get more customers cell companies set up more towers and have those towers broadcast as many frequencies or channels as they can but here's where it gets tricky.
If you have two towers next to each other using the same set of frequencies it actually limits the number of people who can use them because if two people are trying to connect on this same channel using the same slice you could end up with interference or you might even pick up a stranger's call so you make towers near each other use different slices of the spectrum but you only have so many slices to work with and you want to be able to have as many people as possible on your network so four towers that are far enough away.
You can reuse some of that spectrum without worrying about overlap so you want to maximize the channels per tower to serve the most people with the least towers with enough physical distance between towers with the same channel sieve don't get interference and in the end you get a cell pattern
These days most towers also called base stations are triangular and broadcast a different set of channels in each of the three directions to maximize coverage with the fewest possible towers. this is part of what makes a cell Eric so flexible smaller shorter range. towers close together can boost capacity in a dense city while larger more spaced out towers can cover rural areas.
Most cell technology has been about getting those slices of spectrum to encode more and more data and getting more people connected to each tower at once early cell towers might only have supported at most a dozen people making analog voice calls but modern networks use tricks like time sharing and advanced encoding and modulation to support hundreds or even thousands of people all streaming 03:03 Netflix and Verizon Facebook.
So how will 5g improve all this well the change isn't really a hardware one but 5G's is a much broader range of the e/m spectrum and dedicates more bandwidth to those channels. That means it gives people bigger slices traditional cell signals have mostly fallen between 500 and 2500mHz frequency on the e/m spectrum. but 5g can use frequencies up to 20 times higher than that the official 5gn are or new radio spec breaks into two chunks fr1 which covers around 400 to 6000 megahertz and fr2 which is about 24 to 50 gigahertz the much-hyped millimeter wave which we will return to short when we spoke to Qualcomm who make the chips that power most Android phones including cellular modems
Your experience of 5g may also vary widely so when it comes to 5g what's the good the bad and the realistic but first let's answer abates a question what actually is cell network well a cell phone is so named because the networks are divided up into chunks like cells in a honeycomb.
Let's imagine for a second a fictional early cell network your phone would connect with a tower via a specific radio frequency like a slice of the available spectrum and each tower has a limit to the number of people who can connect to it one for each slice so to get more customers cell companies set up more towers and have those towers broadcast as many frequencies or channels as they can but here's where it gets tricky.
If you have two towers next to each other using the same set of frequencies it actually limits the number of people who can use them because if two people are trying to connect on this same channel using the same slice you could end up with interference or you might even pick up a stranger's call so you make towers near each other use different slices of the spectrum but you only have so many slices to work with and you want to be able to have as many people as possible on your network so four towers that are far enough away.
You can reuse some of that spectrum without worrying about overlap so you want to maximize the channels per tower to serve the most people with the least towers with enough physical distance between towers with the same channel sieve don't get interference and in the end you get a cell pattern
These days most towers also called base stations are triangular and broadcast a different set of channels in each of the three directions to maximize coverage with the fewest possible towers. this is part of what makes a cell Eric so flexible smaller shorter range. towers close together can boost capacity in a dense city while larger more spaced out towers can cover rural areas.
Most cell technology has been about getting those slices of spectrum to encode more and more data and getting more people connected to each tower at once early cell towers might only have supported at most a dozen people making analog voice calls but modern networks use tricks like time sharing and advanced encoding and modulation to support hundreds or even thousands of people all streaming 03:03 Netflix and Verizon Facebook.
So how will 5g improve all this well the change isn't really a hardware one but 5G's is a much broader range of the e/m spectrum and dedicates more bandwidth to those channels. That means it gives people bigger slices traditional cell signals have mostly fallen between 500 and 2500mHz frequency on the e/m spectrum. but 5g can use frequencies up to 20 times higher than that the official 5gn are or new radio spec breaks into two chunks fr1 which covers around 400 to 6000 megahertz and fr2 which is about 24 to 50 gigahertz the much-hyped millimeter wave which we will return to short when we spoke to Qualcomm who make the chips that power most Android phones including cellular modems
They said in practical usage the sub 6 gigahertz spectrum should be thought of as two chunks that behave very differently under 1000 and over 2500 megahertz quick refresher cell signals are an electromagnetic wave just like light or radio waves and Hertz is the frequency or the number of peaks and valleys.
That wave carries per second lower frequencies are easier to transmit longer distances. they can wrap around or pass through most objects. think of sound waves you can hear the bass from your neighbor's stereo but the high-frequency the treble gets absorbed before it reaches you.
For just this reason some companies like t-mobile and AT&T in the US have been rolling out so-called low band 5g networks at 600 and 850 megahertz.
That wave carries per second lower frequencies are easier to transmit longer distances. they can wrap around or pass through most objects. think of sound waves you can hear the bass from your neighbor's stereo but the high-frequency the treble gets absorbed before it reaches you.
For just this reason some companies like t-mobile and AT&T in the US have been rolling out so-called low band 5g networks at 600 and 850 megahertz.
These have great coverage and require relatively few towers as a result but they come with a big drawback at these low frequencies. there just isn't much bandwidth and the speeds are a lot slower.
Think of bandwidth as how big a slice of the spectrum you can connect with at low frequencies there just isn't all that much spectrum to slice. so there isn't a huge range of options between 600 and a thousand megahertz so channels tend to be small like 10 or 20 megahertz small slices.
The slower speeds in some cases not actually that much faster than 4G. because of this most providers around the world are actually focusing instead on the mid band which currently runs between more or less 2500 and 4700 megahertz but may extend up to 7000 later.
This is higher frequency than most current cell systems and it will probably require some more towers to get the same coverage but it has a lot more available spectrum channels can be between 50 or 100 megahertz of bandwidth enabling much higher data speeds may be hundreds of megabits aside from sprint.
The US carriers are largely ignoring the mid band for now and instead focusing on that high-end the millimeter wave between 24 and 50 gigahertz. there is a lot of available spectrum here enabling channels as wide as 800 megahertz but it comes with some big drawbacks.
Before we get to those let's talk about what's changed in the actual tech in terms of how this signal is modulated or encoded to hold data not actually a lot cell signals use something called QAM or quadrature amplitude modulation which twists the sine wave.
The signal into shapes that get decoded into collections of ones and zeros for QAM has four shapes. that correspond to 0 0 0 1 1 0 & 1 1 16 QAM has 16 shapes be coding 2 0 0 0 0 & 0 0 0 1 and you get the idea the more complex.
The modulation the more data you can pass in but the stronger a signal you need to be able to read and decipher it and your phone and the tower will scale up or down the QAM depending on your reception in an ideal world.
Right next to a brand new LTE cell tower you could conceivably okay Matt 256-qam where each chunk sends eight zeros or ones with all this it may surprise you to learn that 5g signals are currently maxing out at 64 QAM.
We learned from qualcomm that the generally weaker signals and higher frequencies of 5g meant maintaining signal strength was paramount so in general they toned down this encoding. this means the speed boost of 5g is really due to those wider channels and more frequency and not too heavily modulated signals.
The even more complex 1024 QAM may still be coming someday but our Qualcomm contacts said it'll be years before it even makes it out of the lab to get the most out of those high bandwidth data channels. they've actually been paired to the new technology called massive MIMO which stands for multiple-input multiple-output traditional 4G towers. generally had between 4 and 32 antennas and in good conditions.
5G Deployment Options 
Your phone may actually be able to communicate with more than a single antenna at once boosting. the amount of data it can send or receive most high-end phones currently support 4x4 MIMO. meaning they can have 4 active connections to a tower.
This is definitely a best-case scenario though many phones are actually still 2x2 and even if your phone supports 4 connections, it's not a guarantee the cell tower can supply them. all a massive MIMO base station will have between 64 and 256 separate antennas.
A 5g phone should be able to achieve 8 or even 16 connections which are called layers with the base station increasing speed even more millimeter-wave. actually has enough channel bandwidth that only 2x2 or 4x4.
My mo is needed for that part of the spectrum but for the mid or low band connections massive MIMO should be a big boost. now this does actually require phone makers to produce a device with a dozen or more antennas which will add cost use battery life and may run into physical constraints.
That is a lot of antennas to cram into a phone but the tech should mature and get cheaper over time one advantage of this massive MIMO design is also take advantage of beamforming which is a technique for directing signals to the device that actually needs it.
It's not like the antennas are actually being steered to point at your phone but by using an array of antennas you can take advantage of some clever physics a cell antenna broadcast in all directions though they're frequently mounted on panels these days. so they've really just broadcast in 180 degrees.
But if you broadcast the same signal from two antennas near each other there will be places where their signals intersect an overlap. that will be stronger than a signal either individual antenna can generate by grouping even more antennas together you can reinforce. this effect creating a beam where all the waves from each antenna arrive at once by shifting the phase of the antennas.
Essentially the timing of the waves they're making you can actually bend and direct this beam. the tower will measure the signal from your phone and all of the reflections from the signal bouncing off buildings and terrain. it can use it to help determine your direction and it will aim its reply in the right spot.
So it's not really like a laser or even a flashlight but by combining the signals from multiple weak antennas. you can create a directed signal made from the overlap of their broadcasts according to Qualcomm. this lets mid band signals from a 5g tower travel nearly as far as 4G LTE currently does despite being higher frequency and it lets each tower support more users it's also crucial to millimeter wave which has other challenges to overcome .
5G Deployment Challenges 
Remember higher frequency signals are more easily absorbed and millimeter wave has small enough wavelength. it'll be blocked by just about everything trees walls in an energy-efficient glass will block these signals and so will your skin which is great for folks who are worried about the cancer potential of radio waves but not great for say holding your phone even the air actually blocks millimeter waves and rain and fog can potentially degrade the signal to the extent where the maximum range of a 5g millimeter wave tower will probably be under a kilometer.
Millimeter wave does have the potential to be crazy fast but the physics means it's unlikely to ever scale outside dense urban centres outdoors.
We would likely need towers every few hundred meters and indoors maybe every 50 meters still indoors may actually end up being the best-case scenario for this tech using small cells throughout malls airports office buildings and stadiums to essentially replace Wi-Fi with a superfast network.
Your phone would automatically recognize and connect to where as t-mobile and Sprint have gone all in on low frequency. 5g Verizon has really focused on millimetre wave with mixed results speeds have been impressive as high as a gigabit per second.
But early testers have complained about actually being able to find a signal, what's odd is in general the US companies are ignoring that mid-band. this is where most 5g networks globally are actually being built and while it probably won't enable multi gigabit speeds.
The mid band should enable data rates in the hundreds of megabits and do so without the range penalty of millimeter wave. so what could you do with speeds like this well for starters media streaming will get a lot faster. in fact you can probably stream just about anything superfast speeds like this could lead to nearly storage lists devices where all your files and media are instantly retrievable or imagine.
A camera with no memory card that just beams 4k video straight into the cloud in a best-case scenario. it also makes wired internet functionally obsolete and part of the 5g plan is a convergence with Wi-Fi, where your internet and your cell network become the same thing.
There's also huge potential in less exciting realms like infrastructure and manufacturing and research opening up the possibility of high-resolution sensors. that can beam huge amounts of data in real time to servers for analysis helping a network of machines and automated systems adjust to changing conditions.
A lot of things would also benefit from another advantage of 5g lower latency 5g. it claims to be able to drop the delay for a phone communicating to a cell tower to as low as one millisecond down from 20 to 70 milliseconds for LTE.
Effects of 5G on gaming
now this is probably years away in reality but it could help with mobile gaming especially as services like stadia and X cloud and Nvidia live are now talking about streaming games directly to your phone.
These data speeds are also probably a requirement for true automotive automation with self-driving cars receiving data from sensors and stoplights and intersections and sharing their position and intentions with the cars around them and maybe even with a central municipal computer that can help to reduce traffic and deploy emergency vehicles and monitor conditions.
This all sounds pretty amazing but if you watch this show before you know I need to inject some skepticism here. first off these companies can talk all they want about multi gigabit speeds, but those wantin gigabit speeds people are getting right now on 5g that's how fast 4G was.
Supposed to be when the standard was first set but the which LTE speed in the u.s. is still only between 16 and 30 megabits per second a fraction of its potential the networks we are seeing right now in 5g are essentially prototypes and while companies will keep building out capacity.
Here's also almost no phones on those networks right now and it's hard to know how fast they'll actually be once there are more 5g phones out there. because of course your current phone probably doesn't support any of this tech and new 5g phones are currently pretty pricey in the rest of the world mid band.
5g does seem to have more potential it avoids the range issues of millimeter wave. while still potentially boosting speeds Mobile has already leapfrog broadband in a lot of countries and faster Wireless speeds could help a lot of people get connected but on the other hand I would argue that data caps and expensive plans are probably a bigger impediment for people relying on mobile to get online.
Then the fact that they can't currently download a whole blu-ray in three seconds. the big investment in 5g is also currently centered on cities places. that traditionally have had pretty decent access to the Internet already for now some carriers are also restricting 5g speeds for their most expensive plans and in the u.s. AT&T has even floated the possibility of a tiered system where you would need to pay extra to get full speed.
So what do you folks think are you excited for 5g for me if a company were to offer a 5g connection it was cheaper than my cable and faster and didn't have a data cap and my phone and laptop and PC could all share a connection I could see myself getting excited what would you do with these speeds and are you rushing out to buy a new 5g phone.
If you're curious about 5g technology then comment below and show how excited you are!!!
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