Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep If you think 5G networks have failed to live up to their promise, you're not alone. But the tech is still early on in implementation, although some in the mobile industry are already looking to what might come next. The first full set of 5G standards came with 3GPP Release 15 in 2017, with the specifications officially frozen …
if only the crap 4G was as good as 3G for basic comms. In rural Oz, as well as most cities, none of these digital crap standards had the coverage of the old analogue. In Oz every G upgrade means having to find a higher hill to climb to get an SMS thru, despite newer phones being more sensitive. So just once, get coverage and performance back to where it was with 3G before rolling out yet another crapware standard that only delivers faster scammer calls. Most of us just dont care that some idiot video feed is faster when one stands under a telco tower.
Indeed. If they would only maintain the 3G that so much legacy equipment uses and which is a very reliable fallback from 4G/5G, then we would be less worried about 5G becoming congested, because there is a reliable fallback for important stuff like emergency calls etc.
Sorry for being a killjoy but 3G is the technology most mobile operators are sunsetting (and many have already sunset, especially in US and Europe). You can't reasonably expect operators to maintain 4 distinct networks, with all kinds of fallback and handovers between them, support 10 times the throughput, and pay the same or even lower price. In addition, 3G is based on WCDMA which is a very inefficient use of the spectrum because it assumes uniform transmission quality across its whole frequency ranges. As opposed to OFDM for 4G/5G which is very tolerant to bad frequencies. So, sorry but 3G is on the way out. For the better.
That same freed up 3G spectrum can be refarmed for 4G and 5G. Which allows, precisely, to bring better coverage, especially in the upload direction. So, it's not about keeping 3G hogging the best frequencies and keep subscribers complaining about 4G and 6G. It's about reusing the 3G frequencies to bring better network quality.
once everyone turns off 3G and 2G then we will get better signal the amount of energy maintaining old Infrastructure is crazy
for Australia thats after 30 June 2024.
If your mobile device doesn’t have Voice over LTE (VoLTE) technology, even if it uses 4G, it will not be able to make voice calls on our network after 30 June 2024.
Finally we will be in a IP / Packet only network for telstra and Vodafone already is...
4G works fantastically in my part of the UK, urban and rural. Can't think of the last time a call has dropped down to 2G or 3G (you'd know as it takes a lot longer to go through, and on 2G you lose HD voice). In fact I'd say the 4G at 800MHz is better than 2100MHz 3G ever was at getting out there.
It says more about your phone or telco than it does the general technology.
3G is inefficient and it's got to go.
In fact I'd say the 4G at 800MHz is better than 2100MHz 3G
The bands are the other way around in most of Australia. In Australia, 3g at 800MHz is better than 2100MHz 4g.
This says nothing about the phone or network: it's about the history of band location in your area.
yes, but I'm talking about the UK, where my chosen network operator (EE) never deployed 3G below 2100MHz. 4G was deployed at 1800MHz and 800MHz and it's the latter that really cuts through in rural areas (though their rural sites typically have other bands available too)
The OP however is blaming the technology, as if 4G/5G is inherently worse for coverage - but it's not. It's how their local telco has decided to deploy it, what bands their phone supports, etc.
Telstra seems to have deployed 4G at 700MHz. Doesn't this work well to fill in the gaps?
nope. Blaming the beeping lot, telcos, technology, Tom Cobbly and all because all promises of pie in the sky (or spectrum) are BS. Remember when a 56k dialup modem on a 486 was faster on a web page than the bloated 20 second loading of a dozen tracking scripts plus intrusive adds make a near current PC slow ? As for filling in gaps, my point is in Oz it does exact opposite unless one is under the widely spaced telco towers. My last long distance drive, a mere 1600 km each way north had the same coverage as it did 10 years ago despite lots of BS from assorted telcos about improved coverage.
Well, you’ll be wanting 5G+ then (aka 5G NR-NTN, aka 5G over satellite). Covering desert with 300km between single users, with cell towers idle almost all the time, is always going to be uneconomic. And therefore a coverage commitment honoured only in the breach.
Instead, why not stick the cell tower in the sky, Low Earth Orbit, that is literally already fully paid for by the times it orbits over somebody else (the USA). And then connect to it via a standard cellphone, so that you neither know nor care where the cell tower is. Especially given that the desert is: infinite sightline to the horizon (no blockers), zero humidity, perfect propagation characteristic for satcoms. Always going to be cheaper. Still expensive compared to boring terrestrial 5G in cities, but the distance has to be paid somehow, however you do it.
To be clear if you haven’t been following 5G, I’m not saying “bring a satphone”, I’m saying “every 5G phone you buy off-the-shelf will also be a satphone”.
Telstra seems to have deployed 4G at 700MHz. Doesn't this work well to fill in the gaps?
No! And this is only telstra, the other carriers are even more flaky. The big issue we have in Oz is the distance and population spread. You will (but not always) get coverage on main highways (A roads to you poms) but once you get away from those (B roads etc) there are huge gaps.
You miss the point.
4G IS more efficient. The fact you've got better 3G reception in your area is meaningless. And as 3G is switched off, the 3G frequencies will be used for higher G's, so things will be even better for you.
I hope you haven't gone all 3G - it won't be working for you for much longer!
A couple of years ago had a Masters student work at our company. He was working on a Masters project using LoRaWAN, an IoT wireless protocol. He was trying to get some ambitious interactions between an end device he had built (with e-ink display) and an application he had written. In his mid/late 20's and studying software engineering, he never had to work in a bandwidth constrained environment. As he investigated ways of getting a lot of information across a very constrained wireless link, I pointed him at legacy technologies and protocols which had already solved many of these issues out of necessity, indicating he may want to dust off some of these for his work.
Voice services don't need HD quality - 8kbps or even less may be fine where bandwidth is scarce.
SMS should still be considered an essential.
Networks need to be built so that these services can run even where signal strength is weak. Backward compatibility with lower frequency / longer range services must be maintained to provide those services!
maybe you don't need HD quality, but if it's available why wouldn't you take it? It sounds a lot better and makes phone calls much more pleasurable. We don't need to rely on 80s era compression schemes that mangle the already comparatively poor quality audio from G711, a standard that has its origins in what 1960s electronics were capable of.
4G gives you that (via VoLTE) and it gives you a usable amount of data capacity too, even at the extremes of coverage. It does it better than 3G ever could because it doesn't have the CDMA "cell breathing" phenomenon and it doesn't need to waste massive blocks of spectrum to service even one customer. It doesn't have the interference/EMC issues of a TDMA system like GSM or the poor data throughput of GPRS. It doesn't need legacy circuit switched infrastructure to operate. It is more secure than both. And it *is* deployed at lower frequencies for longer range. You can even get it all on a £15 Nokia dumb phone too.
Don't disagree, however, there are times and places (ie. right now in my house) where the EE 4G network delivers sub 3kbps, hence the phones are using VoWiFi service.
So whilst it is great to be able to use HD voice, there are times when the service needs to be able to down grade to significantly lighter data rates. Hence why services such as SMS should be maintained.
You can even get it all on a £15 Nokia dumb phone too.
The cheapest Nokia 4G phone is the 110, which is forty quid on Amazon, though I have just bought a new 105 4G (same thing, ish, without the camera, now superseded) for twenty quid delivered on eBay.
No thanks to old GSM voice codecs. Those old voice codecs count on being able to find a small number of strong tones in a voice. They can work for a radio announcer kind of voice but fail miserably on some others. I never used a cellphone for voice calls until VoLTE because you had to really concentrate on figuring out what people were saying and ask them to repeat.
5G does work well with a weak signal. T-Mobile in the US is using standalone 5G for their long-range 600MHz band. The original LTE packet latency was all over the place, tens of milliseconds to tens of seconds, and TCP simply wouldn't work. It's sluggish but usable since going to 5G.
When people hate 5G, I'm betting it has a lot to do with the implementation. Non-standalone 5G is still around and it's likely the #1 reason people hate 5G. Did the world learn nothing from FTP? Some telcos have their best frequencies reserved for 3G or LTE.
“Although the average speeds users in the UK are likely to see are lower than what it is theoretically capable of – somewhere between 75 Mbps and 240 Mbps by some estimates – this is multiple times faster than 4G.”
Well here in my corner of the Jura, the local 4G antenna has allowed my pre 5G iPhone, according to Speedtest, a whopping 322 mbps down and 45 up.
Implementation in the UK seems to be the issue together with too many users for the infrastructure provided by stingy operators.
"In Oz every G upgrade means having to find a higher hill to climb to get an SMS thru, despite newer phones being more sensitive."
Each new generation is more expensive to deploy and that doesn't even take into account the hit when scrapping perfectly functional gear. I have to wonder if places like Africa are going to eventually wind up ahead as they can buy the old gear for pennies on the Pound and for the same money, deploy far more of it to have better coverage.
Why did anybody update? I still have iPhone SE 1st gen, circa 2014, because it has excellent 3G radio, good screen, good performance, 64 GB memory.
“Newer is always better,” yeah, for who though? For the guy trying to perpetuate his expensive, eternally improving handsets. I paid $100 for this thing back in 2015 and refused every single Apple “update” which is nothing but Apple sabotage. Jobs was an ass and his company sucks. I only have this thing because FLIR made a companion IR camera for it, which I got for $50 second-hand because people are in a rush to get swindled.
I use data for free from my unlimited wi-fi, I barely use any of my “tablet” 6GB plan. This mobile internet is handy, but in no way is it “crucially important” at all. My 500 kbps wi-fi is plenty good enough.
NO SALE on 6G.
You have to have VoLTE enabled phone. But not all mobile networks have that enabled. It also use VoWiFi that is based on VoLTE that bridges that holes in coverage for 4G. I don't know how many networks have enabled Vo5G, but that is soon to be the standard for voice for 5G.
Quite a lot of the new base stations are self-powered. I guess greater efficiency will allow for more, smaller base stations for more dense coverage. Possibly at some point we might even get fire-and-forget self-configuring stations.
But I don't see networks outside China increasing their spend just to get the new tech. Existing stations will be updated and replaced as and when.
The energy consuming part of AI is the learning and training phases of the models. On net will be for inference only: that does not consume a lot.
Arguably, the models need to be updated periodically, but that effort will be mutualised off net. Vendors do most of the pre-training, in factory. Operators only need to customize the models to cater to their specific situations. So most of the energy cost is mutualised globally at vendor level.
At least where I live 5G is being rolled out on 600MHz (in addition to higher bandwidth sub-6 frequencies), giving it better range, structure penetration and reliability than 4G - so fewer not-spots. 5G also have a number of technologies in the protocol making it more reliant and spectrum efficient. New shorter range higher frequencies will be for for more densely populated areas which makes sense anyway, the point of 5G is not really about the individual getting higher speeds but about more users per cell.
If it seems more flaky to you it'll be because of the gradual rollout where it has very few channels allocated to begin with whereas your local tower still have 3-4 channels on 4G, so better coverage but only for now.
Ah... you mean:-
- more ads
- more data slurping
- more telemetary
All that lovely bandwidth will soon be used up and the Ad slingers/slurpers will be clamouring for 7G.
My 5G capable phone has never seen a 5G signal. My home area has a few Vodafone 5G towers and that's it. The local NIMBY's went apeshit at the mere thought of a 4G mast on top of their kiddiwinkes school. It came but three years late. 5G or 6G or whatever will never happen if this load of brain dead Sky/Fox viewers have any say in the matter. The 'windmills give you cancer' conspiracy theory is rife here.
I haven't noticed 5G being any faster than 4G, what I have noticed though is better performance in congested urban areas.
At home, I have a perfect 4G signal and no 5G. Previously, when I went into the city centre, I noticed that download speeds got a lot slower, often unusably so. Now, with 5G in the city centre, speeds are about the same as my perfect 4G signal at home.
Yes, but Crapple will show hot young people seeexy dancing with 1970s sized wireless home phone handsets against their heads and the masses will clamor for them.
But what do I know, I kinda miss my old Startac flip phone which made me feel like I was in Starfleet when I used it. Later model flipphones that actually did look like fleet communicators never made me feel that way though.
All I've really noticed is that 5G runs the battery down faster.
Two reasons for that:
1) Networks running 5g data with 4g voice, so you need to run both radios.
2) Networks putting their 5g antenna only on their existing 4g mast, so you've got 4g cell size, so you need to amp the power right up to get a 5g connection.
They will fix (1) when they turn off 4g, they will fix (2) when they need to.
> I haven't noticed 5G being any faster than 4G, what I have noticed though is better performance in congested urban areas.
That's correct. 5G massive MIMO antennas are able to detect and use reflections better - through beam forming (and interference cancellation). Even multi-path. It's an active field of research and more progress are coming in 6G (including even lower latency on the Radio side).
> "The main point in 5G was to increase the number of phones that could be supported per node. It might be faster in a best case, but that wasn't the objective."
When the telecom industry releases a new 'g', they don't focus on a single KPI.
Here are some of the most important improvements/objectives of 5G over 4G.
- Latency divided by 10 (from 50-100ms in 4G to 5-10ms in 5G - typical) - Assuming a 5G packet core is used (i.e. 5G standalone). Release 18. aka 5G advanced will see this promise fulfiled, as standalone will be mandatory for many use cases.
- Throughput x 100 (from 50-70 Mbps typical to up to 10Gbps in 5G - Multi carrier component, mmWave). 7GBps already observed in the wild.
- Density x 10 (from 100 kDev/km² to 1MDev/km2)
- Capacity x100 (100Gbps/km² to 10TBps/km²)
- Energy efficiency x 13 (52Wh/GB in 4G LTE FDD to 4Wh/GB 5GTDD mMIMO - typical values, not theoretical values - better values are attainable)
- Spectral efficiency x 4 (on average. values depend on conditions, QAM etc)
- Availability (x 10 -> from 4 "9" to 5 "9", thanks to cloud tech).
- Mobility x1.66 (from 300km/h to 500km/h)
That's for 5G. 6G will bring even more improvements across all dimensions.
- Throughput x 100 (from 50-70 Mbps typical to up to 10Gbps in 5G - Multi carrier component, mmWave). 7GBps already observed in the wild.
But never seen in any real-world situation in a town or city near you.
The x10-100 goals are all very well, but a more sane approach would be to cover more country with usable (or any) speeds, and maybe to focus on reducing the need for high traffic on phones. For example, improving fixed line services everywhere, and reducing the bloat that comes with much internet services these days.
>> But never seen in any real-world situation in a town or city near you.
Agreed. But it's not an either/or situation. Just as car racing innovations bring progress to the automotive industry, demonstrating theoretical speeds in the wild validates and refines concepts and technologies. Which benefits everyone down the line.
>> The x10-100 goals are all very well, but a more sane approach would be to cover more country with usable (or any) speeds, and maybe to focus on reducing the need for high traffic on phones.
Telcos are like you and me: they invest where it makes more sense and in accordance with their licence obligations of coverage. Again 4G was not well suited for rural areas (higher frequencies, lack of beam forming to compensate for distance and in-door attenuation).
>> For example, improving fixed line services everywhere,
Fixed line services also benefit from 5G. Only the last mile is wireless. Most back-haul networks are based on fibre, and now need huge upgrades. Convergent fixed/mobile operators tend to merge their mobile and fixed infrastructure for cost reasons. 5G throughput brings home wireless broadband to the level of FTTH and is much cheaper to deploy as well as faster to bring to end users. Now people also have to be smart enough to put their routers next to a window or even better, to select the external antenna option which has more power than a 2W phone. Subscribers in Norway, Sweden and Finland can do it. Whose fault is it if Brits can't?
>> and reducing the bloat that comes with much internet services these days.
Your bloat is somebody else's lifeline. Like all other markets, telecom markets are mosaics of micro-segments.
We live in a small area in So. Bucks and we're sick and tired of "Oh, get a 5G chip and you'll be all right" nonsense! 4G here is a joke, as are the broadband providers insane bills so we would love to get to 4/5G and dump them, but the telcos only focus on the big towns to the detriment of smaller locales.
telcos only focus on the big towns to the detriment of smaller locales.
No they focus on the areas where the RoI is acceptable to their investors. There is no intended detriment to you or your neighbours.
It's just that if they spend £100k on you they might only get £5k back every year. If they spend £100k on a large town they might get £5k back a month.
In the UK, network providers have been selling "unlimited(*)" 4G/5G packages as fixed-line broadband replacements, for stupid prices like £15 per month or less.
It's not surprising that their available bandwidth has been swallowed up by a small number of users.
Why are they doing this? Presumably out of desperation: they will accept a tiny amount of incremental revenue to show some sort of return on their 5G investments. But in doing so, they make 5G crap for the *real* use case of mobile broadband.
(*) Some companies have a hidden "Fair Usage Policy" cap of around 1TB/month; reputedly Three has no FUP at all.
Networks are (in theory!) dimensioned for peak demand.
Peak times for mobile and home use vary a bit by location but don't generally coincide.
So aside from a small increase in power consumption and the cost of providing the router, it's effectively free money for the network.
(Business use of wireless broadband would be a different matter of course, but the current offerings all seem to be consumer focused)
Where I live (Clacton, UK), using EE and O2, no matter whether I’ve connected to 4G or 5G, I tend to get really crap speeds of around 5Mbps. This is even when I have full signal strength. Little point in having all this infrastructure when the backhaul is steam-driven!
However, when I go to London, EE’s 5G really does shine a bit. I get speeds sometimes around 200Mbps which is more than enough. To me, this is proof that the concept works. In a presumably busy area (train station for example) getting any decent speed is what you’re after.
Overall, what does get me is the variability. Even with a good signal, it doesn’t guarantee speed. And even when being in an obviously not-so-crowded location doesn’t help either.
When travelling in the US last year, I noticed 5G signals almost everywhere, even remote locations. What was daft really was the fact that my mobile signal appeared to be proxied to an EE access point in the UK somewhere. This played havoc with navigation (no GPS meant I was instantly transported from Arizona to Berkshire somehow!) and finding my Apple AirTags proved interesting. It also didn’t do much for my internet speeds.
Generally local break out of VoLTE is only for emergency calls.
Would be a bad idea to send those to another country, but as they use a separate APN it's easy to identify them.
Pretty much everyone offering VoLTE roaming has implemented S8HR for normal calls.
(S8 is the 3GPP interface that carries the traffic and "HR" stands for Home Routing.)
I would guess that it's for tracking and billing because your provider will be responsible for charging you for billed usage and paying their partner network. Alternatively, it could be related to protection of your data so they can use networks you otherwise wouldn't trust, but I don't know whether their tunneling includes encryption or not. Both of these are guesses, though. I don't know if they are correct.
Mainly to simplify management and accounting (VAT is a particular problem).
It does have some user benefits too, but those are more side effects than features that were designed for.
A lot of traffic also passes through a central node on the way home to avoid the need for individual links between every network pair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPRS_roaming_exchange
The article mainly focusses on improved data rates and capacity, but one of the supposed benefits of 5G is use by IoT services using just a few carriers in the multiplex. This is enabled by an arcane spec change over 4G (carrier phase offsets) but I wonder just how many IoT providers are using or planning to use this feature?
...has there been some new discovery since 3G? The only reason 5G is faster than 4G is because not everyone has a 5G phone yet. Same with 4G vs 3G.
The only thing that potentially would work is to put a cellphone mast every 100 yards (which is why home Wifi works).
Honestly, Google and Apple should get together and kill off traditional telcos. If I pay for a subscription for a home broadband wifi router, I should be able to automatically use that subscription for unused bandwidth on anyone else's home broadband router (and vice versa). Just allocate 20% additional bandwidth for such a scheme and 6G is irrelevant.
>>> "...has there been some new discovery since 3G? The only reason 5G is faster than 4G is because not everyone has a 5G phone yet. Same with 4G vs 3G."
Very bad (typical AC) comment. The laws of physics are immutable of course. Technology, which is how we leverage them to improve our lives, however improves regularly.
There are more cars today than 100 years ago. And they are also faster. Why? Car technology (mobile devices) and road network (mobile networks) have improved. Keep your 3G bicycle if you want.
5G spectral efficiency is better than 4G spectral efficiency, which improves on 3G spectral efficiency, which... etc.
>>> Honestly, Google and Apple should get together and kill off traditional telcos.
Look up ecosystem on... google.
Google and Apple are just 2 US companies. There are well over 1000 telcos in the whole world, each of them striving to bring the best coverage to grumpy users like you. Not sure that's a chore Google and Apple want to get their hands dirty with. Not exactly the same return on equity ratio either. Very good recipe to send your stock crashing and CEOs fired.
has there been some new discovery since 3G?
Not "discovery" as such, but just the capability in cheap silicon to implement better error-correction and fancy beam-forming to make better use of the spectrum through spatial re-use and cancellation of reflections, etc. However, having the better capability on tap does not seem to translate in to good handling of poor signal situations, but I suspect that is a decision by the telcos/standard as to what is needed to sell it.
"If I pay for a subscription for a home broadband wifi router, I should be able to automatically use that subscription for unused bandwidth on anyone else's home broadband router"
That's what BT have been doing for years here in the UK. A BT home router also pumps out a number of wi-fi networks with names like BT home hub, BT fon, openzone etc. that any other BT customer can use. Used to annoy me at home when lots of my neighbours were with BT and each router was pumping out at at least 3 WiFi networks, whilst I was struggling to find some spare channels I could safely put my own single wi-fi network on.
You don't understand what the different generations of mobile data technology are for. You don't understand how physics works. You don't understand how commerce works. You don't understand how wifi works. You don't understand the purpose of a mobile network.
Simply put, there's a reason you're not in charge of a 5G network company. I do hope you don't work in anything to do with networking.
- the different "G"s are different *evolutions* of technology. Each technology is an improvement on the previous technology. Each one has better spectral efficiency than the last. Each one has improvements in technology that increase the number of people able to simultaneously connect to a mast, and increase the speed of data transmission. Also, each one has other technological refinements such as ability to switch to/from wifi networks if needed/possible. And other things that I confess I don't understand or know. Each "G" uses things we've learnt about the physics involved in the intervening years, and things we weren't able to do because computing power has increased over the years.
- Physics stays the same, but what we are able to do with it improves. That's why and how new inventions happen. Physics was the same in 1850. And yet we didn't have electric motors, electric light, TV or radio for some reason.
- Commerce works by selling something that there is demand for. In the case of Apple and Google, they won't collaborate on something so big because they would want the entire pie for themselves. Mobile networks need to be robust. Wifi has a limited range, so relying on other people's routers for service is crazy. It might be *nice to have* but it's certainly not practical to rely on. BT has tried this concept with their "BT FON" service which has been around for over a decade. Useful when there was no mobile network and you happened to be in someone else's house. And when you were happy with any bandwidth at all even if it was 500kbps. FON is a useless BT 'feature' at best nowadays.
- wifi works by having a very low power router in people's houses. It isn't long-range enough and the broadband isn't robust enough to rely on for a mobile network.
- the purpose of a mobile network is to provide consistent, reliable service. Relying on people's houses is not going to do that. We have the tech to provide service near where people live through masts, and we're going to need masts to fill in the gaps so why bother?
And why do you say you 'should be able to automatically use that subscription for unused bandwidth on anyone else's home broadband router'? Why shouldn't you have to pay for that? and even if you didn't pay, what use is it? It's not a commercial service - it's a freebie thing that's maybe useful on the rare times you're in range of a decent signal.
All in all your comment shows a total lack of understanding of what's involved, where the tech came from and where it's going. Read up on this stuff before posting next time, or at least frame it as a question from a relative newbie and then you won't get sarcastic replies like mine.
"FON is a useless BT 'feature' at best nowadays."
Really? Your comment apparently shows a lack of understanding of what's out there, do you perhaps work for BT (or EE) or its associates? [joke alert?]
In the various places I go (around the UK), I frequently see FON's logical successors as being availabl. Mind you, whether they're useful or not is still a fair question, as with many BT or EE product or service offerings. AFAIK these particular services are not intended for *mobile* use - e.g. they can't be relied on for hassle free handover between boxes. But then real mobiles often don't manage that either.
https://fon.com/bt-wifi-with-fon-rebranding/
The laws of physics don't change. That's why your radio receives one channel, just Morse code. After all, the first radio experiments worked that way, and the physics isn't any different today. The advantages are in our more efficient use of the laws of physics. Instead of using all frequencies, we limit to a smaller band. Instead of using analog data, we use digital data which can be more tightly packed. Some of the changes are redesigns like that, whereas others are simply improvements in manufacturing technology allowing transmitters to use less bandwidth while not getting prohibitively expensive. The laws of physics say such things as how much power your signal will have based on the distance and items between the receiver and transmitter, that is unless you use other physics hacks like finding a way to reflect it, but those laws say nothing about how low the power level can get before your receiver can no longer use it, let alone how many bits per second you can manage to shove in there. That's down to your tools, and those do change.
As for WiFi, you can have that. Lots of countries have some ISP who came up with this idea and has a public access method. Find which ones do that in your country, they probably exist, and sign up for an account. Congratulations, you have WiFi access from the house of anyone who has the same ISP and didn't change the settings on the supplied equipment. It doesn't work for people like me who buy my own equipment and configure it myself, but my neighbors have these, so you'll have coverage. That is you'll have coverage when you're near someone else's house, but I spend no effort making sure my WiFi coverage extends outside those walls very far. If you're in the street near a house, you'll probably have something, but if you're in a more open space, you won't. The same applies if you're moving between these access points. Most importantly, there are a lot of places without houses where you won't have any APs to connect to at all, and if you want the internet there, you'll need something that has better coverage than home WiFi.
"how much power your signal will have based on the distance and items between the receiver and transmitter, that is unless you use other physics hacks like finding a way to reflect it, but those laws say nothing about how low the power level can get before your receiver can no longer use it,"
Actually there's something called thermal noise or shot noise or whatever which sets an ultimate physics-based limit on whether a useful signal can be received.
If some level of error tolerance is needed, the bandwidth efficiency is reduced, and the latency gets worse.
If some level of error *recovery* is needed, efficiency and latency are hit even more.
Sometimes it doesn't matter much. Other times...
TANSTAAFL.
There's no avoiding mr shannon and his mate Digital Cliff.
Google as the only telco?
Son - Hi Ma, how ya doing?
Ma - I'm fine, sonny boy, I'm baking a cake for your visit!
Google - Cake mix, 99 cents at your local grocer!
Son - That's great Ma, we'll be driving up this weekend.
Google - Have you driven a Ford, lately!
Ma - You be careful! I'll have clean sheets on the bed for you!
Google - Serta makes the best mattresses, now on sale!
Son - OK Ma, we'll see you later! Bye!
Google - Serta King size mattress purchased!
They'd be better off working out how to take all the legacy equipment and optimise it's use. Could all that 3G gear be repurposed to ensure that low bandwidth traffic like SMS and Push notifications for OTP are routed via the legacy equipement which is more than capable of supporting them, whilst the more intensive content is routed via the 4G or 5G network as appropriate.
It wouldn't be impossible to have a device or chipset which load balanced the traffic appropriately over the correct network option.
The 3G network is hugely inefficient in many ways and that's why all four UK network operators are jettisoning it within the next year or two. No amount of lipstick on a pig will help.
2G will remain for legacy "IoT" needs and those who are still using old Nokia dumb phones, while extensions to the 4G network such as NB-IoT, LTE-M are currently the preferred choice for new IoT applications.
If you don't have a 4G handset by now, you've had, oh, 10 years to get one. You can even get LTE dumbphones now (more for VoLTE / 4G calling than data capabilities)
"They'd be better off working out how to take all the legacy equipment and optimise it's use. "
A lot of it goes to third world countries along with handsets that are obsolete yet still perfectly functional. A village can install the gear for very little money, give away the phones and boost from zero tech for a tiny price. It's a much bigger step than going from 4G to 5G to 6G and beyond.
It's okay, I've had my booster shot so I'm 6G-ready. ;)
<ducks>
That being said, I live rural and I can get reasonable 4G standing in the middle of a field. In the house, it's rare that I get anything better than EDGE (which barely works any more and blocks the phone in favour of data). At work in a town, 4G works, but that's after the phone (with only one bar of signal) has taken half a minute to decide whether it wants to run as 4G or 4G+. 5G? Never seen that. I doubt I will. Ditto 6G.
Given the 2G system is due to be switched off soonish, how about decent universal 4G coverage before worrying about other G numbers?
Well, precisely. 5G should be better than 4G.
4G usually does not use massive MIMO antennas (they can in theory). Massive MIMO antennas are able to focus the power on your location and give your more db for the same power. Even better, they will also "listen better" to your weak and remote upload signal (and signaling channels).
I would be surprised if any telco, anywhere, guarantees indoor coverage, as it's completely outside of their control. You have it outside and that's what they aim for. WiFi calling covers the rest.
If you are the person with the namesake website - a rural farmhouse in France with thick stone walls is perhaps not a good example of an urgent coverage blackspot!
As a general rule, anyone who says "4G is crap" should probably check that 4G calling/VoLTE is enabled. Some networks don't enable full 4G coverage unless this is done because they do not want you to be in a position where you think you have coverage but it's 4G only and cannot actually make a call. One plus point for Apple as all iPhones since the 6 support it on virtually every network, but Android support is much spottier and complicated.
mostly 3G. 4G / LTE spotty, you have to know where.
Whats 5G? Oh, those few thousand (barely two digit thousand) towers spread all across Germany! Main 5G usage here are campus networks. Beyond that we lack thanks to weird regulations and Ms. Merkel being behind 20 years what speed was considered as normal minimum in 2013 with her famous "Neuland" remark. And I consider her the lighthouse of modernity within her party! And now they talk about 6G where 5G is just starting here and 4G/LTE is common. You cannot imagine how often I see "E" = Edge on my phone in "modern advanced Germany".
It's that we don't need 5G.
Seriously. I don't need faster data on my phone than I have now, and I'm still using a 4G phone. 3G was a bit slow, but completely usable until it was prematurely turned off.
I need fast internet - on a computer. But it's pointless on a phone. I have no need or desire for Advertising Reality (you know that's what AR really stands for, right?) to exist at all.
Maybe you don't need it, but there are plenty of applications that do. I mean I don't NEED it most of the time as I work from home most of the time. But I do realise that plenty of people need connectivity when they're out and about, and you can be out and about with a computer of course.
Yeah. From the rants and the down-votes, you could be forgiven to suspect that El Reg counts many readers from the Amish community. Who cares? 5G is there. Totally prevalent in China, India and the USA. 6G will come next, hard on its heals. You can count on the Next G Alliance and other standardization bodies to steam ahead. By resisting the change in Britain, a handful of [Igno]rants drifting on some misty North Atlantic island are just making sure they stay irrelevant on the global chessboard. Their call.
Yes, 4G can be good - the 1pmobile (EE) 4G dongle Internet backup I use had a faster upload than my FTTC broadband when I gave it a quick test! (3 via Smarty, on the other hand, had an unmeasurable upload indoors).
However, I only have to walk a short distance to the train station to see a drop to HSDPA among a considerable portion of the track, and a similar run to the countryside sees a signal that is just about usable for SMS and possibly voice, but a complete non starter for Internet.
2G Staying?
2G has been gone for years in the US. All the carriers shut it down, broke a bunch of stuff. Ford put a new modem in my car, as a freebie. Then they shut down 3G a few years ago. Ford wanted money for a 4G modem, I realized that having my car online was a bad idea anyway, so I declined.
If it's a dongle, then it likely doesn't have full access to the EE 4G network as it does not support voice over LTE. It doesn't seem to matter whether or not it can make a phone call. (depending on the age of the dongle it may not support all available 4G bands too)
I see it myself on the train, where my phone is on 4G but my iPad moves down to 3G.
Put that SIM into a phone, turn on 4G calling, and I'd expect you'd see a drastically different result.
Vic - yes, in the UK, 2G is not going anywhere until the 2030s. It doesn't have the same efficiency/operational issues that 3G has and there is a bigger business case for keeping a token amount of 2G capacity available. Especially for O2 who have the energy smart meter contract.
In the case of the train or the West Pennine Moors it's a normal (Giffgaff/O2) SIM in a phone. The coverage checker says it is 'fine outdoors' but that simply isn't the case. It's the same with multiple phones, although none of them are 5G capable.
Possibly worth trying a different network I suppose, but outside those areas coverage is generally OK. Maybe I'll give it a go with EE/1pmobile, seeing as the coverage inside my house is outstanding.
>If it's a dongle, then it likely doesn't have full access to the EE 4G network as it does not support voice over LTE.
If it is an EE branded device which the manufacturers specification includes VoLTE (eg. Alcatel 3T), you need to check the EE specifications - if EE do not say it has VoLTE, assume EE have used firmware that does not include the VoLTE capability...
"On the connectivity side, Nokia believes wireless networks will eventually replace wired connectivity, even in enterprise and industrial sectors, which may place greater demands on them to support all those devices. For this reason, the plans are for 6G to support 10 times more connected devices than 5G, Vetter said."
I call BS Nokia marketing on wireless completely replacing wired networks, I can actually achieve the speeds as advertised over Ethernet unlike the up to theoretical speeds you can get over wireless if all the planets are lined up in the right positions.
For rural areas it would be cheaper and quicker to throw up a couple of 5G towers than laying the necessary cable.
Even in urban areas a 6G tower is probably less hassle than digging up the road to upgrade the cables.
I think Nokia are exaggerating in their prediction but they may well have a point.
Where I live,Ontario Canada, mobile data is still somewhat expensive (especially if you exceed your cap, per megabyte) so you tend to use it judiciously. On a shared family plan, I didn't know that it was all used up mid month. I was at a house with an unworkable ADSL connection it was barely fluid enough for the kid to play his Call of Duty game. I had to download about 600 Mb of HP shitware, graphics drivers etc. So I fucking "hotspot" tethered. I'm soon getting push notifications that I'm over the bandwidth limit. I spent a lot of time screwing around at that house and only billed $100. The bandwidth overage cost me $82. That was probably 2005'ish I reckon. Bandwidth plans are larger than that now, but it's still somewhat prohibitive.
I think we have a lot more (still shared data) on "Fido" now, but I'd have to check. I'm not the one that signed us up for that one, but good deal. I still only use it in emergencies (e.g. I need information or I have to attend to something where there's no wifi). I keep it turned off until I need it, partly because I don't want SMS attachments downloading.
It would help if we were all talking about the same thing rather terms being usurped and used for wildly different things.
Speak to the person in the street about 5G mobile phone networks and the response will probably be something about new handsets operating on different frequencies with more bandwidth. They might even throw in tidbits about cell sizes getting smaller in urban areas to increase capacity.
Speak to engineers or CEO's of mobile phone networks and you'll probably be told about how a 5G network is containerised and all the other elements that are changing in the core.
Then you look at the marketing and see things like "Fully 5G network". Which conveniently doesn't explain what the term means... It's both at once.
Even this article doesn't make it clear in some paragraphs referencing the network core and some referencing the handsets and bandwidth.
So back to the point... How about using different terms for the edge (frequencies, handsets etc, and the core systems);so people can follow what parts are meant and in scope.
> "Speak to the person in the street about 5G mobile phone networks and the response will probably be something about new handsets operating on different frequencies with more bandwidth. They might even throw in tidbits about cell sizes getting smaller in urban areas to increase capacity."
That's no street in the UK.
The response here from the typical person in the street would be about government mind control, or covid distribution. At best, you might get someone say it's all a ploy to make us buy new phones.
Hmmm....turning cellular base stations into radars ? 1 meter accuracy location for people ? All those radio waves in the air ?
Did we not see this in 2008's "The Dark Knight" ?
Between even today's GPS, plus sub meter location accuracy of Bluetooth 5.x, and now what's been "hacked" for research purposes on existing 5G infrastructure much less 6G, ( think Geofencing to a WHOLE new level ), not to mention 6G enabled cameras.....
Well...I'll leave that up to your imagination.
"This is an important research question because we can see mobile traffic going up over the next decade by a factor of 10 or even a factor of 20. So if we don't do anything, the power consumption of the base station will go up by a factor of 10 or 20,"
I wonder how much of that is driven by the operators touting faster networks in the pursuit of profits, rather than genuine consumer-led demand. Probably tied in with the handset manufacturers needing to make and sell "better" handsets year on year to keep shareholders happy.
Well, screen resolution increases. Networks support higher Fps too. Video casting apps propose a lot of content. So, video is the main reason behind this increase. Today, video content accounts for around 75% of data traffic (market dependent).
Videoconf apps are becoming quite common and cannot buffer, putting even more bandwidth and capacity demands on the network (especially if you don't slice your network).
Today, ~20% of gaming sessions take place on mobile and the forecast is that this will increase significantly in 5G.
In markets where "unlimited" plans are common, operators might actually be trying to rein in the demand (and introduce speed tier plans for that very reason). For these "unlimited" markets, the explosion of data demand is becoming a liability.
Not only is there significant increase in demand from more people watching more video on their phones, but there are also more people using the networks for other devices as speeds increase. When my network went down, I still had to work and didn't want to go into the office, so I used my phone to tether my work computer. It worked pretty well. With a lot of people doing things like that, some of them will wonder about whether they need wired internet when they're already paying for this, so some people may shift even more traffic to those networks as they cancel expensive ISP contracts. I wouldn't want to do that, but with my usage, it would probably at least somewhat work. Bandwidth demand has been increasing for a long time over both wired and wireless connections. I'm not surprised to see projections that it will continue to do so.
Look... I've literally... and I do mean literally, in the last few months got access to a 5G signal in spite of having a 5G phones for the last 4yrs.
Why you might wonder.
Because I was using a shitty provider (giffgaff) who used the backend services of another shitty provider. I lived in a large city until Sept 2022 and could get a reasonable 4G signal over most of the city.
Then I moved to a small town near the coast of North Wales... I couldn't even get a signal in town, let alone a decent one anywhere else within 20 miles.
So I did some proper checking out of service providers and found that they only one that had a decent signal in my entire area was EE.
So then begins the hunt for a sim only deal from some one who uses EE's backend services and actually offers the whole spectrum and not part of it... Because there are some out there who can't give you a proper service whilst using the same providers.
What did I end up with.
1pmobile... I kid you not. The cheapest, most basic sim only service around gives you the best deal and the best service.
£10 a month, unltd calls/txts and 25GB data and a full 5G signal everywhere I go, and a decent 4G one outside of towns/villages. I can finally walk down into town and not hit a phone dead zone.
So FFS... before you start adding tens of thousands more towers and repeaters... how about you... I don't know... ROLL OUT 5G Properly you utter cunts!!! Hell, even a decent 4G rollout to the whole country would be a good place to fucking start.
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I have never found being buried neck deep in my phone brings me any more business, more pleasure in life or anything at all, really. When ever I turn on Data to pull up a map to find a local post office or eatery, I get the info and kill the connection. I've got an office with several desktops and big monitors that facilitate doing things much easier than trying to work through a widdle biddy screen and touch controls that often aren't accurate so I spend time backtracking. I think a big part of this is I grew up in the real world vs. a virtual one so I'm usually head's up and looking at things when I'm out and about. I've also been working to keep from using the phone as a time killer by keeping a small notebook around to get on with writing, sketching and getting ideas down on paper. I can do all of that faster in analog than to try and use a phone. The changes in data speeds has little effect on my personal life up close. I do see commercial applications that benefit me, but I'm not sure that the arguments to add more bandwidth are anything more than telcos needing ways to extract more money from people as they big growth ramp of users is over. Now they need to upsell whether that adds any value or not, as long as it adds revenue and profits.
Let the downvotes commence!
Lordy knows what kind of browsing/calling habits are resulting in you being pestered 24/7/52. I can't remember the last time I had any kind of spam on my phone. And anyway my phone has quiet hours functionality. Only friends and family can disturb me between 2300 and 0800.
Although I do still pine for the days when I could activate airplane mode during those hours automatically. Would save quite a bit of battery life.
Lucky you! Here in Oz we get a lot of fraud messages. And it has nothing to do with browsing habits or anything else. They just spam SMS to a random list of mobile phone numbers.
And of course these all contain a link you need to click on. There have been times when these are coming every couple of hours 24/7. That is why I ended up putting my phone onto flight mode.
Says it all, really. Its why existing 'Gs' are abit hit and miss - once the phone ceased to be primarily a communication tool and became a spyware/advertising platform with part time communications duties nothing works that well. Adding 'more of the same' won't fix it.
Then there's politics........
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As a codec developer, let me point out that a proper XR codec which has access to depth data can handle motion vectors substantially better than 2D.
XR doesn’t have to transmit stereo video. In fact, it’s silly to do so as it would limit the receiver of the stream to only the angle of view of the two cameras.
Rather, XR will transmit scenes created via photogrammetry where frame to frame, motion vectors will move vertices but textures will remain mostly the same. For the most part, from frame to frame, static scenes will remain mostly unchanged. Objects in motion will be transmitted as additional texture data which will only include data not previously observed and transmitted.
Scene changes similar in 3D to what was an I-Frame in 2D will be very data intensive and most likely will require buffering. But the 3D version of P and B data will be considerably smaller than its 2D counterparts.
But, these are all things we don’t like thinking about because it would suggest 6G isn’t needed for XR.
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Ahh the telecoms and vendors are off in fantasy land again.
For 3G, and 4G, and 5G, and now 6G, they have this fantasy that factories and such will rip out their wifi and ethernet, and pay a telecom per device to hook up to 6G networks.
Of course I would do this.. why wouldn't I remove an already installed, highly reliable and available network* with installing ethernet to 6G bridges on each and every device (or buying new devices with 6G in them), then paying a telecom per-device for whatever service you happen to get, subject to getting adequate signal strength? That's definitely a sensible thing and not a totally ridiculous fantasy on the part of the telecom vendors.
I also question this assumption that mobile phone usage will constantly increase -- they did find in Japan, once people started getting gpbs speeds (not mobile, but still) that past some point usage did NOT keep going up and up -- after all, if you're streaming 4K video 24/7, there's nowhere to go from there that's going to magically use even more bandwidth. Compared to a few years ago, more widespread use of H.265 versus H.264 or MPEG4 or god forbid MPEG2 (plus some streaming providers letting the picture quality go to hell compared to a few years ago...) also means less bandwidth used for the streaming people are doing whether it's 4K or some 640x480 SD-style stream. Even their people running bittorrent 24/7, the torrents would finish, they'd share with everyone who wanted a copy -- pretty quicklly at those higher internet speeds -- and usage plateaued.
Given the issues with the distance and SNR degradation of 5g, in Australia it doesn't make much sense, even for 5g let alone higher frequency 6g.
To give an idea of the problems, we would need 3-5 towers to cover the main parts of our small town (technically a city) which only has ~25k people total (prolly 5-10k in the coverage area), so it really doesn't bode well as our telcos are switching off 3g (only connection for some), 2g got switched off ages ago and those bandwidths were never re-used except in very small pockets.
I can only see 5g making headway in the cities, 6g, well it would want a greater range and more reliable connection than 5g.
I honestly don't understand telephone companies. What they should do which is more than perfect for the UK is invest in completing the 4G network across 100% of the country and increase the Bandwidth. It will be another 20 years before we even need 5G bandwidth speeds. (If ever).
Theoretical Maximum 4G:
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standardized 4G's capacity to allow for "highly mobile data," with download speeds of up to 1 Gigabits per second (Gbps) and upload speeds of 150 Megabits per second (Mbps). However, these speeds are rarely achieved in real-world conditions.
Based on this information, just invest in finishing and improving the 4G network !!.
Here in Canada the 3G shutdown is postponed until Dec 2025.
Meanwhile, I found out I can easily just pay $40 and get a 4G wi-fi hotspot. This is perfect for me because I don’t pay for any cellular plan anyway: instead, I pay for a tablet data plan. Not only is it much cheaper, but I can get all the same utility with VOIP and SMS alternatives to “normal” cellphone functions.
Now I can skip the whole nonsense of providers trying to force my legacy equipment offline, by attacking my 3G radio.
Ok, suit yourself. Now I’ve got a 4G hotspot, and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop me!
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