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Everything We Know About 5G Cell Phone Networks

It’ll be blazing fast, but we’re still going to run into data cap nonsense.
​Image: Shutterstock

​Without 4G, our smartphones would still be languishing in the days of the early Blackberry and the first couple iPhones—able to check email and slowly browse the internet, but not able to do much else. But now, even 4G networks are getting bogged down, which is why it's already time to start thinking about what comes next.

It's worth noting that 3G and 4G and 5G are, more-or-less, marketing terms—the 'G' stands for "generation," and, while 3G brought us slow web browsing and 4G brought about "mobile broadband," it's still not entirely clear what the big leap forward with 5G is going to be.

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I think a lot of us would be content, for the moment, with 4G connections that were totally unlimited (oh how I long for my old data plan, at least) and had pretty good coverage nationwide. 5G is going to be blazing fast, and it's probably coming in the early 2020s. At the moment, it's looking like both of those problems will remain. Yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show, executives from Samsung, Ericsson, and Cisco—three of the companies who are shepherding this stuff into existence—told us everything we know so far about 5G.

It's fast as hell

On a proprietary, experimental 5G network that it built, ​Samsung was able to get download speeds of 7.5 Gigabits per second. The best consumer 4G LTE networks max out around 100 MB/s (though a new standard, called LTE advanced) could peak at around 1 GB/s. In practice, you're likely to get 5-10 MB/s on a 4G connection. So, yeah, 5G will be a major, major upgrade from that perspective.

In that same experiment, Samsung attached a 5G receiver to a car traveling at highway speeds, and was able to max out at about 1.2 GB/s. And these are in early tests. Ericsson's Ulf Ewaldsson said that by the time it's ready to be rolled out, we're probably looking at speeds that are roughly 1,000 times 4G speeds.

That speed comes with geographical limitations

It's looking right now like 5G is going to occupy what's known as a "high frequency" portion of the wireless spectrum. John Godfrey, vice president of Samsung's regulatory affairs, said that, because of this, you have a "lot of megahertz bunched together" that allows phones and other connected devices to send and receive at higher speeds. But higher frequencies also don't travel as far as lower frequency 4G waves.

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"It doesn't propagate as far, so you need to use a lot of small cells spaced at a couple of hundred meters," he said. "That will not be deployed nationwide all at once."

Apologies for the blurry image—this is from Ewaldsson's presentation. Image: Author

Because of this, you can expect 5G to be rolled out in major urban areas, where the waves can bounce off of buildings and travel further. An early Samsung test in Toronto was able to service a 6 x 12 block section of the city using 10 small base stations, meaning it's not going to be all that easy to build this out nationwide.

There'll be space for small carriers

Because these high-frequency waves are so open at the moment, Ericsson's Ewaldsson suggested that we're going to be able to "add on carriers." It's possible, of course, maybe even likely that major telecom companies will scoop up much of this high frequency spectrum, but there will at least be an opening there.

We'll learn more in a couple years

The International Telecommunications Union—the group that standardizes frequencies worldwide—isn't set to talk about 5G until its 2019 meeting. Ewaldsson and Godfrey, however, expressed hope that the Federal Communications Commission will help clear up the situation in the United States before that, so companies can begin to roll out the first consumer 5G networks in the early 2020s.

It'll power the internet of things

That is, if the internet of things actually happens. Every connected traffic light, every road sensor, smart fridge and thermostat, every connected car is going to have to communicate wirelessly. That's going to take up spectrum, and 4G probably can't handle it.

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"If we're going to get to a place where things can occur automatically without us noticing—traffic lights changing, temperatures adjusting, it's going to have to happen on 5G," Jeffrey Campbell, vice president of global government affairs at Cisco, said.

Fiber networks and mobile networks will merge

With the crazy-fast speeds 5G brings, it's easy to imagine a future where we use mobile internet all the time. But that's not really where the market is going at the moment, Ewaldsson suggested. Instead, fiber will be wired to most places, with 5G filling in the gaps. 5G base stations will have a fiber backbone, meanwhile, which helps keep speeds high. This setup could, potentially, help bridge the rural internet speed problem we have at the moment.

"If you envision a future network, it's got fiber running as far out [geographically, into rural areas] as possible," he said. "And then, you have 5G radio access filling in the last bits."

We're still going to get hosed by data caps

This all sounds great and wonderful, but it's sadly looking like a data cap business model probably isn't going to go away for cell phone users anytime soon. Not because there'll be a spectrum jam, as ​carriers like Verizon and ​AT&T claim, but because the carriers will be able to continue charging power users and data hogs because they're worth a lot of money.

"It's more about philosophy of how the market will operate. Some people like all-you-can-eat, where heavy users are subsidized by light users. That includes, in many cases, older or poorer people who aren't intensive users," Campbell said. "One way to direct costs of running networks is to charge the ones who are causing [high data traffic]. It doesn't seem irrational for a 5G world to include data caps."

So, that seems like kind of a bummer. But Edwaldsson did rightly note that "the price per bit is on an extremely downward slope.

"It's several ten thousand times lower today than it was 15 years ago," he said. "The demand for that is coming from the outside, from the customers, on the industry."

It's worth noting that a gigabyte doesn't go as far as it used to, and that trend is likely to continue as streaming video becomes higher quality. So, still probably a bummer.