Back in about 1997, I did some work on what eventually became LTE. Some of the things we developed back then didn't get in to 4G, but are now appearing in 5G. So, yeah – some of this stuff takes awhi...
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Back in about 1997, I did some work on what eventually became LTE. Some of the things we developed back then didn't get in to 4G, but are now appearing in 5G. So, yeah – some of this stuff takes awhile to mature, get implemented, and deployed. That said, 5G is going to be an important upgrade, but it will not be life-changing for the majority of people The key is understanding the different frequency bands. The bands we use for 4G today have (relatively) long range and reasonable penetration into buildings (so you can get a phone call while you're at the grocery store). So, they are great for rural and even suburban areas where you don't need high capacity (think of this as being measured in bits per second per square kilometer), simply because there aren't as many people close to each other. In a few areas, you have things like shopping malls or stadiums that need higher capacity, and there are microcell solutions to increase the capacity in those specific areas. But, move into the cities, and things change. Now you have a high density of people and you need more capacity. In that environment, you need each cell to be smaller. This is where using higher frequencies starts to help – they have shorter range to start with, so the cells don't interfere with each other as much (in LTE, all of the base stations are on the same channel as each other). So, for 5G, we have ultra wideband up at around 28GHz, which only has a range of about 500 meters. So, you need to have a lot of base stations to even deploy in that band. It also doesn't penetrate much of anything, so you're not going to be on that band walking around inside a building (unless they've deployed an indoor solution for that building). Honestly, the best use for that band may be replacing the last mile for fixed internet service (which requires either an outdoor fixed antenna or placing a fixed antenna by a window). It may also be useful in a few downtown areas as well as high density environments like stadiums. So, where 5G may have the biggest impact is the mid-band, which is a compromise between what is commonly used today for 4G and the UWB. In the mid-band, we can get more spectrum to support higher speeds. We don't have quite the range of the lower frequencies, but it's much better than UWB. So, I expect to see a lot of mid-band 5G deployment happening in urban and suburban environments, which will be a nice capacity upgrade beyond what's possible with 4G today. But in rural areas? That will all still be the current frequencies for the time being. You'll be able to use many of the 5G improvements on those channels, which will improve things, but it's not going to become an ISP option out there – the numbers just don't add up. All of that said, none of this is revolutionary. The basic modulation schemes and channel structure aren't changing much (there are some new things happening at that layer that allow for more parallelism – it's just still OFDM with beam steering). Some improvements in the network will reduce latency, but the biggest cost in deploying 5G is going to be in upgrading the capacity of the wired network that sits behind the base stations. That's why I don't see bandwidth caps going away for 5G customers. That ended up longer than I'd planned, but the TL;DR is this: 5G is definitely coming, but it will not be a revolution – just a nice upgrade over what we have today. It's also absolutely not dangerous.