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Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

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Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#51

Post by rayiner »

learc83 wrote: post #47
Frqy3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't underestimate the cost difference between running a fibre down a street versus running it into every house.

Sure, but running it down the street is comparatively a much bigger cost. And I'm not sure the cost of maintaining a radio on every street corner, individual antennas on every house, and maintaining a clear line of site to every individual antenna is going to be cheaper than burying a few extra feet of fiber in the long run. Plus running fiber from the street to the house means the residents don't have to worry about…

> Sure, but running it down the street is comparatively a much bigger cost.

The branch factor kills you. I had fiber installed at my house. It took half a day to run it down the main road to the subdivision another half a day to run it to the pole next to my house. Another half a day to trench it under my driveway and install the CPE. If they just ran it to the subdivision and put up a 5G base station, they could serve a couple of hundred users. It would cost far more time to actually pull the fiber to each of those same couple of hundred users.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#53

Post by kingosticks »

learc83 wrote: post #47
Frqy3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't underestimate the cost difference between running a fibre down a street versus running it into every house.

Sure, but running it down the street is comparatively a much bigger cost. And I'm not sure the cost of maintaining a radio on every street corner, individual antennas on every house, and maintaining a clear line of site to every individual antenna is going to be cheaper than burying a few extra feet of fiber in the long run. Plus running fiber from the street to the house means the residents don't have to worry about…

Surely they'd always install the radios above bus/lorry height? Even in low sprawling areas of the U.S. there's sufficient building height available for that?

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#54

Post by 6nf »

leoh wrote: post #24

It's hard for me to understand why anyone is excited about 5G when most carriers aren't running full bandwidth 4G and have significant data caps. Although 5G may be fast in some markets, 5G on the whole just seems so pointless for consumers.

Faster internet is ALWAYS welcome. On wifi, on cell network, always.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#55

Post by noselasd »

jjoonathan wrote: post #43
Gpetrium wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the importance of 5G is not only tied to the consumer wanting a faster internet. It is tied to potential advances in remote surgeries, automated cars, Amazon drone packages, VR for medical purposes, potential improvements in security, cuts in operational cost by the carriers, etc. It should be seeing similarly to advances in computer power throughout time, to some it makes little difference depending on the t…

> potential advances in remote surgeries Whoops, truck drove by, there goes the signal!

This is the difference between the ceo and the engineer, the ceo sees potential, the engineer sees problems.

They're both needed.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#56

Post by jdhn »

Nokinside wrote: post #23
nimish wrote: post #2

4G->5G is the equivalent to upgrading from gigabit to 10 gigabit ethernet yet everyone is treating it like some kind of insane technology. I have yet to see what exactly the hype is about.

People seem to have strong opinion that this is the case even though they are most likely wrong. Just some changes: * You will have your own 5G home router micro cells. Factories will have their own 5G networks in unallocate bandwidth. Like Wi-fi but lower latency and better services. * High quality low latency streaming means that gaming consoles will disappear from homes. You can stream games either from servers or…

>You can stream games either from servers or from edge servers

Can't wait for the rise of GaaS (gaming as a service) and the associated monthly subscription fees.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#57

Post by ksec »

freyir wrote: post #35
superkuh wrote: post #16

Great interview. At the start Dave kind of conflates 5G with millimeter wave 5G. The big difference between LTE networks and 5G networks is not the frequency ranges used, low band 5G is perfectly feasible. The big difference is the linear increase in information capacity per antenna in MIMO (multiple in multiple out, many send many receive antenna) verses the logarithmic increase per antenna with single antenna to si…

Just to be clear, MIMO is not a new feature in 5G. LTE has MIMO. Old Wi-Fi routers from 10 years ago had MIMO. 5G is upping the number of antennas per base station. Theoretically, this allows a linear increase in capacity, but linear scaling is not always achievable in practice. The advantage of the higher frequency bands is the larger bandwidths available there. Conventional cellular bands typically have 5, 10, or 2…

>MIMO is not a new feature in 5G

Or Specifically Massive-MIMO, which is as you said upping the Antennas per base Station. LTE Massive MIMO actually already works in 3GPP Rel 13 for FDD, and Rel 7/ 8 for TDD. However 5G were specially designed with M-MIMO in mind, which brings higher efficiency than using in on LTE.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#58

Post by learc83 »

rayiner wrote: post #51
learc83 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but running it down the street is comparatively a much bigger cost. And I'm not sure the cost of maintaining a radio on every street corner, individual antennas on every house, and maintaining a clear line of site to every individual antenna is going to be cheaper than burying a few extra feet of fiber in the long run. Plus running fiber from the street to the house means the residents don't have to worry about…

> Sure, but running it down the street is comparatively a much bigger cost. The branch factor kills you. I had fiber installed at my house. It took half a day to run it down the main road to the subdivision another half a day to run it to the pole next to my house. Another half a day to trench it under my driveway and install the CPE. If they just ran it to the subdivision and put up a 5G base station, they could ser…

One tower for a 200 house subdivision isn't going to work.

If you want enough bandwidth to replace fiber to the premises, you're going to use millimeter wave (if you're talking one tower per neighborhood you're already talking about mm wave), so you'd need completely unobstructed line of site to every single house. The pole would need to be high enough that tower would he a more accurate description, you'd have to keep removing trees and cutting branches to maintain that clear line of site, and rain would cause problems.

I've set up microwave transmitters before for a similar use case. At these frequencies it's going to be much harder.

My guess is that they're going to have to run fiber to the end of the hypothetical subdivision anyway and set up multiple towers throughout.

Also you don't need to actually run fiber to every house to get competitive speeds to 5G. And you can run fiber without burying it. I don't think 5G towers in every suburban neighborhood is going to be a viable replacement for cable.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#59

Post by learc83 »

kingosticks wrote: post #53
learc83 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but running it down the street is comparatively a much bigger cost. And I'm not sure the cost of maintaining a radio on every street corner, individual antennas on every house, and maintaining a clear line of site to every individual antenna is going to be cheaper than burying a few extra feet of fiber in the long run. Plus running fiber from the street to the house means the residents don't have to worry about…

Surely they'd always install the radios above bus/lorry height? Even in low sprawling areas of the U.S. there's sufficient building height available for that?

Above bus height at the tower doesn't mean that every section of the sight lines between the tower and each house is above bus height.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#60

Post by Spooky23 »

learc83 wrote: post #47
Frqy3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't underestimate the cost difference between running a fibre down a street versus running it into every house.

Sure, but running it down the street is comparatively a much bigger cost. And I'm not sure the cost of maintaining a radio on every street corner, individual antennas on every house, and maintaining a clear line of site to every individual antenna is going to be cheaper than burying a few extra feet of fiber in the long run. Plus running fiber from the street to the house means the residents don't have to worry about…

On my block, they installed about 4 poles. The fiber splicing/install work took about 3 hours. Those poles will serve something like 150 households someday. This is a mid-density urban block with 1-4 family buildings.

It took Verizon two weeks to install external FIOS CPE equipment in my brothers’ subdivision, and probably yielded fewer homes.

That’s a lot of capital cost, and these telcos are looking for margins closer to cellular. They get that by eliminating these costs and getting better regulatory terms.

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