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Will there be a 7G?

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Re: Will there be a 7G?

#31

Post by VorpalWay »

wolvoleo wrote: post #29
VorpalWay wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5G seems pretty widly available here in Sweden in my experience, even in the countryside. Not that the speeds are actually better than 4G, but the indicator say 5G as I'm writing this in a tent in the middle of nowhere. :) I guess other countries are further behind?

Don't just look at the indicator on your phone though. Providers are free to scheme with those. Some honestly show the icon when you are on 5G. Others use the option of showing it when you are on 4G (not even 5G NSA) but the network offers 5G on the cell. The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.

It has been going between 4G and 5G today while hiking, so if they lie it isn't all the time at least.

But what do you suggest instead (on Android, a Pixel specifically)?

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#32

Post by general1465 »

Unlikely. 5G hit the wall on UWB (Ultra Wide Band; 10-100GHz) because geniuses who were doing marketing for its transfer speeds did not realized that such high frequencies are disrupted with minimal amount conductive material in the air - so surprise surprise, 5G UWB does not work when you are behind a wall, it does not work when your big head full of water is in the way of BTS and most perplexing for common folk, it does not work behind a glass because regular glass is full of iron - so forget on 5G UWB on a train, tram or bus, unless somebody put mini BTS inside the vehicle.

So 5G for most folks is just marginally better LTE and that's about it. Any higher frequencies like 6G (30GHZ~3THz) or 7G (???) won't achieve much of anything outside of laboratory, because they will hit exactly same walls like 5G UWB.

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#33

Post by eightysixfour »

esperent wrote: post #12
BlackRabbit1 wrote: post #6

5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G? I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM. Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are…

I'm not sure what the "SA" part means but my phone says it's on 5g right now and has done most of the time for a couple of years now.

The 5G standard is a bit of a mess. In the US we heavily rolled out 5G NSA, which means you still have a 4G network core with both 4G and 5G radios at the edge. You get a chunk of the performance benefits without having to replace the network core first.

This usually has similar (in practice) performance characteristics to LTE Advanced.

5G SA is an actual, end to end 5G network. The two biggest wins here for an end user are reduced latency (a big focus in 5G) and reduced power usage (the phone doesn’t need a simultaneous 4G connection).

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#34

Post by numpad0 »

esperent wrote: post #12
BlackRabbit1 wrote: post #6

5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G? I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM. Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are…

I'm not sure what the "SA" part means but my phone says it's on 5g right now and has done most of the time for a couple of years now.

5G SA means real 5G. 5G NSA means 4G over 5G NR.

They created an option to use just the 5G radio modem parts with 4G tower equipment to run them in the "Non-StandAlone" mode, so that telcos can start deploying 5G before even it matures. And the modem parts and their specs are called "5G New Radio", which is one of names of all time.

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#35

Post by Havoc »

wolvoleo wrote: post #24
Havoc wrote: post #15

There will always be new Gs...marketing teams require it. I hope they go into the direction wifi is taking though - stability rather than speed. I never think about cell speeds being slow anymore but irritation at lack of coverage is still frequent. Esp in urban jungles where buildings block it

That's more of a physics thing. For building penetration you need low frequencies but those low frequencies have less bandwidth available because the bands are smaller. At the same time bandwidth needs rapidly go up, making those low bands fuller. Because there's a limit to how many bits per second you can get out of a Hz of spectrum. What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters. A bit like the…

>A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally.

They're still readily available.

But yeah think this would need a legislative push to solve. Force high rises to host multi provider relays as you say and hook it into their fiber links.

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#37

Post by numpad0 »

wolvoleo wrote: post #29
VorpalWay wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5G seems pretty widly available here in Sweden in my experience, even in the countryside. Not that the speeds are actually better than 4G, but the indicator say 5G as I'm writing this in a tent in the middle of nowhere. :) I guess other countries are further behind?

Don't just look at the indicator on your phone though. Providers are free to scheme with those. Some honestly show the icon when you are on 5G. Others use the option of showing it when you are on 4G (not even 5G NSA) but the network offers 5G on the cell. The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.

I've been away from Twitter phone nerds scene for quite a while, what do they use now for those details? Is it still ##service## or something else entirely?

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#40

Post by quietsignal »

walrus01 wrote: post #16

Note that "G" generally is a marketing term for consumers, the actual tech is 3GPP rev-whatever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP Like 3GPP release 15 or 16 is what we currently know as a lot of in production LTE/LTE-Advanced stuff.

Exactly. This is far outside my professional field, but lately I've found that one of the better ways to read the tea leaves of the next decade is to look at the boring 3GPP/ETSI material rather than the consumer-facing "6G/7G" discussion.

The interesting part of 6G doesn't seem to be faster downloads so much as sensing. ISAC is basically about making the network capable of sensing the physical environment as well as communicating.

Some of the current work is already discussing the "six sensing modes", involving different combinations of the network and UEs transmitting and receiving signals reflected from objects, and even how users might be incentivized to let their devices participate

That feels potentially much more consequential than another speed bump. 3G/4G didn't just make phones faster; they enabled an entire ecosystem that was hard to predict beforehand. My guess is that sensing could be a similar pivot for 6G.

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