This is the first I've heard of any plan for 6G….
Will there be a 7G?
71–80 of 199 posts
Re: Will there be a 7G?
#72It needs to work backwards, much like Video Codec and ask what do the stakeholders really want or need? We are closing in to rolling out the last / final phase of 5G. And yet none of the Massive MIMO on FDD is happening. We are still stuck on 32T32R, hardly that impressive considering we have that in LTE already. Not to mention the insane complexity increase from 4G to 5G. And judging from the previews of 6G that see…
Something I've noticed is that a phone is actually usable at a stadium or concert when 3g or 4g felt essentially useless at that density.
Re: Will there be a 7G?
#73I sure hope not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_the_End_of_the_World
Re: Will there be a 7G?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Also if I had a dollar for every end user residential consumer (as a person who runs ISPs) that confuses "5G" with "5 GHz wifi". Like, when your install techs have to explain to a customer why they're getting shit performance in the default 20MHz wide 2.4 GHz channel, and to reconfigure all their devices in a house to talk to a 802.11ax/802.11be 3x3 or 4x4 80 MHz channel AP in the 5.x GHz band. Consumers literally do…
> Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now.
Why would they know the difference? They don't have any technical appreciation of what either term means or its implication for what the hardware actually does; the terms sound similar; and they've been trained by decades of marketing to choose bigger numbers[1].
[1]: And many of them apparently didn't even know that "one third" is bigger than "one quarter", as A&W found out the hard way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger
Re: Will there be a 7G?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
And companies are selling electric cars even though not everyone has a petrol car… I remember people saying the same thing about 4G relative 3G and 5G relative 4G.
2G -> 3G -> 4G were all massive jumps that all enabled new use cases. I doubt majority of phone users who have a decent 4G connection would notice the difference if they upgrade to 5G.
In Germany telcos using 700MHz for 5G a lot (also for LTE in non-5G regions and sometimes with DSS). So they can create a lot of coverage on rural areas or building penetration.
Telefonica didn't set their signallevel-to-bars-parameters on their SIMs correctly yet. Even directly next to a antenna you only see 1-2 bar although the signal level is maxing out.
Re: Will there be a 7G?
#76Do we even need 6G?
Re: Will there be a 7G?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
2G -> 3G -> 4G were all massive jumps that all enabled new use cases. I doubt majority of phone users who have a decent 4G connection would notice the difference if they upgrade to 5G.
I feel like 5g is worse
In terms of signal level?
Well.. that amount of bars you can see depending on the real signal level is just a SIM configuration. In the "newer" networks they aren't configured properly yet.
Re: Will there be a 7G?
#78Note 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.
No it is not. 2G->3G->4G->5G refer to real changes in technology and system architecture, as detailed in the Wikipedia page you linked to. 3GPP releases are more fine-grained than that. E.g. rel. 99 introduced 3G/WCDMA, rel. 8 introduced 4G/LTE, etc. Other releases only add features. In the industry Gs are used all the time to refer to the technology/architecture, then releases are used to refer to specific features,…
Tell that to the cellular industry marketing people who decided to put "4.5G" on things. Also not everything that is marketed "5G" is equal in capability, there's a myriad of different bands in different regulatory regimes in the world, some of which go through material like brick/concrete much better than others. You'll see "5G" connections that have speed tests in an urban area that top out at 50 Mbps downstream and others where you'll have 850 Mbps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequency_bands
Even within a category such as "4G" there have been significant advances in some radio capabilities since it was introduced, like MU-MIMO, vs early "4G".
There's a very large number of different things that are all being marketed as "5G" now, so it's really a drastic oversimplification to try to say that all 5G is the same thing. Do you not remember the very early days of "3G" when cellular carriers were trying to market EDGE/GPRS as if it was 3G?
Re: Will there be a 7G?
#79There 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…
> What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters.
But that's also a physics thing. Plain same-frequency boosters hamper frequency reuse on neighbor cells, so less bandwidth for you. And if boosters run on a separate band, you'd need to do frequency planning for them just like it's done for cells now.
Wireless is finicky, we should really avoid using it everywhere wired can be used instead.
Re: Will there be a 7G?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of what passes for 5G in the US is the same old but full duplex with wider channels. Calling that 5G obscures the fact that millimeter wave 5G standalone is a totally different beast, and a huge network engineering challenge. It may seem bureaucratic to regulate what people can call 5G, but US consumers get ripped off thinking they're on an advanced network when in fact you could call it the long-term evolution…
sure but is anyone deploying mmwave outside of maybe sports stadiums? I'm not exactly going to get it on my commuter train or at work.
is anyone deploying mmwave outside of maybe sports stadiums?
I have it in my home, but I live in the center of a major city. It just speedtested at 476.64 Mbps down, though I think I've seen 650+ in the past, but I might be mis-remembering that.
However, I only get 5G mmwave (indicated as "5GuW" on the phone) on my work phone.
The carrier I use for my personal phone charges an extra $20/month for 5G, and I don't care that much, so I leave it at 4G LTE.
Edit: Just re-tested and got 767 Mbps.