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Will there be a 7G?

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121–130 of 199 posts

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AT&T has figured out a way to monetize that. If you have a "Turbo" plan or add-on, your phone will work in crowded cells. If you don't, good luck with that.

Net neutrality would have prevented this kind of pay to win

Net neutrality as generally understood says nothing about being able to pay more for a higher service tier from your ISP.

It's entirely on the publisher side: net neutrality was an attempt to avoid ISPs getting paid extra---costs that would be passed onto you---in exchange for making your experience on site A be better than your experience with site B (or service, vs site).

Think: "Oh, yeah, Netflix 4k works great on your new Comcast plan! But if you want Hulu 4k, you're gonna need to pay us more, because Netflix pays us to make their shit work better than Hulu's if you don't!"

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get 5G mmWave in my home and around my neighborhood in Seattle. In fact sometimes at home I’ll turn off WiFi on my phone just because I’m sitting in a WiFi dead zone but the mmWave still works great. This is on Mint Mobile, a budget MVNO now owned by T-Mobile. I pay $20/month for 15GB data.

You're ripping yourself off, you can get 1TB of 5G from tmobile for $50-60

How is paying $20 instead of $50-60 ripping themselves off? Have you considered that the extra 985GB might be useless to them?

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

Hah, I was aware of 5G vs 5G mm-wave, didn't realize there was another way in which most 5G was "kinda fake" too.

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#125
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AT&T has figured out a way to monetize that. If you have a "Turbo" plan or add-on, your phone will work in crowded cells. If you don't, good luck with that.

you know AT&T will be there first in line with a plan.

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#126
post #72
post #49

It 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.

and that has definitely improved everybody's experience at concerts /s

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#127
post #49

It 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…

4G used clever ideas to get much better practical spectrum efficiency than people thought was possible... At the cost of very expensive infrastructure. The biggest selling point to carriers was standalone 5G networks that were cheaper to build but paradoxically carriers are prone to frame 5G as a feature customers pay more for. The area where wireless networks fall short is coverage. Obviously many homes and business…

This doesnt seem to match reality?

e.g. Notably several major carriers in India skipped 3G entirely and went to 4G directly because it was cheaper per subscriber. Which implies less expensive equipment per unit performance?

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

5GUW on Verizon isn't necessarily mm wave. Originally, it meant mm wave, but that hasn't been the case since 2022. Now it means the 3-5GHz C-Band spectrum or the 20-50GHz mm wave. If you're seeing 5GUW on your phone, it's going to be C-Band a lot more than mm wave.

C-Band spectrum also makes sense given a speed test of 400-800Mbps. That's fast, but not hugely faster than what you should expect with really good coverage today. T-Mobile experiences speeds above 560Mbps 25% of the time. Verizon's 5GUW (which is mostly C-Band) experiences speeds above 620Mbps 25% of the time. You ran two speed tests and got 477Mbps and 767Mbps. One of those is pretty average for C-Band and one of those is quite good for C-Band (25% faster than the 75th percentile), but nothing too out of the ordinary.

Those are speeds that are relatively common when carriers have around 150MHz of 2.5-5GHz spectrum deployed in your area and you have good signal and not too much congestion.

mm wave does exist, but the coverage is often a block or two with indoor coverage being really spotty. C-band coverage will be measured in square miles. C-Band won't have the coverage that lower frequencies have, but it's a lot more practical to deploy than mm wave. mm wave shines when you have a small, high-value area where you want to deploy 1,000MHz+ of capacity. Carriers might have 50MHz of capacity around 800MHz, 90MHz of capacity around 1.9GHz, 150MHz of capacity around 4GHz, and 1,000MHz of capacity around 30GHz. That really high frequency mm wave won't cover a large area, but there's a lot of it. If you're looking to cover a sports stadium, it makes sense. If you're looking to cover people's homes (even in major cities), C-Band is going to get you really good speeds with coverage that will be a lot more usable.

It's possible that you're getting mm wave, but those speeds are pretty normal for good C-Band coverage. The first test is pretty average and the second test is quite good, but nothing extraordinary.

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#129
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3G has been shut down in several countries to free up frequencies. 2G was also shut down in several countries, it seems to be still up in most european countries with shut downs being scheduled in the next few years up to 2030.

2G is hard to shut down, because it just works, and many of the core services and old phones rely on it. It will survive 5G, 6G, 7G an other Gs.

2G also needs a tiny amount of spectrum in contrast to the newer standards, as it was designed almost exclusively for voice calls, where a few Kbps is sufficient for good quality speech. (And 64kbps, which is only 8KB/s, is considered "toll quality".)

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#130
post #68
post #49

It 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…

In Germany I notice a massive difference in 4G and 5G. If I see 4G on my phone and know I can put it away again if it's not some kind of an emergency because it's basically unusable. I am not sure what is going on here, probably the telcos that are limiting the bandwidth.

The difference between 4G and (non-SA) 5G is fairly small compared to earlier generations. They use the same core network, and it’s actually quite possible to be connected to 4G and still see the 5G logo.

These tricks are less common in Germany though, as far as I’ve seen, so seeing 5G can serve as a weak proxy for “the carrier has at least touched this base station in the last few years”, which increases the chance they’ve upgraded its spectrum or backhaul a little bit.

Really depends on the concrete situation, though. Having a small 4G cell with 20 MHz of spectrum to yourself beats an overloaded large 5 MHz rural 5G site any day.

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