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Will there be a 7G?

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Re: Will there be a 7G?

#131

Post by mdasen »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #85
nemomarx wrote: post #64

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.

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 probably not getting mm wave with Mint. T-Mobile hasn't deployed mm wave much. They have deployed a lot of 2.5GHz spectrum which will be very fast (faster than most people's home internet connections). If you're seeing 5GUC, that's probably not mm wave.

I think a lot of people are attributing speeds of 200-700Mbps to mm wave when it's actually pretty ordinary speeds for 2.5-5GHz coverage today now that carriers have decent capacity there. If you're getting below 144Mbps, you're in the bottom 25% of T-Mobile's network experience. Over the past 6 years, speeds have gotten a ton faster, mostly from 2.5-5GHz spectrum. Verizon is the only carrier that put much effort into mm wave and it still covers basically nothing.

Ignoring latency, you're likely to get speeds similar to wifi from today's mobile networks without mm wave - unless you have a really great home internet connection and a good wifi setup. I have a MacBook Pro, but it only has wifi 6 and I can get 700-800Mbps out of my wifi, but I'm not getting 2Gbps from it.

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#132

Post by lxgr »

kulahan wrote: post #115
ksec wrote: 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…

I’m not in the industry, so I can’t speak intelligently on this, but as a user, literally the only change I’ve actually noticed in my day-to-day is that when they removed 3G, I lost a shitload of connectivity. I live probably half a mile from the capital building in a greater metro region of over a million people and I still get shit connection at home on TMo. Maybe physics is the problem, but why waste time making t…

More likely, data usage has increased greatly in your area since 3G was still available and your carriers spectrum or backhaul hasn’t caught up. 4G/5G make things more efficient but ultimately can’t fight physics.

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#133

Post by lxgr »

dakolli wrote: post #117
ksec wrote: 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…

Ive never heard a single person say they don't see a difference between 4G and 5G, atleast in the USA. Ive switched my entire home internet setup to 5G and haven't had an outtage in two years. Whereas it was once a week with fiber. I also can fallback with duel sims. 5G has legitimately changed my quality of (digital) life.

That’s most likely because of the massive amounts of midband spectrum that became available for 5G use in the US and less so due to any inherent advantage of 5G.

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#134

Post by ianburrell »

general1465 wrote: post #32

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…

Ultra Wide Band (UWB) has nothing to do with Extremely High Frequency (mmWave). UWB is usually in the 6-8.5 GHz band but with 500 MHz wide frequency, while mmWave is above 24 GHz.

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#135

Post by lxgr »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #63
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.

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,…

Increasingly less so. 2G to 3G was a very clear cut on the radio side (TDMA to CDMA); 4G changed both the radio side (OFDMA) and the core (no more circuit switching, more Internet-standards-like).

5G is already much less clear: 5G non-SA literally depends on 4G for signaling and uses 5G-NR (which itself is still OFDMA) only for user data. 5G SA changes the core network again, but isn’t even supported in many networks worldwide.

There are huge jumps in bandwidth within a generation too. 3G started out with circuit-switched-ish 384 kbit/s and ended with 40+ Mbit/s on HSPA+. The jump from that to early LTE was much smaller in comparison.

So in a way, the model of “every once in a while, the carriers and manufacturers bundle up a bunch of optional extensions and call it (n+1)” seems to be coming for 3GPP just like it already has for e.g. 802.11.

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#136

Post by miovoid »

lukeschlather wrote: post #56

We really need a hybrid short-haul standard designed for short-range transmission. Something that uses low-frequency spectrum currently allocated to 5G but isn't locked to a single carrier and the protocol can be shared between WiFi and Cellular. Staking out some new frequencies would be great too.

WiFi Passpoint (Hotspot 2.0)

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#137

Post by TheJoeMan »

ksec wrote: 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…

My pessimistic take is it’s being optimized for the “numbers” users benchmark with. The 5G repeater towers that display on your phone as full-bars but the tower itself is constrained, to juicing the speedtests. Apple even changed how the RSSI translates to the bars. There are engineers doing great work, and the marketing teams muddle the waters (like ATT’s “5Ge”).

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#139

Post by [deleted] »

lxgr wrote: post #133
dakolli wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive never heard a single person say they don't see a difference between 4G and 5G, atleast in the USA. Ive switched my entire home internet setup to 5G and haven't had an outtage in two years. Whereas it was once a week with fiber. I also can fallback with duel sims. 5G has legitimately changed my quality of (digital) life.

That’s most likely because of the massive amounts of midband spectrum that became available for 5G use in the US and less so due to any inherent advantage of 5G.

[deleted]

Re: Will there be a 7G?

#140

Post by Zigurd »

mdasen wrote: post #128
reaperducer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 covera…

Everyone uses the example of stadiums, but the occupancy rate of stadiums makes the economics of the network and backhaul iffy. I would guess only the biggest NFL stadiums get it as a showcase. Maybe parts of Manhattan, too.

Chinese cities, especially at train stations and the surrounding area get really impressive flows of people every day. But even in China I would expect that while they might have a lot more 5G SA when in the US, that the radios are actually mid band and not millimeter wave for most coverage. You still get higher capacity and low latency, but most people probably don't notice the low latency, except maybe Chinese autonomous taxis faking it till they make it.

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