5G is here

BigMonka

So 5G goes live in a few cities across the UK today (on EE). Personally I'm excited that it has the potential to be the end of landlines and the monopoly/stranglehold that Openreach has on the country's telecoms systems.

Is anyone here planning on being an early adopter?
I'm sure I heard something about iphones not working on the 5G band that EE are using, which strikes me as causing a bit of a spanner in the works of uptake.

wibble

Well there isn't a current iPhone with a 5G modem in it, and chances are this year's new model won't have one either considering the dust has only settled on their legal spat with Qualcomm.

Funkfingers

If the 4G roll out is anything to judge by, 5G is not going to reach rural areas of the UK for a couple of years. (Guess where I live! )

Some customers will find the new technology advantageous. Most probably will not. It will just make possible another bunch of capabilities that we do not need. Not exactly NEED.

stephen.wood125

5G will necessitate the refarming of 3G spectrum to serve many areas, there is also the massive massive civils program to be undertaken, a standard 2G/3G/4G antenna (as well as basic 5G ones) is around 15kg; the 64T64R Massive MIMO antennas are around 80kg so all the towers will need considerable strengthening, there are also additional ICNRP (safety absorption rates) calculations that need to be taken into account. 

The additional bandwidth needed for 5G will mean lighting up a lot more fibre with decent DWDM equipment; guess who makes a lot of "core" equipment in several operators? 

5G is going to be a long expensive road, personally I'm not sure I see the actual benefits, "100mb/s to the handset" is pure vanity. I can stream 4K UHD with encoded audio to my TV at home with anything over 30 Mb/s and not see any buffering.

The AR features will need lower latency more than bandwidth this will mean building more data centres, the only operator who has the means to do this is EE, guess why?   Oh yeah... BT.

There has never been a technology that allows users to off the shackles of the big operators, lets face it, how many home BB suppliers user fiber to the cabinet, yet you still have to pay line rental?? I'm with EE for home BB as they don't most of the others do. Many are Fibre to the exchange and so still rely on the Local Loop Unbundling technology and have their own DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer) to serve you just the same as ADSL but with better onward connection from the exchange.

Sorry for the rambling post, but I think we have to accept that true 5G (or "new technology" as the operators term it) will be a while off, it's easy to have a few eNodeB's in heavily populated cities, and let's face it it wouldn't be the first time an operator re-termed the identifier on your phone screen when it was connecting on the old mechanism (Edge-3G-HSUPA etc)

Jalapeno

Don't understand the excitement of people - it's just a faster pipe. 

3G & 4G not rolled out yet outside cities ....

stephen.wood125

Jalapeno said:

Don't understand the excitement of people - it's just a faster pipe. 

3G & 4G not rolled out yet outside cities ....

Also crucial to bear in mind when people are using "speed test" apps to check it, many ISPs and Mobile Operators host the servers for those services in their own points of presence and so often the results aren't worth a wank.

DiscoStu

I'm in Moray, NE Scotland. I can get 4G+ in some places with download speeds of over 100Mbps which puts my home fibre connection to shame.

Jalapeno

DiscoStu said:

I'm in Moray, NE Scotland. I can get 4G+ in some places with download speeds of over 100Mbps which puts my home fibre connection to shame.

I live 45 miles outside London and it's hard to get a freaking reliable signal to make & receive phone calls

TwoSpellWizard

I think I'll wait until there's a bit more coverage and prices are (hopefully!) a bit cheaper. I live and work in semi-rural areas so there'd be no real benefit for me right now.

menamestom

stephen.wood125 said:

5G will necessitate the refarming of 3G spectrum to serve many areas, there is also the massive massive civils program to be undertaken, a standard 2G/3G/4G antenna (as well as basic 5G ones) is around 15kg; the 64T64R Massive MIMO antennas are around 80kg so all the towers will need considerable strengthening, there are also additional ICNRP (safety absorption rates) calculations that need to be taken into account. 

Pretty sure some of the E// and Huawei antennas we have been installing over the last few years needed cranes due to weight, I can't recall a 15kg antenna!  But agree with what you are saying, much of the upgrade requirements will be additional wind loadings from bigger antennas and all the additional RRU's, some of the things going through planning at the moment look quite substantial.  Wind loading is really the issue on existing structures due to the over turning movement and subsequent deflection of a fully loaded tower.  Even if they are safe enough not good for those dish links!

I've been away from the active side for a while, god knows what I'm going to have to get my head around when I finish putting up towers for a living.  My head still hurts from 4G London rigging   

Maynehead

The 5G deployment today is actually a hybrid of 5G RAN (i.e. antennas and their controllers) over the existing 4G core network (hardware packet routing, mobility and security management etc.) This means that a lot of the advantages of 5G (ultra low latency, edge computing, network slicing, elastic scaling etc.) will not be fully realised until 2-3 years time, when service providers begin to migrate to a virtualised 5G core, and roll out the extra data centres and edge computing nodes to support it. Until then, 5G deployment will be restricted by higher costs and limited management capabilities, and will not provide you with everything the hype promises.

meltedbuzzbox

Jalapeno said:

Don't understand the excitement of people - it's just a faster pipe. 

3G & 4G not rolled out yet outside cities ....

Yes it is, I have a 3g mast in the centre of my village and 4g at the edge

boogieman

I thought it was beautifully ironic yesterday. A BBC local news item about 5G and broadcast from Covent Garden over a super fast 5G link firstly started pixelating then broke down completely and had to be abandoned. You could see the announcer was trying so hard not to laugh. 

I don't know about anyone else but I’m not planning to ditch my mobile for a new one anytime yet. I imagine 5G enabled ones are going to be selling at a massive premium for quite a while after launch.

RaymondLin

My phone can't even do Full HD, what do I need 5G for lol

axisus

All this is so far over my head ..... 

Jalapeno

meltedbuzzbox said:

Jalapeno said:

Don't understand the excitement of people - it's just a faster pipe. 

3G & 4G not rolled out yet outside cities ....

Yes it is, I have a 3g mast in the centre of my village and 4g at the edge

Just 'cos you have it doesn't mean anything. See my post above - coverage here hasn't changed for 20yrs, and I'm right next to the West Coast mainline and A41M - not far outside London.

BeardyAndy

Funkfingers said:

If the 4G roll out is anything to judge by, 5G is not going to reach rural areas of the UK for a couple of years. (Guess where I live! )

Some customers will find the new technology advantageous. Most probably will not. It will just make possible another bunch of capabilities that we do not need. Not exactly NEED.

Rural?.. I'm in Southampton and still find myself on 3G a lot of the time!

57Deluxe

and all this so that the Chinese Government can know that I will home in 20 mins...

boogieman

57Deluxe said:

and all this so that the Chinese Government can know that I will home in 20 mins...

And your PIN numbers and porn preferences. 

stephen.wood125

@menamestom ; @Maynehead both wiz'd for those insights. Thank you! 

If I could start a business now, it would be tower strengthening/civils etc, that's going to get the lion's share of the money over the next two to three years. Either that or SDN app programming /traffic migration for all the intelligent services routing migration that's going to be needed. Especially in some operators where they're not even running VRF/MPLS across the whole core estate. I think the likes of X2 etc will stay on LTE for the next 4-5 years and 3G will be turned off while they will still keep some 2G stuff (I think  critical infrastructure providers will keep it running for the distances even if most of it will be IP-ABIS) [/ramblemode]

thecolourbox

DiscoStu said:

I'm in Moray, NE Scotland. I can get 4G+ in some places with download speeds of over 100Mbps which puts my home fibre connection to shame.

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore

When the place that you are is just north of Dunbar, that's a Moray