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Re: [OM] OT: Wireless Internet

Subject: Re: [OM] OT: Wireless Internet
From: Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2021 11:27:34 -0800
> 5G is 'Pie in the sky' Chris. Gotta have a gimmick to sell new phones
> even though your old phone is perfectly fine in the foreseeable future
> with the available tech.

As I'm up to my eyeballs in 5G deployment, I've got a little different
opinion on the matter. It's certainly not "Pie in the Sky", it's just
the standard technology advancement that goes hand-in-hand with
increased bandwidth demands. Aggregate bandwidth requirements closely
follows "Moore's Law". 4G (LTE) is running out of gas, and 5G
increases the overall network capacity to support bandwidth demands.

5G deployment is more than just changing out handsets. The radios are
different, the entire channel plan is expanded, the base units (at
each tower) have 10x the capacity, and the fiber backhaul network is
also increased by at least 10x. We're also changing the way the
network is designed to provide greater resilience and less latency.

All of the non-handset upgrades are being done to support overall
network demands regardless of the moniker "5G". In reality, from a
handset perspective, there really isn't much of a difference between
4G and 5G other than the addition of new radio channels and how the
signal is coded. It's evolutionary, not revolutionary. From a handset
to tower perspective, 5G is backward compatible to include 4G
handsets, and some variants of 3G, just as 4G is backward compatible
to include variants of 3G. We still have significant 2G areas left,
but those exist only for certain practical reasons and require dual
antenna systems to support. The propagation and configuration of 2G
allows for longer distance coverage in low density environments.
However, one thing special about 5G is that the standard allows for
the channel mapping to include the lower-frequency bands with similar
propagation features of 2G.

Another cool feature of 5G is the inclusion of millimeter-wave radios.
While the typical handset probably won't include this for the next
couple of years, fixed wireless and "in-building/in-campus"
deployments is expected to make heavy use of it. Generally speaking,
any given "radio' on a cell-tower will effectively support x-number of
average users. To increase the number of average users we need to
increase the number of radios on a tower, or shrink the overall
coverage area of any given tower. This is where millimeter-wave comes
in, along with a bunch of other cool things that are built into the 5G
standard. We'll see a new variant of picocell/femtocell deployments
that create a far more seamless and less compromised environment than
we currently have with 3G/4G.

Of course, where I live, we're lucky to be able to connect to a tower,
much less have a choice of towers. We first build towers to make sure
we have the geographical coverage taken care of, but then add radios
and other towers to alleviate the demand on any given radio. For
example, a football stadium may have many dozens of radios with very
shrunken coverage areas for each radio.

AK Schnozz
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