5G? what about the back hauL?
Having multi Gig download is all well and good but what will the telcos put in as their backhaul from the towers? Bet they generally only do 1 GB, shared between all those cell phones.......
The next top-end addition to Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor family, which powers millions upon millions of Android smartphones, will be the 855. And as you'd expect, this 64-bit Arm-compatible system-on-chip is heavy on the 5G and AI hype. It is due to arrive in phones in the first half of 2019. Your 5G network may arrive …
Optical fiber is the obvious way but also expensive. It would involve a LOT of digging. You could also return to the lily pad net idea mentioned years and years ago and deploy base stations in e.g. every lamp post. These already have cabling facilities, with luck you can pull more fiber through the cable sleeves and into the base station..
Since fog cuts into the bandwidth you can use free space optical links. Fog will reduce back haul efficiency but that is not a problem when handset bandwidth is reduced anyway.
People aren't skeptical 5G won't work, they are skeptical that it is going to drive phone replacement demand.
Though lately I've seen a lot of alarmist nonsense about 5G "death towers", so it looks more anti-science nutjobs will be out claiming 5G is somehow far more deadly than LTE, wifi, bluetooth and all the other terrible radiation we are bathing in daily. That might be a bigger problem than "skeptics".
"I heard that 400-700nm is the worst radiation wavelength."
You jest but I believe around 300-400 really is. UV is ionising, for some atoms and molecules.
One thing about believers in low level radiation nonsense is that their belief basically follows the pattern of religion or homeopathy. As one possibility after another is exploded, they invent new ones. OK, microwaves in general aren't harmful but the modulation of the wifi signal makes it dangerous. 50Hz has been around in our houses for years? It was safe until CFLs affected the waveform and made it hazardous.
I wish I was making this stuff up. Alternatively, I wish I had a big business selling radiation detectors to the gullible.
>I heard that 400-700nm is the worst radiation wavelength...
Trying to explain how electromagnetic radiation interacts with people is virtually impossible because its statistical -- the probability of damage goes up with frequency from effectively zero through quite likely to certain. Unfortunately most people don't do statistics, so they will take 'effectively zero' as an attempt by the lizard people to hoodwink them.
Where I live its common to find small cell towers on top of streetlights. The irony of people protesting the dangers of radiation from those towers is impossible to explain.
On last night's local news I saw a story on the electric utility in a nearby city that was installing "smart meters". They mentioned a woman who came to a city council meeting objecting to them claiming the usual list of non-specific symptoms when she lived in Colorado and a neighbor had a smart meter installed 70 feet from her house, and said she moved back home to get away from it and her symptoms improved.
Then they had a utility spokesman on who said that it uses the same amount of power as a cell phone, and is active only once a day for about a second. I'm sure she'd find a reason that a single second's exposure to that smart meter was somehow worse for her that being anywhere in public where she is around other people, all of whom have cell phones, many of them in use as she walks by.
The most significant outcome I see is that it's going to be much harder to find a phone that works well with your home provider plus any countries you travel too. Phones with global LTE coverage already cost a fortune. Now there's going to be all kinds of regional high-band offloading.
"Phones with global LTE coverage already cost a fortune. "
Unless you mean you want something that works with both CDMA and GSM I don't think you're right.
Early 4g phones were quite expensive but a lot cheaper than a new iPhone. Many Far Eastern phones have "global" editions which cover all the usual bands. I paid £240 for mine.
I expect 5g to get to reasonable prices about the time I need a replacement.
Ability to read wet fingerprints would be a nice feature to have ( part of my job involves cleaning things, so my hands are often wet and confuse my fingerprint scanner) but no cause for a new phone.
What would tempt me is if Google update ARCore to take advantage of multiple cameras / ir grid projectors ( a la Project Tango) to generate accurate point clouds ( 3D scans) of rooms and objects.
Great that mobile phone chip development continues but, given the recent 5Eyes/Australia/GCHQ, pressure for 'backdoor/compromised" access who will be independently determining that Qualcomm will not be engineering covert access to the chipset ready to be enabled when Canberra or Cheltenham send in their Technical Assistance notice?
Let me get this straight..
We have 4G that goes a long way, kind of goes through some walls and doesnt get badly ruined in fog.
4G is also FAST. as in, the SAME major cities where 5G will be implemented typically already have 4G doing 60mbp/s+ all day long with low latency.
Who the HELL needs more than that speed on a mobile device?
This feels like the 3D TV ballache from years ago. Why try and replace something with what is literally a gimmick.
Who the HELL needs more than that speed on a mobile device?
No one: 5G is just a marketing name. The basic idea is to increase the number and density of cells so that more devices (mainly autonomous sensors) can use it in the IoH (internet of hacked devices). Oh, and all the 4K live video feeds from music concerts and football matches…
I remember when 3G was rolled out and networks were trying to work out how to get a return on it. Charging for clips of football highlights was mooted, but it didn't work out - there just wasn't that much that a typical consumer would want to do on a 1.5" screen that required lots of data.
What changed was the arrival and mass adoption of full screen smartphones and the services that ran on them.
What changed was the arrival and mass adoption of full screen smartphones
By then (2008) they'd already given up on the premium data services. The increasingly ubiquitous wifi did for their grand 3G schemes, including the perennial white elephant of video calls: people weighed up the cost of a data contract over the alternatives and this effectively created a ceiling for data charges. Most European countries had enough operators that at least one of them was prepared to offer data only contracts for dongles and myfi devices.
In the US the smartphone, coupled with the lack of competition, did drive data contracts, investment infrastructure and harmonisation on UMTS and then LTE. But it was really the lack of competition that kept prices high.
The feature that no smartphone had/has.
My Ericsson T68 could do them. But, at € 0,70 a minute and being dependent upon the other caller and their network supporting it, it was too expensive to do. Even with ubiquitous VoIP and larger pipes I still almost never do video calls. I guess it was the blockchain / VR of its day: required lots of expensive technology but was really little more than a gimmick.
>Lots of people do make video calls, but they use something like Facetime, Skype or Whatsapp to do them.
Those are not video phone calls.
Neither Android nor iOS ever implemented video phone calls. (Probably because at the time it was too difficult for either company, who had next to no telecoms experience.Apple couldn't even work out MMS.)
I am left unsure whether that was meant to be funny or not, because on the whole commentards are not people who go for fantasy world conspiracy theory blogs.
Or perhaps I really should check out whether exposure to multi-gigahertz radiation in my garden really did turn the grass brown this summer.