Telecommunications providers relentlessly extol the power of fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology. Government officials and policy advocates fret that the winner of the “5G race” will dominate the internet of the future, so America cannot afford to lose out.
Pundits declare that 5G will revolutionize the digital world. It all sounds very thrilling. Unfortunately, the hype has gone too far.
5G systems will, over time, replace today’s 4G, just as next year’s iPhone 12 will improve on this year’s 11. 5G networks offer significantly greater transmission capacity. However, despite all the hype, they won’t represent a radical break from the current mobile experience.
First of all, the “race to 5G” is a myth. 5G is a marketing term for a family of technologies, which carriers can stretch to cover a variety of networks. The technical standards are still under development, so what counts as “true” 5G is arguable. As with 4G, the 5G rollout will take years, as carriers upgrade their networks with new gear and users buy new phones.
Just as they do today, connections will fall back to slower speeds when users aren’t near enough to a tower, or if the network is overloaded. There’s no magic moment when a carrier, or a nation, “has” 5G.
Even if there was a race, it’s over: South Korea and China have already built much more extensive 5G networks than the United States. But that shouldn’t be cause for panic. Customers in those countries may have a leg up on faster connections, but that doesn’t necessarily create a sustainable strategic advantage. Romania is one of 10 countries with significantly faster average fixed broadband connections than America today, yet no one in Washington seems concerned that will give Romanian firms a dominant advantage. The major tech platforms delivering innovative digital services to the world are still based in the United States and China. There are important concerns about the Chinese networking firm Huawei creating backdoors for surveillance or tilting the carrier equipment market toward Chinese-defined standards. Your 5G user experience, however, won’t depend on who makes the gear in the guts of the network.
The overheated rhetoric is based on the misconception that 5G heralds a new era of services for end-users. In reality, the claimed performance — hundreds of megabits or even gigabits per second — is misleading. Averages and ideal numbers mask huge variations depending on distance to an antenna, obstructions, weather and other factors. The fastest speeds require “millimeter wave” spectrum, which doesn’t penetrate walls or foliage well, and is generally less reliable than the lower frequencies used today. Millimeter wave requires a much denser network of antennas, which could be cost-prohibitive outside dense urban areas. Even if that hurdle is overcome, a gigabit per second to millions of phones requires a network able to move traffic at that speed end-to-end, which doesn’t exist today.
And just what are the applications that need more capacity than 4G offers? We already get crystal-clear video chats, a torrent of TikToks, Pokemon Go augmented reality, and massive Fortnite battles. Yes, every advance in network performance opened up new uses that seemed insignificant before, but the new capabilities of 5G are best suited to non-consumer applications.
If and when fleets of self-driving vehicles communicate constantly with each other or remote robotic surgery is a standard feature in local hospitals, 5G will be a must. But these next-generation “internet of things” scenarios are years in the future, as are the kinds of virtual and augmented reality worlds that appear in science fiction.
The most immediate use of 5G is “network slicing” to rapidly deploy and reconfigure specialized networks for financial, health care and other applications. Enterprises that need quality of service guarantees can access a virtual “slice” of capacity, rather than building a separate network. It’s a big deal for carriers and large companies. Not so sexy for ordinary consumers.
When we look back from 2030, the changes in the digital world will be dramatic. The 5G platform will support those changes, just as 2G, 3G, and 4G wireless did in prior decades. However, the heralded innovations of 2019 to 2021 will seem insignificant.
Enjoy your new 5G phone when it arrives. Just don’t expect it to bring you to wireless nirvana.
Kevin Werbach is a professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the author of The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.
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Over the last 5 years, the IRREGULATORS, a consortium of senior, independent experts, forensic auditors and lawyers was formed. Working together they uncovered a massive financial cross-subsidy scheme, and it was done by manipulating the USA FCC’s cost accounting rules being applied to the state-wired telecommunications public utilities controlled mostly by AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink.
5G is the newest in a long line of tech services that are supposed to change our lives for the better. Truth is, 5G is really designed to get rid of the wired regulations and obligations, and have wireline phone customers pay — cross-subsidize, the wireless companies’ business. And we have since 2000 we paid— $4-7000 per household and more for fiber optic that we never received!! Read more at http://irregulators.org.
I’m surprised at the ignorance of this author’s posting. Especially due to the fact as a Professor at Wharton, the alleged gem of Pennsylvania’s business schools, he’d do a better job of researching the financials, rather masquerade as a technical expert on a science blog.
On 17JAN20 the IRREGULARS sued the FCC and the telecoms to recover a half trillion dollars that was suppose to finance the rollout of USA Nationwide Broadband that we never got. Stay tuned.
The spectrum used by various 5G proposals will be near that of passive remote sensing such as by weather and Earth observation satellites, particularly for water vapor monitoring. Interference will occur and will potentially be significant without effective controls. An increase in interference already occurred with some other prior proximate band usages. Interference to satellite operations impairs numerical weather prediction performance with substantially deleterious economic and public safety impacts in areas such as commercial aviation.
The concerns prompted U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in February 2019 to urge the FCC to delay some spectrum auction proposals, which was rejected. The chairs of the House Appropriations Committee and House Science Committee wrote separate letters to FCC chair Ajit Pai asking for further review and consultation with NOAA, NASA, and DoD, and warning of harmful impacts to national security. Acting NOAA director Neil Jacobs testified before the House Committee in May 2019 that 5G out-of-band emissions could produce a 30% reduction in weather forecast accuracy and that the resulting degradation in ECMWF model performance would have resulted in failure to predict the track and thus the impact of Superstorm Sandy in 2012. The United States Navy in March 2019 wrote a memorandum warning of deterioration and made technical suggestions to control band bleed-over limits, for testing and fielding, and for coordination of the wireless industry and regulators with weather forecasting organizations.
SpaceX intends to launch another 60 satellites as soon as the weather is favorable, bringing the total number of “Starlink” satellites in low orbit around the Earth to 240.
An Appeal by Astronomers called “Safeguarding the Astronomical Sky” is circulating, spearheaded by Italian astronomer Stefano Gallozzi. The appeal will collect signatures for about one more week, and then will be sent to governments, institutions and agencies around the world, and to newspapers and other media.
Most of the satellites will be visible to the naked eye, especially in the time after sunset and before sunrise, when they will most strongly catch the glare of the sun. If tens of thousands of them are launched, say the astronomers, they will ruin the night sky for all of humanity. The satellites will not only “greatly outnumber the approximately 9,000 stars that are visible to the unaided human eye,” but will “reach the brightness of the stars in the Ursa Minor constellation,” and will be “exceeded in brightness only by 172 stars in the whole sky.”
Even if the satellites are coated with non-reflecting paint, say the astronomers, they will still eclipse stars, and their radio transmissions will cripple radio astronomy, “making the astrophysics community blind to these spectral windows” through which they are currently able to observe the universe.
An article about this threat to the night sky was published in the popular and widely-read science magazine, Scientific American, on January 16, 2020. It is titled, “The FCC’s Approval of SpaceX’s Starlink Mega Constellation May Have Been Unlawful.” It quotes Ruskin Hartley, the Executive Director of the International Dark Sky Association. Such a large number of satellites, he says “has the potential to change our relationship, and our connection, with the universe.” And it quotes Ramon Ryan, a law student at Vanderbilt University. Ryan has written an article, to be published later this year in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, in which he argues that the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of 12,000 satellites was illegal because no environmental review was carried out. If the FCC is sued in a court of law, he says, it will be likely to lose.
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Carbon Bigfoot
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Over the last 5 years, the IRREGULATORS, a consortium of senior, independent experts, forensic auditors and lawyers was formed. Working together they uncovered a massive financial cross-subsidy scheme, and it was done by manipulating the USA FCC’s cost accounting rules being applied to the state-wired telecommunications public utilities controlled mostly by AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink.
5G is the newest in a long line of tech services that are supposed to change our lives for the better. Truth is, 5G is really designed to get rid of the wired regulations and obligations, and have wireline phone customers pay — cross-subsidize, the wireless companies’ business. And we have since 2000 we paid— $4-7000 per household and more for fiber optic that we never received!! Read more at http://irregulators.org.
I’m surprised at the ignorance of this author’s posting. Especially due to the fact as a Professor at Wharton, the alleged gem of Pennsylvania’s business schools, he’d do a better job of researching the financials, rather masquerade as a technical expert on a science blog.
On 17JAN20 the IRREGULARS sued the FCC and the telecoms to recover a half trillion dollars that was suppose to finance the rollout of USA Nationwide Broadband that we never got. Stay tuned.
Reply
T. C. Clark
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I’m waiting on 6G….maybe even wait until 10G…yeah, 10G is where it’s at…..10G will use X-Ray spectrum….no more obstacle problems.
Reply
geran
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From wiki:
The spectrum used by various 5G proposals will be near that of passive remote sensing such as by weather and Earth observation satellites, particularly for water vapor monitoring. Interference will occur and will potentially be significant without effective controls. An increase in interference already occurred with some other prior proximate band usages. Interference to satellite operations impairs numerical weather prediction performance with substantially deleterious economic and public safety impacts in areas such as commercial aviation.
The concerns prompted U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in February 2019 to urge the FCC to delay some spectrum auction proposals, which was rejected. The chairs of the House Appropriations Committee and House Science Committee wrote separate letters to FCC chair Ajit Pai asking for further review and consultation with NOAA, NASA, and DoD, and warning of harmful impacts to national security. Acting NOAA director Neil Jacobs testified before the House Committee in May 2019 that 5G out-of-band emissions could produce a 30% reduction in weather forecast accuracy and that the resulting degradation in ECMWF model performance would have resulted in failure to predict the track and thus the impact of Superstorm Sandy in 2012. The United States Navy in March 2019 wrote a memorandum warning of deterioration and made technical suggestions to control band bleed-over limits, for testing and fielding, and for coordination of the wireless industry and regulators with weather forecasting organizations.
Reply
Carbon Bigfoot
| #
SpaceX intends to launch another 60 satellites as soon as the weather is favorable, bringing the total number of “Starlink” satellites in low orbit around the Earth to 240.
An Appeal by Astronomers called “Safeguarding the Astronomical Sky” is circulating, spearheaded by Italian astronomer Stefano Gallozzi. The appeal will collect signatures for about one more week, and then will be sent to governments, institutions and agencies around the world, and to newspapers and other media.
Most of the satellites will be visible to the naked eye, especially in the time after sunset and before sunrise, when they will most strongly catch the glare of the sun. If tens of thousands of them are launched, say the astronomers, they will ruin the night sky for all of humanity. The satellites will not only “greatly outnumber the approximately 9,000 stars that are visible to the unaided human eye,” but will “reach the brightness of the stars in the Ursa Minor constellation,” and will be “exceeded in brightness only by 172 stars in the whole sky.”
Even if the satellites are coated with non-reflecting paint, say the astronomers, they will still eclipse stars, and their radio transmissions will cripple radio astronomy, “making the astrophysics community blind to these spectral windows” through which they are currently able to observe the universe.
An article about this threat to the night sky was published in the popular and widely-read science magazine, Scientific American, on January 16, 2020. It is titled, “The FCC’s Approval of SpaceX’s Starlink Mega Constellation May Have Been Unlawful.” It quotes Ruskin Hartley, the Executive Director of the International Dark Sky Association. Such a large number of satellites, he says “has the potential to change our relationship, and our connection, with the universe.” And it quotes Ramon Ryan, a law student at Vanderbilt University. Ryan has written an article, to be published later this year in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, in which he argues that the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of 12,000 satellites was illegal because no environmental review was carried out. If the FCC is sued in a court of law, he says, it will be likely to lose.
Reply