EDPS: Transitioning from 5G to 6G
At the recent EDPS, the keynote on the second day was by Mallik Tatipamula.?He?is the CTO of Ericsson Silicon Valley and also has?experience all over the telecom industry with stints at F5, Juniper Networks, Cisco, Motorola, Nortel, and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
Mallik started with a potted history of mobile. You may already know all this, and I've covered my version of the story at length in:
1G was FDMA, frequency division multiple access. This means that each call was given its own frequency band. The radio technology was all analog. These networks were purely voice, and the phones would not work in?different countries.
2G was TDMA, time division multiple access. This is a bit of a misnomer since it also used FDMA, and then divided the frequency band up into time slots. The technology was digital, with data rates of 16Kbps (for voice encoding). Very limited data came along. In the U.S., there was also one CDMA network, which stands for code division multiple access. This uses frequency hopping and constant updating of power so that all signals share the same spectrum. So these were voice and text messages, and with GSM (and, to a lesser extent IS-136) there was some interoperability of handsets in different countries.
3G was circuit-switched voice and packet-switched data at 150Kb/s. This was the first era with reasonable (at least by the standards of the day) mobile internet.
4G was true all-IP networking (voice just transmitted as voice-over-IP) with a performance at megabits per second. Finally, you could watch video on your phone in reasonable quality. Everything ran over internet protocol using OFDMA, or?orthogonal frequency-division multiple access. This was the era of apps on your smartphone, the era of Uber, food delivery, chat programs, and so on.