Problems with 5G: Is it too soon?

With 2019 rolling in, we are on the verge of seeing a multitude of advertisements for 5G enabled phones??. With exactly a week left for the world's largest tech-biz expo in Las Vegas, Nevada(CES for anti-nerds), I sit thinking of the possibilities the technologies will open once they are announced. The reality is that a properly rolled out 5G network is more than awesome, you get insane internet speeds, you can even say goodbye to 720p on YT. You will also get to connect a bunch of devices to that super-fast internet, and yes this is a stepping stone to Brad Bird's Tomorrowland. But to get to that stage where everything is talking to each other and IoT is on steroids, there lies a challenge to overcome.??

Overview

Every new generation of wireless networks delivers faster speeds and more functionality to our smartphones. 2G introduced us to texting and 3G gave us the very opportunity to use the world wide web. With 4G, we have made the internet a part of our daily lives, important in every field that the humans have ever touched. But at a time when users want to consume even more data at a faster rate, 4G networks have just about reached their limits. With 5G, carriers and mobile operators are transforming industries, enabling everything from smarter homes and businesses to self-driving cars.

With the advent of a newer generation, imagine downloading a HD movie in under a second and think of the possibilities that 5G will open. 5G will be the foundation for virtual reality, autonomous driving, IoT, and stuff we can't even now imagine(throw in Jarvis too).

Relay the Radio

To put some shade on the whole 5G smartphone comes the difference in 5G wavelength. These signals act very differently from the lower frequency 4G wavelength. This is because it uses millimeterwaves. They tend to have significantly shorter range and weaker penetration, so things like walls, trees and rain is going to affect the use of 5G. With the current layout of telecom towers, we can use 5G is in our wildest dreams. The human body will also affect the waves, so if your hand is covering the antenna, it will attenuate the signal. Small Cell is the solution, flooding a ton of cell towers so that you have them at every single street.

Gadgets work in 3GHz to 6GHz are it is getting crowded and hence we see slower service and more dropped connections. We need more real estate, scientists are working on gadgets that can use the empty 6GHz to 300Ghz frequency space. Small Cell will be large high powered cell towers to broadcast their signals over long distances. The base stations will be forming a sort of relay team to transmit signals around obstacle which will change on the basis of strength of the signal.

Frightening Frequencies

Most 4G base stations have about a dozen ports for antennas that handle all cellular traffic. For the case of 5G, a massive MIMO(Multiple-Inputs-Multiple-Outputs) base which can have hundreds of ports. Today's cellular antennas broadcast info at every direction at once and all of those signals could cause serious interference. Yes, I'm referring to the news that reports hundreds of birds falling out of the sky numb while a 5G network was being tested in the Netherlands.

The solution is to send data in the form of beams. The signal will be more powerful and focused and hence stations could handle more incoming and outgoing streams at once. It works like a traffic signal that allows only a single pathway for travel at a time.

Bottom Line

We saw the network side of things and we saw how they can be taken care of. Coming to the side of phone hardware, there are a whole slew of other obstacles. Pete Lau (CEO of OnePlus) suggests that an average 5G phone will cost $200-$300 more than the regular 4G powered phones. The new Snapdragon 855 needs a separate 5G modem and multiple antenna modules to make a phone work on the network.

There's also the issue of shorter battery life when you giveaway your space to getting a lot under the hood for 5G. It will invariably use more power for transmitting and even consuming data at a greater state. Plus, the current modem that supports 5G can hit only two and a half times what a 4G network can hit. The tech is awesome and we will definitely hear some great reveals in a week at #CES2019. Till then, I guess we need to wait for a couple more years to actually harness the use of 5G. That's the bottom line. Peace Out.

Image Credit: IEEE Spectrum