5G, the Long Road Ahead | Hacker News Reader

5G, the Long Road Ahead

cellularinsights.com

One of the major things not really addressed in the article is backhaul for each 4.5G/5G cell site or small cell site. More air spectrum and better radio modulation/MIMO for the cell-to-handset is very important, but that's only a piece of the puzzle...

There's still a lot of locations out there without fiber, or that are currently fed by a 250-400Mbps capacity PTP microwave link. Cellular carriers are aggressively spending money to bring dark fiber to tower sites, of course, with the minimum connectivity for a new site being a single 10GbE circuit. This is one of the things driving the growth of outside-plant fiber construction and dedicated-purpose dark fiber network operators (example: Zayo's ongoing new builds spending $$$$$ in major metro areas in Texas).

The other part of the puzzle is much higher capacity new PTP microwave to feed sites, some of which will be logically downstream of newly fiber-fed sites. These new links will be at 1 Gbps to 5Gbps+ capacity.

Walrus01, you brought a very interesting topic. In NYC market for instance, operators provision their cell sites between 100 and 400Mbps. Verizon for instance has 45MHz of aggregate downlink radio capacity, which in today's 2x2 MIMO configuration means 337.5Mbps potential throughput per sector, times three sectors per site and you're at 1Gbps requirement. Yet, their sites are mostly provisioned at 150 or 200Mbps PER SITE, and then shared between three sectors. Most of their sites have 1Gbps capable cards too...

It's been an opex saving trend for all operators which will allows them to "control" incremental capacity gain at their discretion, without a truck roll.

I definitely plan on addressing that in the future posts, it's an annoying issue from the consumer perspective, that's for sure.

As much as I like progress, one of the big hurdles 5G has is that 4G is mostly good enough.

The improvement from 3G to 4G was significant, but even then most people didn't care much. You got sub 20ms latency (my non-scientific tests show 14-19ms), much less jitter than 3G and sufficient bandwidth for most applications.

Why would people upgrade to 5G if they don't get any perceptible performance improvement?

4G is already good enough you can simply run remote desktop over it and get near local performance.

When the remote end is connected with an 1 Gbps+ link, who cares how much packet data bandwidth you got?

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