5G Network end-to-end demonstration by Ericsson
ericsson.com
ericsson.com
I would prefer if we aimed our research on increasing coverage.
4G cannot viably stream 1080p netflix into the number of homes in America that use it at any given time (unless you use an unrealistic number of cell sites).
Some sort of rationing has to occur otherwise cells would be overrun.
Carriers should bring back free nights and weekends.
I have always been an advocate for more, open, spectrum, and simple laws to outlaw intentional interference. We are not operating dumb radios - we can dynamically change or allocate spectrum channels to load balance congestion and avoid making it worse.
To legally cordon off everyone into separate silos is a hatchet solution to a nuanced problem with much better solutions if you could just incentivize good behavior and punish bad in commons.
I do not believe for a second we cannot technologically transfer h265 video via radio to every individual in even the highest population densities if we had full access to building infrastructure around all of the spectrum of light we use for communications.
At least, I'm assuming that's what OP meant. Not simply that "free nights and weekends" would be anti-net neutrality on its own, but that it could very easily be made more proprietary than it initially sounds. And we've seen it done in the past when free nights and weekends were were restricted to those within your telco, the x-amount of people within your network that are free to call[I believe AT&T made it 10?], the free mobile to mobile that was eventually restricted to free mobile to mobile only within the same telco again, etc., etc.
In its strictest (and IMO, most useful) sense, "net neutrality" is the concept that data is data is data. It doesn't matter whether it's carrying video or whether it's carrying text, whether that comes from Google or whether it comes from the server in your basement, or whether it's being transferred at 11am or at 11pm.
IMO that definition is the most useful because it's the clearest - anything else ends up getting into some debate about why this applies and that doesn't. I'd very much like to keep my neutral internet connection - the creeping preferentialism on my cellphone connection is not welcome.
Edit to clarify, it's more "anti-competitive" than "anti-net neutrality"
I have a sneaking suspicion that it's been done this way so that it can be treated like "property" legally protected and commoditised as such.
The bottleneck here is the law, which as everyone knows "is an ass" (by which I mean in all seriousness it has difficulty dealing with such nuance)
We have the ability to programmatically build radios that can adjust bandwidth channels on demand, in fairly broad ranges. But because spectrum is treated as a commodity to be owned by private entities, nobody can utilize the potential of load balancing across all possible radio spectrum (both immediately and in macroscopic economic trends).
If we are stuck with the ~800mhz combined spectrum openly available today, of course we will continue to see incredible bottlenecks in congested wireless environments. But in practice there is about ~10ghz of practically usable spectrum for wireless data transfer, and you can fit a lot more channels in the low end.
5G is for more countries than just the US. Plenty of countries are very happy with the local carriers.
I do wonder how it would work if we did some sort of high-speed dynamic bidding for bandwidth, rather than a constant fee. It could actually be very helpful; it would incentivize carriers to appropriately allocate bandwidth for an area (maximizing profit would coincide nicely with maximizing customer utility) and it would allow customers to directly "feel the pain" of bloated downloads and websites, leading to more market feedback for wasting bandwidth by making 8MB webpages or whatever.
Here's a really cool idea; no SIM card, no network attachment. Your phone uses some technology like Bitcoin micropayment channels (high-speed off-network secure micro payments, great protocol) to automatically buy bandwidth from whichever regional cell tower is offering you the best deal.
With those speeds 5G could be an alternative/replacement for cable/DSL for home internet access. I'm not sure the carriers would be on board with that tough as its its easier to oversubscribe mobile devices than home internet.
Though 3/4G already is, it's what many people use instead of wired internet here (Finland) and it's often marketed as such. I rarely get under 25mbps in our clubroom that only has 4G internet access.
I'm not entirely happy with current operator, though; I used to get 15 Mbit/s downlink but now it's often 3 Mbit/s at home, which is not enough. I might switch operator.
(At work I get 25 Mbit/s with the pad so the limit is clearly in poor coverage of operator DNA in my residential area, at work it is OK.)
I'm not clear what the providers think the future will be - even 200gb is a tight fit for streaming 1080p video, never mind 4k or 8k hdr.
Looks like they'll continue to drag their feet with fiber, and continue to spend on dsl while struggling to get people to commit to 4g (because at current price/datacap/coverage it doesn't really make sense).
Or maybe it's the electronics dealers that will take the hit because lossy 720p doesn't look any better on a 4/8k screen...
Not Finnish but have lots of Finnish friends. They pay for the speed of the service, not data transfer. [0] So for example you would pay to have a SIM card with 10MBit/s, 20MBit/s, 30MBit/s, etc.
They're always horrified to hear that we have data caps in Germany. At least here if you exceed your cap they just throttle you to 2G speeds. Interestingly, it seems that Finland mobile subscribers use more data than the average German fixed line subscriber. [1]
In Canada if you exceed the cap the carrier starts charging you exorbitant amounts of money per GB (on to of the already insane monthly cost of the plan).
[0] http://dfmonitor.eu/insights/2016_may_finland_mobile_data_us...
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/finnish-like-unlimited-mobile...
Edit: My hotspot tends to run at around 22Mb/sec, which is faster than the fastest DSL line you can get here, which is 16Mb and costs $400/mo.
Should probably be Kista:
https://youtu.be/rQIE22e0cW8?t=603
Then it was still in the labs as a prototype. He talks about some of the limitation, the history (3G, 4G, 5G) and how it all set up. It is mostly in the context of building reactive systems and this was just the intro bit.
Also fun fact: since Ericsson controls more than half of the market in smartphone <-> internet gateways and most of those run Erlang. If Erlang stops working, no more cat videos for anyone on their phones.
As an outsider, I find that quite a strange reaction. I mean, when I ship something with DHL, Fedex, or UPS, they're able to give me (I assume) quite accurate tracking information. So clearly they already have a bunch of sensors in their sorting facility and trucks to monitor when a package has arrived/departed.
From what I've heard of Amazon logistics centres, it seems that they would already have thousands of sensors there to scan, transport, label, etc items in the warehouse.
But I do work with electricity utilities, where technologies like FTP and ModbusTCP are still considered cutting edge...
Think 10-20MM a year in operating costs (small feet of trucks, few large facilities) - you're on the right track when you mentioned utilities. Even a business like $TWNK will likely have to think about this if they have not already. :)
Network operators should know better than to put cell radios into devices you know will be compromised in a year or two.
Hell, the solution sounds pretty simple to me. Network attached devices must be openly disclosed with open source hardware and must have standardized wired update and control mechanisms. That way consumers can make intelligent decisions to buy products that can see long term support by their communities, because companies absolutely won't do it (and because they are international, you cannot really bind them to support terms of contracts - these negotiations have to happen at the import level, and nothing really stops them from dropping products a year down the road from support and bribing the right people / dissolving and reforming the company to circumvent consequences - but you can force them to disclose source and hardware architecture, enabling the consumers to maintain security themselves).
In 3GPP cellular IoT (2G/GPRS, 3G/UMTS to HSPA, 4G/LTE) it is very common for devices to be on what's called a private APN. It's a private IP network, and the cellular operator provides a VPN access to this private network to let the managing company access the devices from their application servers. Only the application servers can access the devices, which are not on the Internet. In practice this removes the risk of remote attacks on the devices (if you either hacked the telco or service operators and can get to the devices, you already could get to more interesting stuff like aggregated data). This has been available since GPRS and will also apply to 5G --- no difference at this level.
Of course the flip side of this model is that the end customer must go through the device associated service provider to get to the device. It may not be acceptable to all, but when it is using a private APN is really a very effective way to kill remote attacks on cellular IoT devices.
Even for devices not using a private APN but having Internet access, the operator is still in between and could do ad-hoc filtering if called for. Another factor is that tier 1 telco operator tend to require support for FOTA (Firmware update Over The Air), so cellular IoT devices can be remotely upgraded.
With all this cellular IoT is in a much better situation for security than LAN-based IoT. It's also more expansive.
> Besides the technical challenges, there is the very practical problem of incentivizing users to lend their devices to serve as relays for the traffic of others, especially since these connections will consume bandwidth, storage, and battery power on the relay. Again, the appropriate class of solutions depends upon the D2D design.
If this D2D does become a central part of 5G, I'm really curious about whether users will be able to use 5G not (only) with a carrier's towers, but as a part of a mesh network (and as a Bluetooth- or wifi-like tool for local networking). It could be a great way to chip away at the power of carriers and ISPs (which might be one reason LTE Direct is nowhere to be seen, and why D2D 5G capabilities could be gimped in end-user devices).
I'm a complete layman in this area, so I'm curious to hear others' thoughts.
[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/invention/research/projects/lte-dir...
[2] https://www.ericsson.com/research-blog/5g/device-device-comm...
[3] http://www.comsoc.org/ctn/device-device-communication-5g-cel...
If I was a CEO at a major wireless carrier, I would be thinking that means we can charge people more per month, and generate more revenue. Anytime you increase usage, the carriers are going to find a way to squeeze some more money out of their users.
If I accidentally load a large video/gif/website, It's easier to back out then let it eat my data.
I'm also noticing that with similar usage, my same apps are eating much more data than they used to a couple years ago. Twitter, Facebook, Maps. I could live on 500MB/mo, now 2GB/mo is not enough.
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Bandwidth-Ruler-for-Android-l...
Wow, 15Ghz signals are going to really suck for building penetration...
For the number of antennas, I've seen anything from 64 to 1024 (amazing...). Even then millimeter waves are only for short distances (< ~300m).
Of course, a very narrow beam makes life very interesting with mobile devices ;) But one of the first application of mmWaves should be last mile access, where this is not an issue. With this, fiber is required close to the home but the most costly last hundred meters can use wireless. This should reduce cost while still supporting very high throughput. TBC.
4G supposedly has actually secure radio links; I think to the extent Stingrays work on these devices, it's by forcing a downgrade to 2G/3G. So as it becomes feasible to drop 2G/3G support Stingrays will stop working, although of course this will take a long time.
That said, supposedly what encryption 2G/3G did use extended further into the core network, whereas the encryption that 4G uses terminates at the base station. Supposedly all providers which are implementing 4G are in practice encrypting the links from the base station to the rest of the network with IPsec, but this does mean that the traffic is unencrypted at the base station itself, which makes the base station vulnerable to physical compromise. Some people have criticised LTE's security over GSM/UMTS for this reason.
On the whole I think it's a net gain, though. Physically compromising a base station is a higher friction and higher risk activity than deployment of a Stingray. Moreover, I can understand that it would be potentially troublesome to have an encrypted channel from the handset to deep in an operator's core network, since it forces all traffic to travel via that route, which would necessarily increase latency. Although in practice IIRC 4G traffic might still take the same route anyway due to the weird tunnelling architecture GSM/UMTS/LTE uses, so that might be a moot point. But the article seems to imply they're focusing on reducing latency, so it's possible they're changing that for 5G. Anyone know?
http://csrc.nist.gov/news_events/cif_2015/research/day2_rese....
It was put out by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
There's encryption between your mobile and a few nodes within the core network of your carrier - inside that network, you can easily break that encryption if you get hold of the keys - and those keys are communicated in plain-text between a couple of the network nodes (on the S6a interface). While those interfaces are supposed to be using IPSec, I've yet to see anyone doing that all the way.
The radio interface, between your device and the cell tower is decently protected though. Unless you're in a country that demands the use of the EEA0 and EIA0 encryption algorithms (a.k.a. no encryption at all).
Encryption through some part of the middle is only useful on the radio side -- the rest of the network is wired and has the same ("meh"-) level of security.
It should've been quite obvious in the context of privacy.