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Comment by xattt | Hacker News Reader

Is there a specific 5G standard? In comparison to 3G which had CDMA2000 and UMTS, there seems to be mutlitude of unnamed standards.

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4G mobile standard was LTE from 3GPP, which competed against WiMax from IEEE and won in the late 00s.

5G mobile standard is NR (stands for New Radio) from 3GPP. There is no competing mobile standard from anyone else.

Biggest change compared to LTE is the formal standard for millimeter wave communication for mobile. Previously it's been used for fixed wireless access and/or satellites. We'll see how it plays out in a mobile consumer environment.

There’s been rumblings in the BUD (big ugly dish) community that 5G will start to ruin C-Band for TRO (TV Recieve Only). Most birds are going mostly Ku but C-Band is used for backhaul & feeds on a lot of soon to be retired: Galaxy & AMC series.

For Amatuer Dx’ing C-Band offers way more unencrypted and English channels than Ku. There’s way more weird channels too. I just pickuped an old 8ft Dish for free off Craigslist simply to watch North Korean TV.

From what I gather one will need a much larger dish for C-Band in the US to overcome spectral interference or that it will pretty much put an end to C-band in the US.

https://www.multichannel.com/news/fcc-votes-to-open-c-band-f...

https://spacenews.com/fcc-votes-to-open-c-band-for-5g/

Is anyone distributing C-band reception from RF quiet locations over IP?

If they are I'm sure they are quiet about it. They wouldn't have distribution rights. Bandwidth costs would be high.

There is such a thing as torrent though. Make initial reputation come from e.g. some crypto mining sufficient to fund the bandwidth costs from loosing the block to an uncooperative peer, and then handle reputation based on share ratio, either theoretical or measured.

So "long term evolution" turned out to not be so long term? :D

Not really. 5G won't replace 4G. 5G just requires to many cell towers to make sense outside of high-traffic areas like hospitals, airports and stadiums. 4G will still be what's used in outside environments. That's how it's been explained to me, anyway.

Those are two separate technology standards. 3GPP2 evolution got merged and we came down to a single "4G" standard with the LTE air interface. It borrowed a lot from WiFi's adoption of OFDMA that allowed a lot of the bandwidth increases. 5G evolution on the air interface though significant, are just an extension of that, using higher frequency bands. But where the meat of 5G lies is in expanding on the legwork done in LTE specs in preparation for IoT. It brings in the ability for multi-bandwidth, multi-reliability and multi-latency applications and SDN paradigms. "Kubernetes for the Network" kind of terms are being thrown about.

Initial deployments though will focus on "FTTH replacement" scenarios.

>It borrowed a lot from WiFi's adoption of OFDMA that allowed a lot of the bandwidth increases

Um.... WiFi doesn't get OFDMA til 802.11ax, which isn't even finalise yet.

My bad, I meant OFDM but typed OFDMA.

Yes.

5G New Radio (NR) is the global standard for a unified 5G wireless air interface. It was ratified some time ago. This allows investments to hardware.

The standardization efforts continue and they add functionality and more interfaces for specialized services and applications. For example: Multimedia Priority Service, Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) application layer services, 5G satellite access, Local Area Network support in 5G, terminal positioning and location and lots of other service interfaces. 5G will be much more than just 4G LTE with steroids.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but won't this put Verizon in the opposite situation that they're in now? Doesn't Verizon have coverage in most places because they were able to build early and keep their old CDMA towers in place? With the change to 5G aren't all the LTE/GSM carriers now in a better place to update to 5G? Won't this actually cause Verizon to require huge network and infrastructure upgrades?

The move away from CDMA happened with LTE. LTE required a complete network upgrade to add in the eNodeBs to supplement the BTS (basestations) from the CDMA world.

5G (3gpp rev 15 or newer) does require new hardware but a lot of networks have been planning for this. Sprint has been rolling out new MIMO capable antennas for use with 5g. Verizon similarly has been future proofing before the standard was finished. There will be new equipment required no matter what though. Especially with Verizon pushing millimeter in cities.

ITU IMT-2020, though I can't seem to find the actual text. Secondary sources:

https://news.itu.int/5g-update-new-itu-standards-network-sof...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G

Yes, there is a set of 3GPP specs that define 5G standard. Slicing of the network to provide low latency is one of the highlights. There are open source implementations such as openCORD that target the same goals.

3gpp release-15 describes parts of what they're calling 5G [1]. And no AFAICT it's not finalized, there's a lot under this umbrella. IIRC fixed/terrestrial wireless (at 60GHz?) is part of what's referred to as '5G'.

[1] http://www.3gpp.org/release-15

http://www.3gpp.org/news-events/3gpp-news/1929-nsa_nr_5g

It is like virtualization of air interface. Multiple standards with different metrics.

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