If 5G uses almost the same frequency where microwaves detect water vapour (around 24 GHz), won't the weather have a great impact on it?
Also, I always thought that such small waves would have problems with obstacles, with good signal just when your phone is in line-of-sight with antennas.
IMO 5G is massively overhyped. My iPhone 7+ isn't limited by 4G LTE, it's limited by Verizon deciding to only allow it 10mbps down (with great signal). 5G won't matter one bit if the current bottleneck isn't 4G LTE in the first place.
They spend massive amounts of money on marketing, at that doesn't benefit the product at all.
THIS!!! Even if more sites are added, each with their own 10/100gb fiber run - it's still running to the main circuit for a region. That circuit isn't changing(in the near term), this will just consume more of it. Regions without colossal backbone access that are already bandwidth constrained will remain bandwidth constrained.
Network bandwidth is still going up and up in speed. 100G was very expensive and hard to do only a few years back, now it’s becoming standard. DWDM systems continue to evolve.
Perhaps it's different in USA, though, the geography and population density differences mean that the backhaul problems are different than in Europe; but here the bottleneck is on the radio side.
One of my biggest memories of 9/11 as a school-boy was when all phone-lines were so congested that no one could call their parents. We all kept trying, but it was "busy" tones all the way through.
That's the only time I remember land-lines all being too congested to make a call, but it was part of the event that a lot of us talked about for days later. Some of the kids were trying to call their parents to see if they were still alive, because some of them worked at the Pentagon. (Their parents were fine, but they too couldn't contact their kids because all the phone-networks were too congested. I presume everyone was trying to call each other at that time).
Its the only time in my memory where I got a busy-signal from picking up a phone. You didn't even dial yet, it was too busy to even give a dial tone.
For the kids out there: texting wasn't common yet, and pagers weren't really worth the trouble. Pagers worked like text messaging today, except you didn't have a screen... so it was hard to use and weren't really used very much. You called a pager using a land-line, and then dialed "44 33 555 555 666" for "HELLO". People generally still just did phone calls for simple messages like "I'm okay".
This is in fact a limitation of 4G.
A single device is fine, but there is only so much bandwidth available. When you get lots of devices in the same area, something has to be limited.
Speedtest.net (with Verizon hosted servers) was at a very consistent 50mbps/4.5mbps which would make sense for my unlimited plan.
Please note that speedtest.net is REALLY not a good representation of real world network usage, and I don't just mean like how they throttle netflix. They get to host the server in-network as well as full traffic shaping to get those juicy benchmark numbers.
Lack of competition and sensible operators isn't 4Gs fault...
so... sorta like a WiFi access point?
WiFi has no built-in system for authentication across different operators, no system for accounting usage, no system for ensuring trust.
This is what 3gpp brings. Their systems are hopelessly convoluted, and have some issues. However, it works.
In other words glorified wifi, except the AP is no longer owned or controlled by me.
There's a general misunderstanding about the technology that leads people down this road of thought.
5G is broken up into two frequency ranges, FR1 and FR2. FR1 is everything below 6Ghz and encompasses the same spectrum as traditional cellular technologies. FR2 is everything over 24Ghz and that's the bit everyone is confused about.
FR1 is like traditional cellular and will be slapped on cell towers to provide broad coverage over a wide area with performance characteristics similar to what we have today with LTE. It's not very exciting but it's 5G and this is what everyone is currently rolling out.
FR2 is meant to be absorbed, otherwise you'd have a big problem. Unlike FR1 which limits you to 100mhz bandwidth per channel, FR2 mandates that channel bandwidth be between 50-400mhz. So at a minimum, an FR2 channel will have half the maximum allowable bandwidth of FR1. If FR2 propagated more than a very short distance the airwaves would be quickly saturated by a small number of users.
FR2 is intended to be deployed in very dense areas like indoors. You'd be able to deploy many cell sites without worrying about overlap or signal propagation because everything from walls to moisture in the air will absorb the signals.
It might also be possible to slap an FR2 cell site on top of every lamp post going down a street.
Samsung's 28Ghz solution was rated at something like 1500ft at maximum power. So one per city block might be more realistic than one per lamp post but it will ultimately come down to capacity. The mmWave portion of 5G is designed to high density deployments.
The problem is that omnidirectional (so non-directional) radiation causes the problem, not fixed point-to-point links. So, with the omnis the best idea is to limit their TX power and spread the noise via ultra-wide band multiplexing (using random orthogonal coding [which is CDMA or lately frequencies (subcarriers/subbands), which is OFDMA] minimizes the interference), but with the p2p links, you can go wild, use a relatively high power high frequency narrow band high symbol/baud modulation (like QAM256 - used in 802.11ac wifi).
But of course cables rule, because they are really great at containing the EM radiation. And lamps already have cables to power the lamp, and the micro-nano-pico-cell thingie will also need power too, and then you can just do Power over Ethernet and be done with it, and then concentrate the copper wires and switch to fiber.
Though probably the p2p mesh backhaul module would be pricey, but sometimes getting your cable to a switch is equally problematic/costly, so that's why probably a bit of both from a cost perspective too.