Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe what I just read from Sabine. But then if she dont gets it. No wonder why 99% of HN still don't get 5G. Like I said in my HN bubbles post [1], which had lots of upvote but the only disagreement was on 5G.

5G isn't mmWave. mmWave isn't REAL 5G. This is the most common misconception on the internet inclusive but not limited to HN. AFAIK, till late 2021, no county other than USA has used or plan to use mmWave for their mobile network. The only usage outside of USA are for residential Wireless Internet. And those were on trial only.

Even the biggest proponent of mmWave, Verizon are backing off mmWave expansion.

5G has lots of things other than mmWave. As a matter of fact mmWave isn't even 1% of the initial 5G ( 3GPP R15 ) spec. And the same goes to 6G, which is NOT about higher frequency either. Another misconception is you need higher frequency for more bandwidth. Which is true in Shannon's law [2]. But we dont need more maximum bandwidth, we need higher capacity, or same bandwidth in ( e.g 1Gbps ) available to more people at the same time. i.e Network Capacity. And that, is what 5G ( Massive MIMO ) and 6G ( Distributed MIMO ) is about. ( Along with dozens of other things )

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635268

[2] I still remember my professor told me the exact same thing in the 90s when I was doing work on 3G. How we will soon reach those limit. So for people who has not worked in the Wireless / Mobile industry space. A lot of what we take for granted today were essentially miracle or black magic not that long ago.

I have to say I find that Sabine is more pondering to the nutjob crowd. I really enjoyed some of here posts with deep insights into quantum physics and cosmology, an area where she is a subject expert. Now she is posting on all sorts of topics, some of them where she clearly has very little background and limited understanding.

They also have this strongly science sceptic undertone. While I appreciate that an healthy amount of skepticism is a good thing, the undertones in her posts are much more of a general criticism of science/scientists without any actual arguments.

She cited sources for her two claims. I didn't read said sources so it is of course possible she either misrepresented them or cherry-picked, but assuming she didn't i'm not really sure what more you want from her.

Could you explain where you get these undertones from? From my perspective she is representing her points in favor of meteorologists, which are scientists and critical of various organizations which are economical organizations. She is also pointing out critisizing about many of the studies that investigated 5G, which is what a scientist should do. Not every study is good. And being critical of bad studies doesn't make you anti-science, but pro-science! She said multiple times that she does not believe there are health-risks to 5G radio.

So, the undertones are not so strong in this article, but I have to say already the choice of topic is pondering to a certain crowd. As a good scientists she should know what she doesn't know, and her understanding is clearly limited.

She also clearly plays with the uncertainty. First stating that yes she doesn't believe there is an issue, but then starting a discussion about the quality of the publications. Now quality of health impact studies is an interesting discussion, but I don't think it's relevant here. Moreover, the way she summarizes the shortcomings in the studies is somewhat selective/misleading, the full quote is:

> Our meta-analysis showed that the bulk of the studies had a quality score lower than 2 out of a possible 5, with only one study achieving a maximum quality score of 5 [9]. The meta-analysis further showed that studies with a low quality score were more likely to show a greater effect.

I think leaving out that last sentence gives a misleading impression.

Another quote from her video/post:

> So scientists say there’s nothing to worry. Well, they also said that smoking is good for you and alcohol doesn’t cross the placenta and that copies of you live in parallel universes.

If you actually follow the link to "they said smoking is good for you" you find it links to the The Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA) collection. That's advertising, not scientists who said that smoking is good for you. Again a misleading quote/citation.

And this is not the first time she does this. They are always somewhat plausible deniability kind of sentences, but the repetition of these memes makes me suspect she is purposefully pondering to a specific audience.

> As a matter of fact mmWave isn't even 1% of the initial 5G ( 3GPP R15 ) spec

What a silly argument. I'm sorry about nitpicking on one minor point of a long post, but percentage of the text of the standard is a rediculous thing to bring up and very irrelavent.

> 5G has lots of things other than mmWave.

> ( Along with dozens of other things )

To name a few: Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC), Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC), massive MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output), beam forming, etc.

mmWave is also deployed at least here in Japan since 2020. I have Galaxy Z Fold3 with mmWave (though I don't need), it seems that only US/JP models have mmWave antenna. It's natural to misunderstood as it's only in the US since iPhone supports mmWave only for the US IIRC. Where I could test it is only on mobile phone shop becaues I'm on local, and I got 2Gbps. No use case for now.

Small sample size, but I'm typing this on a Fold4 on a Verizon UW cell, inside a hotel in California. Admittedly I could probably hit the tower with a free hotel breakfast muffin thrown hard out the window.

Another data point: I speed tested at more than 3GBits down on UWB service on the street in Chicago.

If I'm buying into your line of reasoning, then you should concede that 5G is a terrible name for this suite of services as anyone who has home 5G wifi or understandably conflates 5G with mmWave would say that 5G is junk because it cannot penetrate walls (or glass).

Then you are not getting 5G. In FR1 (sub 6GHz), we are not going to get much advantage. In the end, there is a limit of data you can send per Hz. This is not increasing from 4G to 5G (yes, you can use higher coding mechanism, but that's only for short distance, otherwise noise impact negates all advantages). To get the higher bandwidth as predicted and expected, industry has to move to FR2 (24GHz+/mmWave, I don't want to go into the discussions that mmWave starts at later band, the difference is statistical error). To support mmWave, standards bodies defined new standards/adopted technologies like beam forming, higher matrix antennas etc. And thats really a difference in 5G from 4G standards releases (along with cloud native core network with more simplistic IP routing and use of polar codes for control plane). In 6G, we are going to see Tera Hz band allocated for mobile network. Saying mmWave is not 5G is not accurate. You would not have needed 1000s of pages of standards for FR1, with little enhancement, LTE would have supported.

I don't get your post. On the one hand you say that you need to go to FR2, due to higher throughput requirements. On the other hand you point out beam forming, MIMO etc. as the real difference between 4G and 4G. But that's exactly the technology used to get higher throughput. You don't need more bandwidth necessarily to get higher throughput, there is a D term in the Shannon formula, thus you can go to several spatial paths to increase throughput.

I doubt we will see _real_ THz comms in 6G, maybe we go up to a few 100s of GHz, but not THz (I know many in the industry use THz to mean anything from ~50GHz, but that's just marketing rubbish).

Beamforming, MIMO, etc are not like you need for FR2, but without that you cant deploy. At this high frequency, the range is in 10s of m with antenna size of coin. To get the gain, you need MIMO and to get the distance, you need beam forming. Both MIMO and beam forming has more advantages, but without these technologies, almost impossible to deploy more than 50GHz. We will mmWave, but will take time. Thats how mobile world works. The high end of the targeted band is usually used at the end of particular generation of mobile or the next one. BTW, mmWave is having issue in adopting in mobile world not the FWA. My understanding is, both Lumen and Verizon are going ahead with mmWave band for FWA.

Regarding THz, FCC already opened the band till 3THz for 6G testing. I dont track, but next WRC might be planned for 2024 or 2025 (because of COVID, all the schedules are screwed up). The next WRC will kick start the standardization fo 6G and there is more possibility of THz to be part of 6G. Although as I mentioned earlier, my guess is, it more than a decade before THz band will be in use for mobility.

Yeah, I never really got the connection between the two. Nowhere I've lived has mmWave, nor will it ever, probably.

It has no reach. It's for high density applications, which seems like a good idea, but is probably already covered adequately by wifi.

If what you’re saying is true then my meter should not be picking up any signals above 4 GHz correct?

So why is my meter picking up signals up to 40 GHz from the towers in my small tourist town?

that spectrum isn't for phones. https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/2003-alloch... will let you know how the spectrum is allocated.

except the diagram shows several mobile blocks right above 40ghz, so what do you mean?

"Mobile" frequency allocations dont necessarily mean mobile phones. It just refers to an allocation for devices that arent transmitting from a fixed position.

I said "up to".

Probably a tower-to-tower link? It's sometimes cheaper to use a radio link rather than bringing cables to a new tower location. Or sometimes as a resilience measure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com