Will there be a 7G?
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
We are closing in to rolling out the last / final phase of 5G. And yet none of the Massive MIMO on FDD is happening. We are still stuck on 32T32R, hardly that impressive considering we have that in LTE already. Not to mention the insane complexity increase from 4G to 5G. And judging from the previews of 6G that seems to be event worst.
If you ask an average user, they will tell you they don't feel much different between 4G and 5G. Yes there are capacity increase and other things. But at this stage I don't think the benefits outweigh the cost of switching. That is both from MNOs and End user perspective.
If I'm downloading podcasts for a flight, I do it on WiFi beforehand or on 4G on the plane. 5G in the terminal is really useful at getting you some service, but it's slow.
Probably a side effect of not enough backhaul speed.
DFW is generally a terribly-run airport, though.
If you don't, good luck with that.
Net neutrality is only about the connections between a provider and external networks, not about how a company handles bandwidth contention amongst its customers.
Net neutrality would fix a problem like “only Facebook is accessible inside crowded stadiums” not “AT&T customers who pay more get better connections in crowded stadiums”
It's entirely on the publisher side: net neutrality was an attempt to avoid ISPs getting paid extra---costs that would be passed onto you---in exchange for making your experience on site A be better than your experience with site B (or service, vs site).
Think: "Oh, yeah, Netflix 4k works great on your new Comcast plan! But if you want Hulu 4k, you're gonna need to pay us more, because Netflix pays us to make their shit work better than Hulu's if you don't!"
They can absolutely meter and limit your connection as long as one byte is one byte, no matter its origin. They can also discriminate based on the technology they provide (4G, 5G, fiber...). Net neutrality is not about preventing "pay to win", obviously, you can get a better connection if you pay more. It is about fair competition between online services.
The area where wireless networks fall short is coverage. Obviously many homes and businesses are difficult to cover with wireless technology. Also many "IoT" and public service situations need wide coverage, and a network that works in 92% of places is "close but not cigar." There are few obvious answers rather than "lots of fiber and very cheap small cells" and "satellite technology" but it's what it takes to address wireless use cases that currently aren't addressed.
e.g. Notably several major carriers in India skipped 3G entirely and went to 4G directly because it was cheaper per subscriber. Which implies less expensive equipment per unit performance?
Whereas reality showed 4G was so cheap that major telecoms decided to skip over 3G entirely.
[1] ... and there was that summer my son and I tried to visit as many state parks in upstate NY as we could and I had phones on both the AT&T and Verizon networks that had terrible coverage away from certain big roads.
Calling that 5G obscures the fact that millimeter wave 5G standalone is a totally different beast, and a huge network engineering challenge.
It may seem bureaucratic to regulate what people can call 5G, but US consumers get ripped off thinking they're on an advanced network when in fact you could call it the long-term evolution (see what I did there?) of the existing network.
Why would it be ripped out?
Had no idea about full duplex though - that's huge
I have it in my home, but I live in the center of a major city. It just speedtested at 476.64 Mbps down, though I think I've seen 650+ in the past, but I might be mis-remembering that.
However, I only get 5G mmwave (indicated as "5GuW" on the phone) on my work phone.
The carrier I use for my personal phone charges an extra $20/month for 5G, and I don't care that much, so I leave it at 4G LTE.
Edit: Just re-tested and got 767 Mbps.
C-Band spectrum also makes sense given a speed test of 400-800Mbps. That's fast, but not hugely faster than what you should expect with really good coverage today. T-Mobile experiences speeds above 560Mbps 25% of the time. Verizon's 5GUW (which is mostly C-Band) experiences speeds above 620Mbps 25% of the time. You ran two speed tests and got 477Mbps and 767Mbps. One of those is pretty average for C-Band and one of those is quite good for C-Band (25% faster than the 75th percentile), but nothing too out of the ordinary.
Those are speeds that are relatively common when carriers have around 150MHz of 2.5-5GHz spectrum deployed in your area and you have good signal and not too much congestion.
mm wave does exist, but the coverage is often a block or two with indoor coverage being really spotty. C-band coverage will be measured in square miles. C-Band won't have the coverage that lower frequencies have, but it's a lot more practical to deploy than mm wave. mm wave shines when you have a small, high-value area where you want to deploy 1,000MHz+ of capacity. Carriers might have 50MHz of capacity around 800MHz, 90MHz of capacity around 1.9GHz, 150MHz of capacity around 4GHz, and 1,000MHz of capacity around 30GHz. That really high frequency mm wave won't cover a large area, but there's a lot of it. If you're looking to cover a sports stadium, it makes sense. If you're looking to cover people's homes (even in major cities), C-Band is going to get you really good speeds with coverage that will be a lot more usable.
It's possible that you're getting mm wave, but those speeds are pretty normal for good C-Band coverage. The first test is pretty average and the second test is quite good, but nothing extraordinary.
Chinese cities, especially at train stations and the surrounding area get really impressive flows of people every day. But even in China I would expect that while they might have a lot more 5G SA when in the US, that the radios are actually mid band and not millimeter wave for most coverage. You still get higher capacity and low latency, but most people probably don't notice the low latency, except maybe Chinese autonomous taxis faking it till they make it.
In general, putting aside the bandwidth/crowding concerns (which are real, of course), I don't find 5G that much of a step above LTE - it's nothing compared to the jump from 3G to LTE. LTE changed how I used my phone in a big way (e.g., I could now watch video or download something on my phone practically). LTE got pretty fast over time anyway.
This is on Mint Mobile, a budget MVNO now owned by T-Mobile. I pay $20/month for 15GB data.
I think a lot of people are attributing speeds of 200-700Mbps to mm wave when it's actually pretty ordinary speeds for 2.5-5GHz coverage today now that carriers have decent capacity there. If you're getting below 144Mbps, you're in the bottom 25% of T-Mobile's network experience. Over the past 6 years, speeds have gotten a ton faster, mostly from 2.5-5GHz spectrum. Verizon is the only carrier that put much effort into mm wave and it still covers basically nothing.
Ignoring latency, you're likely to get speeds similar to wifi from today's mobile networks without mm wave - unless you have a really great home internet connection and a good wifi setup. I have a MacBook Pro, but it only has wifi 6 and I can get 700-800Mbps out of my wifi, but I'm not getting 2Gbps from it.
How is it a better deal to spend more money for essentially the same thing?
Imagine you're buying food that will go bad tomorrow. You can't keep it. You can't share it. You can buy enough food to fill you up today for $5, or enough food to fill you up 50x for $20. You will still eat that one unit of food, the other 49 units will just go to waste. Which do you buy?
For all the time I've had Mint, I've saved nearly $3,000 compared to your $50/mo plan. I've never felt the urge to really need more data personally, and it's worked well for me on my international travels around North America. If the outcome was the same, wouldn't you rather keep $3k in your pocket?
For a while I had my phone stick to 3G, which doesn’t support emergency alerts, because my jurisdiction kept sending them out for joint custody disputes at 3AM 1000km away. It was fine But the 3G became unbearable and they tightened up the alert criteria.
Not necessarily for 4G to 5G. 5G can run a 4G compatible control channel and timeslices can be 4G or 5G.
> Usually the most penetrating frequencies (ie lowest) are kept on the lower G to maximize legacy support.
Maybe, but at least in the US, 4G wad deployable on new lower frequency spectrum that had previously been used for TV. LTE 71, 600 Mhz is lower frequency but wouldn't have been usable for 3G because legacy phones didn't use those frequencies.
And for those playing at home, WiFi 7 devices aren't held back by coexisting with WiFi 6 devices, for the same reason (the use of OFDMA), at least on the 6 GHz band. Legacy clients of course muddy the waters on the other bands when they're in use.
These tricks are less common in Germany though, as far as I’ve seen, so seeing 5G can serve as a weak proxy for “the carrier has at least touched this base station in the last few years”, which increases the chance they’ve upgraded its spectrum or backhaul a little bit.
Really depends on the concrete situation, though. Having a small 4G cell with 20 MHz of spectrum to yourself beats an overloaded large 5 MHz rural 5G site any day.
Ftfy
I guess there aren't enough network engineers or RF experts here to have a real conversation about it though. All the comments are just anecdotal discussions of phone bars and reception.
In Norway, Telia shut down 2G in 2025, but Telenor is holding out until the end of 2027.
In Sweden, Telia is holding until 2027, and all other telcos have already switched it off.
France is shutting down 2G this year.
So the 2G shutdown is a real thing.
Is how it should be country wide in my opinion. Way too many towers up everywhere just so xyz company can get coverage there. Leaving no 1 company to have the "best" coverage.
I do not give a shit if I can download at 500mbps while resting my phone on a wireless router. I need to be able to USE it.
Ive switched my entire home internet setup to 5G and haven't had an outtage in two years. Whereas it was once a week with fiber. I also can fallback with duel sims.
5G has legitimately changed my quality of (digital) life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP
Like 3GPP release 15 or 16 is what we currently know as a lot of in production LTE/LTE-Advanced stuff.
The interesting part of 6G doesn't seem to be faster downloads so much as sensing. ISAC is basically about making the network capable of sensing the physical environment as well as communicating.
Some of the current work is already discussing the "six sensing modes", involving different combinations of the network and UEs transmitting and receiving signals reflected from objects, and even how users might be incentivized to let their devices participate
That feels potentially much more consequential than another speed bump. 3G/4G didn't just make phones faster; they enabled an entire ecosystem that was hard to predict beforehand. My guess is that sensing could be a similar pivot for 6G.
Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now.
Why would they know the difference? They don't have any technical appreciation of what either term means or its implication for what the hardware actually does; the terms sound similar; and they've been trained by decades of marketing to choose bigger numbers[1].
[1]: And many of them apparently didn't even know that "one third" is bigger than "one quarter", as A&W found out the hard way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger
3GPP releases are more fine-grained than that. E.g. rel. 99 introduced 3G/WCDMA, rel. 8 introduced 4G/LTE, etc. Other releases only add features.
In the industry Gs are used all the time to refer to the technology/architecture, then releases are used to refer to specific features, though generally noone supports all the features of a release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequency_bands
Even within a category such as "4G" there have been significant advances in some radio capabilities since it was introduced, like MU-MIMO, vs early "4G".
There's a very large number of different things that are all being marketed as "5G" now, so it's really a drastic oversimplification to try to say that all 5G is the same thing. Do you not remember the very early days of "3G" when cellular carriers were trying to market EDGE/GPRS as if it was 3G?
"Even within a category such as "4G" there have been significant advances in some radio capabilities since it was introduced".
Yes but this is as I explained in my previous comment. There have been new features and new capabilities but on the same technology and system architecture. Think of improving internal combustion engines over time vs. switching to electric motors. That's how Gs broadly work on the technical side.
Perhaps the issue is marketing overusing a technical term that does not lend itself to it super well, especially when comparing 4G and 5G, from a smartphone consumer standpoint.
5G is already much less clear: 5G non-SA literally depends on 4G for signaling and uses 5G-NR (which itself is still OFDMA) only for user data. 5G SA changes the core network again, but isn’t even supported in many networks worldwide.
There are huge jumps in bandwidth within a generation too. 3G started out with circuit-switched-ish 384 kbit/s and ended with 40+ Mbit/s on HSPA+. The jump from that to early LTE was much smaller in comparison.
So in a way, the model of “every once in a while, the carriers and manufacturers bundle up a bunch of optional extensions and call it (n+1)” seems to be coming for 3GPP just like it already has for e.g. 802.11.
I hope they go into the direction wifi is taking though - stability rather than speed.
I never think about cell speeds being slow anymore but irritation at lack of coverage is still frequent. Esp in urban jungles where buildings block it
For building penetration you need low frequencies but those low frequencies have less bandwidth available because the bands are smaller. At the same time bandwidth needs rapidly go up, making those low bands fuller. Because there's a limit to how many bits per second you can get out of a Hz of spectrum.
What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters. A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally. This could be incorporated into the standard. Then establishments could easily include a booster just like many of them offer free WiFi now.
They're still readily available.
But yeah think this would need a legislative push to solve. Force high rises to host multi provider relays as you say and hook it into their fiber links.
But that's also a physics thing. Plain same-frequency boosters hamper frequency reuse on neighbor cells, so less bandwidth for you. And if boosters run on a separate band, you'd need to do frequency planning for them just like it's done for cells now.
Wireless is finicky, we should really avoid using it everywhere wired can be used instead.
The bandwidth available at 26Ghz is huge and the low penetration means you dont need to have as much distance before you can reuse them again. A simple wall is already enough.
But no I didn't mean those old style signal boosters that basically just retransmit the analog signal.
/s
Ex 6G = 8B.9 verizon cool blue and 7G = A0.D costco ultra red or similar.
(/s)
I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM.
Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are famous for suffering this much.
This same shit happened with launches of 5G NSA, eSIM, Apple Watch eSIM, RCS, and lots of other telco technologies...
At this point all the operators have 5G SA networks up and running for parts of Slovakia (Telekom even claims it covers 99% of Slovak population with 5G SA), but it's only available for business customers in private networks...
They all claim the same stupid reason for this - "most customer phones don't support it, and there are additional benefits for businesses"...
And there are rumors from all of them that they plan to launch it for regular customers by the end of this year...
I mean come on... In a fair market competition the first one to upgrade its network would launch first and heavily claim that they're the fastest innovator in marketing...
And when the network is up and running, why not open it up to regular people? And why it's always the same bullshit type of excuse that's basically trying to say "people don't want/need this"?
Interesting, where can I learn more about that?
EDIT: This looks promising: https://hilfe.o2online.de/o2-mobilfunknetz-einstellungen-zur...
This usually has similar (in practice) performance characteristics to LTE Advanced.
5G SA is an actual, end to end 5G network. The two biggest wins here for an end user are reduced latency (a big focus in 5G) and reduced power usage (the phone doesn’t need a simultaneous 4G connection).
They created an option to use just the 5G radio modem parts with 4G tower equipment to run them in the "Non-StandAlone" mode, so that telcos can start deploying 5G before even it matures. And the modem parts and their specs are called "5G New Radio", which is one of names of all time.
NSA is non stand alone meaning basically 4G with some 5G backwards compatible improvements.
Talking is one of the steps towards making things available to the broad masses. You have to start these things ahead of time so they are ready to deploy when the time comes.
I remember people saying the same thing about 4G relative 3G and 5G relative 4G.
I doubt majority of phone users who have a decent 4G connection would notice the difference if they upgrade to 5G.
Telefonica didn't set their signallevel-to-bars-parameters on their SIMs correctly yet. Even directly next to a antenna you only see 1-2 bar although the signal level is maxing out.
Conversely, higher frequencies mean more density, shorter distances and more cell towers. The ROI in the rural scenario in this case is lower.
Well.. that amount of bars you can see depending on the real signal level is just a SIM configuration. In the "newer" networks they aren't configured properly yet.
I guess other countries are further behind?
In the US at least, low-band or extended range 5G is widely available and has been for some time (and I'm talking about the "real" 5G low-band, not the BS marketing speak AT&T used for a while). Mid and high band 5G, or 5G ultra capacity, is much less available but if course it only really makes sense in dense cities.
I'm surprised that low band 5G isn't widely available in most 1st world countries, as again it's been here in the US for many years now.
Yes, and even in Europe. The demand-led need was badly misunderstood or anticipated in my opinion as operators were hesitant to invest (and some big ones still are). In this sense, 7G is a pipe dream (but of course worth researching as such).
The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.
I think it's not so much a nerd thing rather than a false advertising one though.
But what do you suggest instead (on Android, a Pixel specifically)?
Ps I looked it up, it can show it if the cell has 5G even if you're not connected to that at the moment, not if the network has it somewhere.
But each provider makes different choices. They have like 4 options to choose from.
You can use a network monitor app (or the built in one but it's a bit technical) to see what you're really connected to.
As a matter of fact, the only phone I ever got with a mobile plan was my first mobile phone, a Motorola RAZR flip phone more than 2 decades ago.
So 5G for most folks is just marginally better LTE and that's about it. Any higher frequencies like 6G (30GHZ~3THz) or 7G (???) won't achieve much of anything outside of laboratory, because they will hit exactly same walls like 5G UWB.
Its extremely limited range and penetration is a benefit there because you can put up thousands of cells without them interfering with each other.
It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
The speeds thing was just marketing BS as usual but mmWave did have benefits in niche scenarios.
It did not took off because the whole sales pitch was utter nonsense. Why would anyone put 3rd party 5G BTS inside their buildings and then pay for data, when they can use WiFi for free + they control the network so they can decide how data are shared between stations and which stations are allowed to be logged in.
I can see that 6G is pitching... exactly same thing. Which predictably is going to fail... on exactly same issue.
And it would have worked similarly to managed WiFi. Lots of companies outsource their WiFi and network. Many don't want to have that knowledge in house. Basically the provider would play the role of network outsourcing party inside the office and the outdoor connectivity would be more of a value-add.
The benefit would have been much higher speeds due to much more available bandwidth (way more than even 6Ghz WiFi), more security (people can't just poke at it with some packet injectors), less interference due to managed spectrum, higher density due to the beamforming and low penetration. Oh and it would have improved phone connectivity inside those buildings to boot. It could be combined with VPN/MPLS like connectivity so that laptops would always be behind the firewall even outdoors without having to run a VPN client.
This was also the pitch that led to those laptops with 5G built in that intel and Qualcomm were on about (Qualcomm was heavily trying to get into the laptop market back then). But it kinda stalled. I don't think it was a bad pitch though. It also came at a time when people weren't actually working in the office due to the pandemic and it lost momentum, beside the chicken and egg problem.
I could really see this taking off under the right conditions. But the whole laptop with mmWave isn't a thing anymore now. Perhaps 6G will bring a renewed push with it. Personally I don't think it's a bad pitch at all.
The much higher speed also does not hold together when you will look at it. When you have a device which is generating or processing a lot of data (GB/s ~ TB/s) such device needs substantial computational power to pull it off, so it is likely a stationary device connected to 230V. So why won't you drag a fiber there?
And like I said there's many companies that outsource their whole network. This isn't all that different. Not every company wants to deal with all that stuff. At work we do but we're an IT company.
They can renegotiate upon completion of the contract term yes. But during this term, usually 2 or 3 years, the terms are set. And the office will get a fiber uplink anyway. The access points will be hanging in the office but connected to fiber. Probably provisioned by the same provider that we have now for our WiFi uplink.
And it's easy enough to replace the provider with another one if they become too greedy. We'll do an RFP every 3 years anyway to get the best price every time. We recently changed WiFi access point manufacturer too for that reason.
And yes right now WiFi is sufficient for laptops but it might not always be this way. And don't forget the spectrum in office buildings is pretty crowded. And it's not the only benefit.
It may not be for everyone but I'd see this working out pretty well, really. Once there's another push from the industry and chicken and egg come together.
In fact I could even see this working out for consumers when endpoint devices with 5/6G become mainstream. Most customers right now just use the WiFi from the provider, they don't bother to change the password or the channel. Most people wouldn't even know that there's different WiFi channels. I could see a world where instead of a WiFi password they just get eSIM codes to scan.
For people like you and me this would probably be bad but on the other hand it would free up WiFi spectrum for us to use :)
Right now from my flat I see literally 100+ access points around me all hogging those few limited WiFi channels (big dense city). Compared to that the providers have a lot more bandwidth.
In india, jio is using 26ghz for wifi now instead. It's a service called airfiber. This don't even use any 5G. It's a weird custom hybrid solution where all the frames are wifi. Density here means that it's feasible to put the receiver on the rooftop of apartment buildings wherever you can get LoS. So in some sense it's been salvaged and those bands are actually being used. It's a fairly popular service.
URLL failed because it's main immediate usecase was supposed to be vehicle to vehicle comms. And auto didn't want telcos middlemanning there. But there is still hope here.
I frequently have to disable 5g and switch data to LTE to get any actual service, even when I have full bars of service. It’s highly annoying phones don’t do this by default
There is no reason you can't have phased array antennas of tens of elements on the handset and thousands on the masts, to give a massive bandwidth increase.
It will take a lot of generations to get to the limit physics sets.
I'd be perfectly happy with less headline speed increases and just a real world busy tower speed improvement. That or efficiency gains.
well if they ever get the lander upright, you'd think they'd learn to put crashbags that self-inflate to upright landers by now
Will 7G be needed?
I say no for the next 15 years. Because there are 1425235 other things that are way much important than this.
For traceable biomarkers and other reasons.
Of course there will fucking be a 7G. Capitalism doesn't just demand it, capitalism literally needs it to continue working.