Exactly. This is far outside my professional field, but lately I've found that one of the better ways to read the tea leaves of the next decade is to look at the boring 3GPP/ETSI material rather than the consumer-facing "6G/7G" discussion.
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.
Also if I had a dollar for every end user residential consumer (as a person who runs ISPs) that confuses "5G" with "5 GHz wifi". Like, when your install techs have to explain to a customer why they're getting shit performance in the default 20MHz wide 2.4 GHz channel, and to reconfigure all their devices in a house to talk to a 802.11ax/802.11be 3x3 or 4x4 80 MHz channel AP in the 5.x GHz band.
Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now.
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.
>A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally.
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.
Hopefully, they’ll move to reporting versioning as an explicit value rather than tying it to a constant that the general population might not know about. (I.e. 6g = 58.86; 7g = 68.67).
5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?
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.
These industries are pipelined. When generation N is in operation, N+1 hardware and software must be in development, N+2 specifications must be in endless committee discussions phase, and N+3 techs must be worked on in labs, etc.
The 5G standard is a bit of a mess. In the US we heavily rolled out 5G NSA, which means you still have a 4G network core with both 4G and 5G radios at the edge. You get a chunk of the performance benefits without having to replace the network core first.
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.
> 5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?
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.
Well, I suppose the rolling out of 5G must happen at some point, but otherwise his/her take in Section III.A is spot on and the most important takeaway.
5G seems pretty widly available here in Sweden in my experience, even in the countryside. Not that the speeds are actually better than 4G, but the indicator say 5G as I'm writing this in a tent in the middle of nowhere. :)
On raw coverage of 5g, only a few much denser countries are better. You live in basically the best 4g and 5g covered, sparsely populated country on earth :) most countries are not just further behind.
American cities also generally seem to have good 5G coverage with 4G frequencies being repurposed for 5G and 4G overall being put on life support as it’s phased out
Don't just look at the indicator on your phone though. Providers are free to scheme with those. Some honestly show the icon when you are on 5G. Others use the option of showing it when you are on 4G (not even 5G NSA) but the network offers 5G somewhere.
The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.
I've been away from Twitter phone nerds scene for quite a while, what do they use now for those details? Is it still ##service## or something else entirely?
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).
With 5G in particular I think it's important that people talk about which specific technologies they're referring to.
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.
Could there come a limit to the G-cycle? Like either a) marginal gains slow/stall progress or b) more connectivity simply not being better? Curious to hear from folks in this field if this question has been raised.
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.
Yes, why working on something that "may" be beneficial in the far future?
This is like inventing a 128-bit CPU architecture. Nobody would be able to utilize like even 1% of that, even with AI.
Unlikely. 5G hit the wall on UWB (Ultra Wide Band; 10-100GHz) because geniuses who were doing marketing for its transfer speeds did not realized that such high frequencies are disrupted with minimal amount conductive material in the air - so surprise surprise, 5G UWB does not work when you are behind a wall, it does not work when your big head full of water is in the way of BTS and most perplexing for common folk, it does not work behind a glass because regular glass is full of iron - so forget on 5G UWB on a train, tram or bus, unless somebody put mini BTS inside the vehicle.
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.
There was full team that found out that did the test that 26ghz doesn't work IRL. It didn't even work across a street corner. But they were ignored in favour of some well, career pushers.
In india, jio is using 26ghz for wifi now instead. It's a service called airfiber. They don't even use any 5G. It's a weird custom hybrid solution where all the frames are wifi. Density 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. It's a fairly popular service.
URLL failed because it's main immediate usecase was vehicle to vehicle comms. And auto didn't want telcos middlemanning there. But there is still hope here.
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.
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.
/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 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).
NSA is non stand alone meaning basically 4G with some 5G backwards compatible improvements.
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.
I remember people saying the same thing about 4G relative 3G and 5G relative 4G.
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 guess other countries are further behind?
The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.
But what do you suggest instead (on Android, a Pixel specifically)?
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).
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.
I'd be perfectly happy with less headline speed increases and just a real world busy tower speed improvement. That or efficiency gains.
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.
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.
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.
In india, jio is using 26ghz for wifi now instead. It's a service called airfiber. They don't even use any 5G. It's a weird custom hybrid solution where all the frames are wifi. Density 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. It's a fairly popular service.
URLL failed because it's main immediate usecase was vehicle to vehicle comms. And auto didn't want telcos middlemanning there. But there is still hope here.
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
* https://www.wired.com/story/nokia-4g-network-on-the-moon/