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It’s become increasingly impossible to talk about spectrum policy without getting into the fight over whether 5G is a miracle technology that will end poverty, war and disease or an evil marketing scam by wireless carriers to extort concessions in exchange for magic beans. Mind you, most people never talk about spectrum policy at all — so they are spared this problem in the first place.
So I've written 3500 words trying to break down the technical capacity of 5G for the interested lay-person. As I explain, there are two parts to 5G: millimeter wave (mmWave) and everything else. These do increase overall efficiency, and mmWave beams may allow for multi-gig download where economics allows for the combination of densified small cells and fiber (i.e., urban areas). As for the rest, we are looking at about a 25%-50% increase in efficiency overall. That might still sound impressive were it not for the fact that a number of these technologies for increasing efficiency are independent of "5G" and work just fine with existing advanced LTE deployment.
In other words, while we ought to be moving ahead on stuff, we do not need to work ourselves into a frenzy that China or someone else will build a 5G network first and eat our digital lunch. And we certainly don't need to allow a merger that would take us from 4 national competitors to 3.
You can read the blog post here. http://www.wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/so-what-the-heck-does-5g-actually-do-and-is-it-worth-what-the-carriers-are-demanding/
So I've written 3500 words trying to break down the technical capacity of 5G for the interested lay-person. As I explain, there are two parts to 5G: millimeter wave (mmWave) and everything else. These do increase overall efficiency, and mmWave beams may allow for multi-gig download where economics allows for the combination of densified small cells and fiber (i.e., urban areas). As for the rest, we are looking at about a 25%-50% increase in efficiency overall. That might still sound impressive were it not for the fact that a number of these technologies for increasing efficiency are independent of "5G" and work just fine with existing advanced LTE deployment.
In other words, while we ought to be moving ahead on stuff, we do not need to work ourselves into a frenzy that China or someone else will build a 5G network first and eat our digital lunch. And we certainly don't need to allow a merger that would take us from 4 national competitors to 3.
You can read the blog post here. http://www.wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/so-what-the-heck-does-5g-actually-do-and-is-it-worth-what-the-carriers-are-demanding/
