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Bench Talk for Design Engineers | The Official Blog of Mouser Electronics


5G: Tall Order or Tall Tale?
On May 20, 2016 in RF by Barry Manz
Barry Manz

 

If you believe what the wireless industry is saying about 5G, the fifth generation of cellular technology, you’d think it was the equivalent of landing a man on the moon. Not only will we have lightning-quick data rates and expanded coverage, 5G will make it possible to connect everyone with every “thing” that needs to be connected. That’s a tall order that could wind up being a tall tale, for several reasons.

First, achieving this universal connectivity will require an entirely different, software-defined rather than hardware-defined approach to network design, a colossal undertaking. Next, 5G will for the first time will break through the 3 GHz barrier, ultimately using frequencies well into the millimeter-wave region up to about 60 GHz. Signals don’t propagate over long distances at millimeter-wave frequencies and can be impeded by almost anything, so a lot more expensive infrastructure will be required.

However, the most daunting challenge is without a doubt the need to reduce latency from its current round-trip time of about 50 ms in 4G to an incredible 1 ms or less in 5G. If this can’t be achieved, a lot of the applications that 5G is supposed to make possible will not exist, or at least not in all situations. Those applications include virtual reality, “serious” gaming, the next generation of robotics, telesurgery, autonomous vehicle connectivity, and a group of other applications grouped in the category of the “tactile Internet”.

The problem is that, hard though we may try, the laws of physics dictate how fast signals can travel between one place and another, which is 186,000 miles/s--in a vacuum; that is, space. (Radio signals are basically electromagnetic radiation, so they travel as fast as the speed of light.) But the Earth’s atmosphere slows them down somewhat, and combined with the fact that 5G signals will travel through terrestrial and satellite communications networks and all types of electronic devices, it seems likely that sub-1 ms latency will be achievable only over very short distances.

I’m not saying that achieving nearly insignificant latency is impossible, just that it will be incredibly difficult and impossible in some scenarios, which is infuriating, as most articles in the media assume that making this happen is a piece of cake, a done deed, a fait accompli. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to following the progress on this front.



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Barry Manz is president of Manz Communications, Inc., a technical media relations agency he founded in 1987. He has since worked with more than 100 companies in the RF and microwave, defense, test and measurement, semiconductor, embedded systems, lightwave, and other markets. Barry writes articles for print and online trade publications, as well as white papers, application notes, symposium papers, technical references guides, and Web content. He is also a contributing editor for the Journal of Electronic Defense, editor of Military Microwave Digest, co-founder of MilCOTS Digest magazine, and was editor in chief of Microwaves & RF magazine.


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Tagged With: 5G, Cellular Technology, IoT, RF

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