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5G
It seems like whenever there is a thread about cloud gaming, some clueless person will come in and basically say that 5G will offer near-infinite bandwidth at essentially zero latency, which will fix all problems with the Internet forever. Obviously, that's not how it works. But I thought I'd explain some of what 5G will and won't bring.
If you're transmitting data using RF from one point and receiving it at one point, the maximum rate at which you can transmit data that the other end will actually pick up correctly is the amount of spectrum that you're using times some function of the signal to noise ratio. You're not guaranteed to hit that maximum rate; for that matter, you're pretty much guaranteed not to hit it. But how clever you are about transmitting the data will affect how close to it you can get.
That means that a cellular network has several paths that they could pursue in order to increase bandwidth:
1) send data from more places and to more places
2) use more of the spectrum
3) be more clever about how you transmit and receive data
I'll come back to (1), as that's the big one. But points (2) and (3) are limited in what you can do.
As I said above, for point (3), there is some best possible rate. You can make adjustments to get closer to it. But if you're already at 80% of the theoretical peak, you're not going to double your throughput just by being more clever. The move from 2G to 3G picked up most of what was available to be had here.
Any protocol to send data reliably has some overhead for error detection and correction. For example, in SATA, this overhead is about 20% of the raw data sent. In PCI Express 3.0, it is about 1.5%. In GSM (2G), it was about 70%. 3G got rid of most of that overhead.
That's hardly the only regrettable thing about the 2G standard. The modulation couldn't adjust to send data faster when the signal to noise ratio made it possible. Switching from one cell tower to another was really clunky. The latency if something got missed and had to be resent was awful. The encryption wasn't very good.
And that all got fixed with the move from 2G to 3G. Yes, moving from 3G to 4G also improved things, as will moving from 4G to 5G. But that's tinkering around the edges, not a massive revolution.
Another approach is to just use more of the spectrum, which was my point (2) above. That's limited for different reasons. For starters, there is only 6 GHz of spectrum at a frequency of 6 GHz or less. That's axiomatic, of course, and not a statement about 6 GHz in particular. But cellular networks have commonly used frequencies around 1 GHz or 2 GHz or so because they propagate pretty well. Try to send data at a frequency of 1 THz and it will get absorbed by the air pretty quickly.
In a sense, claiming more spectrum is the big advance of 5G. But that won't do everything that you might hope for. The 5G standard will use two separate chunks of spectrum: one below 6 GHz, and the other above 24 GHz. The former is just an evolutionary advance over 4G and not really claiming more spectrum than before.
The latter is the new thing. It's sometimes loosely called "millimeter wave", though that portion of RF technically doesn't start until 30 GHz. Claiming the chunk of spectrum from 24 GHz up to 300 GHz will give 5G massively more spectrum than 4G had, and thus the possibility of massively more bandwidth. Some portions of that spectrum may be reserved for various other things in some parts of the world, but still, that's going to be a lot more spectrum than before.
So why didn't previous cellular standards do this? Because it doesn't propagate very far. It's not just that it gets absorbed by the air, though some does. It's also that it gets blocked to some degree by buildings, vehicles, hills, trees, or whatever else might happen to be in the way. If you try to connect to a cell tower that uses the higher portions of spectrum from a mile away, you're not likely to think it's an improvement over 4G. Or 3G.
That's why the millimeter wave form of 5G isn't going to be deployed that broadly, at least as measured by land area. It will get used in dense, urban areas. It will be a big improvement over public WiFi for the crowded areas that use it today. But it won't get deployed into more sparsely populated areas. If your nearest neighbor lives 500 feet away, you're not going to get millimeter wave 5G. You could still get the lower frequency version of 5G (and probably will if you have 4G now), but that's just an evolutionary improvement over 4G.
And that leads us back to option (1): send data from more places to more places. That really breaks into two cases:
1) have more cell towers that each cover a smaller region
2) have multiple transmit and receive points for a given connection between one cell tower and one cell phone
The latter is already done, but 5G networks will improve its capabilities. You can have an antenna that instead of a single transmit point, has four transmit points right next to each other that each transmit their own signal. You can also have an antenna that instead of a single receive point, has four right next to each other, and then do some computations from all four inputs to figure out what data was sent. But you could do beamforming on nearly any signal at all, and 4G already uses MIMO pretty heavily.
Rather, the improvements that 5G networks will offer here are not so much due to the 5G standard as increased processing power from Moore's Law. If you want to make heavy use of MIMO and beamforming, it comes at a cost of heavy computational requirements. To get n times the signal to noise ratio, you're going to have to do more than n times the computational work when receiving the signal. For complicated, technical reasons, sometimes it could be a lot more than n. Sometimes it could be more than n^3.
And then there is the option of more cell towers that each cover a smaller region. All of your "this is the best you can do" computations are on a per cell tower basis. If you have 4 times as many towers that each cover a quarter as much area as before, then your network can have four times the aggregate bandwidth. This doesn't even cause extra interference problems.
The move from 2G to 3G already did this to some degree, as did the move from 3G to 4G. Going from 4G to 5G will do it again. Indeed, 5G will be forced to go with smaller cells when using the millimeter wave chunk of the spectrum.
But the gains from improved MIMO, beamforming, transmit diversity, and whatever else aren't really due to the move from 4G to 5G. They're mostly due to having more computational power available because of improvements in chip fabrication. If the various carriers decided to spend as much resources on building new networks that strictly followed the 3G specification today instead of 5G, they'd still get some huge bandwidth gains over the existing 3G networks.
If you're transmitting data using RF from one point and receiving it at one point, the maximum rate at which you can transmit data that the other end will actually pick up correctly is the amount of spectrum that you're using times some function of the signal to noise ratio. You're not guaranteed to hit that maximum rate; for that matter, you're pretty much guaranteed not to hit it. But how clever you are about transmitting the data will affect how close to it you can get.
That means that a cellular network has several paths that they could pursue in order to increase bandwidth:
1) send data from more places and to more places
2) use more of the spectrum
3) be more clever about how you transmit and receive data
I'll come back to (1), as that's the big one. But points (2) and (3) are limited in what you can do.
As I said above, for point (3), there is some best possible rate. You can make adjustments to get closer to it. But if you're already at 80% of the theoretical peak, you're not going to double your throughput just by being more clever. The move from 2G to 3G picked up most of what was available to be had here.
Any protocol to send data reliably has some overhead for error detection and correction. For example, in SATA, this overhead is about 20% of the raw data sent. In PCI Express 3.0, it is about 1.5%. In GSM (2G), it was about 70%. 3G got rid of most of that overhead.
That's hardly the only regrettable thing about the 2G standard. The modulation couldn't adjust to send data faster when the signal to noise ratio made it possible. Switching from one cell tower to another was really clunky. The latency if something got missed and had to be resent was awful. The encryption wasn't very good.
And that all got fixed with the move from 2G to 3G. Yes, moving from 3G to 4G also improved things, as will moving from 4G to 5G. But that's tinkering around the edges, not a massive revolution.
Another approach is to just use more of the spectrum, which was my point (2) above. That's limited for different reasons. For starters, there is only 6 GHz of spectrum at a frequency of 6 GHz or less. That's axiomatic, of course, and not a statement about 6 GHz in particular. But cellular networks have commonly used frequencies around 1 GHz or 2 GHz or so because they propagate pretty well. Try to send data at a frequency of 1 THz and it will get absorbed by the air pretty quickly.
In a sense, claiming more spectrum is the big advance of 5G. But that won't do everything that you might hope for. The 5G standard will use two separate chunks of spectrum: one below 6 GHz, and the other above 24 GHz. The former is just an evolutionary advance over 4G and not really claiming more spectrum than before.
The latter is the new thing. It's sometimes loosely called "millimeter wave", though that portion of RF technically doesn't start until 30 GHz. Claiming the chunk of spectrum from 24 GHz up to 300 GHz will give 5G massively more spectrum than 4G had, and thus the possibility of massively more bandwidth. Some portions of that spectrum may be reserved for various other things in some parts of the world, but still, that's going to be a lot more spectrum than before.
So why didn't previous cellular standards do this? Because it doesn't propagate very far. It's not just that it gets absorbed by the air, though some does. It's also that it gets blocked to some degree by buildings, vehicles, hills, trees, or whatever else might happen to be in the way. If you try to connect to a cell tower that uses the higher portions of spectrum from a mile away, you're not likely to think it's an improvement over 4G. Or 3G.
That's why the millimeter wave form of 5G isn't going to be deployed that broadly, at least as measured by land area. It will get used in dense, urban areas. It will be a big improvement over public WiFi for the crowded areas that use it today. But it won't get deployed into more sparsely populated areas. If your nearest neighbor lives 500 feet away, you're not going to get millimeter wave 5G. You could still get the lower frequency version of 5G (and probably will if you have 4G now), but that's just an evolutionary improvement over 4G.
And that leads us back to option (1): send data from more places to more places. That really breaks into two cases:
1) have more cell towers that each cover a smaller region
2) have multiple transmit and receive points for a given connection between one cell tower and one cell phone
The latter is already done, but 5G networks will improve its capabilities. You can have an antenna that instead of a single transmit point, has four transmit points right next to each other that each transmit their own signal. You can also have an antenna that instead of a single receive point, has four right next to each other, and then do some computations from all four inputs to figure out what data was sent. But you could do beamforming on nearly any signal at all, and 4G already uses MIMO pretty heavily.
Rather, the improvements that 5G networks will offer here are not so much due to the 5G standard as increased processing power from Moore's Law. If you want to make heavy use of MIMO and beamforming, it comes at a cost of heavy computational requirements. To get n times the signal to noise ratio, you're going to have to do more than n times the computational work when receiving the signal. For complicated, technical reasons, sometimes it could be a lot more than n. Sometimes it could be more than n^3.
And then there is the option of more cell towers that each cover a smaller region. All of your "this is the best you can do" computations are on a per cell tower basis. If you have 4 times as many towers that each cover a quarter as much area as before, then your network can have four times the aggregate bandwidth. This doesn't even cause extra interference problems.
The move from 2G to 3G already did this to some degree, as did the move from 3G to 4G. Going from 4G to 5G will do it again. Indeed, 5G will be forced to go with smaller cells when using the millimeter wave chunk of the spectrum.
But the gains from improved MIMO, beamforming, transmit diversity, and whatever else aren't really due to the move from 4G to 5G. They're mostly due to having more computational power available because of improvements in chip fabrication. If the various carriers decided to spend as much resources on building new networks that strictly followed the 3G specification today instead of 5G, they'd still get some huge bandwidth gains over the existing 3G networks.
Comments
Wired connections aren't meaningfully limited by the amount of spectrum, as you can get 100 times the bandwidth of a fiber optic cable by having 100 fiber optic cables right next to each other. Or ethernet, or infiniband, or whatever you prefer. The computational workload to do this scales much more closely to linear in the amount of bandwidth that you need than any MIMO or beamforming that you can do with a wireless connection. Wired connections always have been far superior to wireless in every way except for needing the physical wire, and 5G won't do anything to change that.
For residences in the high density areas where the high frequency version of 5G makes sense, that's precisely where it's easiest to run a bunch of fiber optic cables or whatever to give everyone a good wired connection, too.
The places where 5G will be the biggest jump is densely packed public areas where you pretty much can't use a wired connection. Think airports, stadiums, and things like that, where it will supplant public WiFi. That's not really the gaming market, though, at least apart from mobile.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Where some important points crop up, happens in a few different points.
Saturation levels are important when it comes to spectrum in general, which also includes penetration rates. This is why certain carriers with low band spectrum are often more widely acclaimed in larger cities, because signal penetrates better through walls at a lower spectrum.
But these days, we also have devices that aggregate bandwidth and services, while not exactly common place in terms of performance in the mobile space, it's important to signify that this is an important distinction because traffic can sometimes be offloaded to 4G services, especially with evolutionary upgrades, similar to what happened with HSPA+, but potentially aggregated to expand not only service area and potential usable spectrum, but it can, and will, improve speed.
The real issue with Mobile isn't so much what amount of spectrum is available as you claim, it's more along the lines of who owns what amount. https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/09/21/where-each-wireless-carrier-stands-in-the-5g-race.aspx
What it will boild down to isn't the performance hit you may take, it's what carrier will be able to provide the performance you're looking for, for what you want to do, and how soon they will be able to accomplish it.
Over the next 3 years 5G will be just like anything else, a part of life, but in the interim, it will be a work in progress.
Nobody is saying that even on its best days, will this iteration of 5G beat a fiber optic wired connection, but it will come as close as we've ever been. When the dust settles, it won't even be price to performance that will matter for the majority of people, it will simply be where market adoption goes.
I'll tell you this though, I know I don't want to hunt for a network connection, or find a wifi connection I can connect to... and I feel many others will feel the same way, especially after batteries catch up in their evolution, and playing without an electrical socket handy will be much more common.
Gut ouT!
What, me worry?
I still don't know what the heck you are talking about though, Is this going to make my internet faster and do you guarantee that this 5g wont cause a massive tumor to grow somewhere on my body ?
Cheers
RandyWatson
Aloha Mr Hand !
Gut ouT!
What, me worry?
If you don't allow anything until you're absolutely sure that it won't cause cancer, then you'll die from not breathing within minutes.
But what I really meant by "free" is that it costs $0/month to not have a cell phone at all.
Aloha Mr Hand !
The only reason that who owns which chunk of spectrum matters is that the amount of spectrum with good transmission properties is limited. If there were 1 THz of bandwidth with the transmission properties that you'd like for a cellular connection, then at least in the near future, there would be enough for all of the major carriers to have however much they have a good use for. That that isn't a good model of the universe we live in is why it matters who owns what.
And yes, you're right that if you're hunting for public WiFi in crowded areas likely to offer it, then 5G is probably going to make that experience a lot nicer. Just connect to your normal carrier's network and be done rather than trying to decipher which available WiFi network is legit.
There are places in (rural) US where I have lived that didn't have "wired" internet - OK technically 20k/sec max! (I spent a small fortune on non-wired solutions). And they still don't. They have gotten costs but they were a) very high b) needed pretty much everyone to sign up for a couple of years. So they soldier on. Motto: not everyone has wired.
They are most unlikely to get 5G either - not sure all the areas have 3G yet! - for them Amazon's plans will be a godsend.
Cloud gaming has been tested and it does work with Fiber. 5G isn't going to immediately fix issues related to cloud gaming, it's a matter of connection strength, stability, and in every facet of 5G results could potentially vary with every step you take.
But there is some precedent pointing to the capabilities of real-time cloud gaming, in the form of Vives Wigig hardware. At best case performance, you have about a 7ms delay. Granted you are streaming locally, and in best case scenarios, but even real world tests can confirm low latency with high visuals, FPS and resolution wise.
Granted real world statistics on a 5G service will be heavily dependent on the area, and physical location, so there's no telling how it will work in real world tests. I do think there will be a lot of improvements in wireless infrastructure between now and 2023 when more AR focused consumer hardware will require that kind of cloud processing for mobile focused 5g devices. We just have to wait and see.
That's not to say that 5G will be useless. Far from it. If you're using 4G now and want more bandwidth on a mobile connection, then 5G will help a lot. If you're using overtaxed public WiFi hot spots a lot and want a better connection with less fuss, then 5G will be a huge advance for you. Neither of those are primarily about gaming, though.
Personally I wouldn't hate taking a 30% hit in data speed, but it's unlikely speed is the only issue. I'm more worried about overall latency, at least, when it comes to gaming. I think it'll be very interesting to see how it all shakes out in real world experiences. We've got a year minimum before that's even on the radar though.
You stay sassy!
Ionizing radiation is the nasty stuff that you should worry about. Radio frequency, even at the top of the 5G range, is far too low energy to knock an electron off of anything that wasn't already in such a high energy state as to be practically falling off of its atom anyway.
At sufficiently high intensity, it could bake you. Of course, so could visible light. That's not how it's going to be used.
Ya we safe.
Then 6G
Then 7G
Then 8G
...
If functional demand drove the evolution of tech, I'd likely not worry. The reality is that the VAST majority of the public is driven by advertising and not functional reasoning. Governing such progress is well out of the knowledge of current administrations too when it comes to high tech ... the internet proves this.
All I said is I worry about the deployment of the evolving cell phone tech and this is entirely due to the lack of immediate governing of it. It WILL out pace reason.
You stay sassy!
As for pushing into higher frequencies, even the higher end of the millimeter wave spectrum is undesirable because signals won't propagate very well. I'd expect carriers to stick toward the lower end of it until they have no other options. If they want to go above that for more bandwidth, the next thing up is infrared, which is pretty much unusable for a variety of reasons.
There are some serious dangers from cell phones, such as:
1) accidents due to people not paying attention to their surroundings because they were watching something on their phone
2) people neglecting real-life responsibilities because they're addicted to something on their phone
3) people spending money that they can't afford to spend on gambling-style stuff in stupid mobile games
But the way that it gets transmitted isn't really a problem. If you'd like to focus on a transmission problem that could become serious if people get carried away rather than mere paranoia, ask how much power all of those cell towers are going to burn, and how much heat they're going to output. Those computations to find the exact coefficients to use for MIMO and beamforming aren't cheap, and if scaled up far enough, they can take vastly more energy than actually transmitting. That infrared waste heat output would become a danger to humans long before their transmitted RF does.
I'm not predicting that that will become a serious problem--though it likely will be a meaningful drain on our power grids. I'm only saying that it would become a serious problem long before what you're worried about could.