5G

GoWolfpack said:
There are plenty of areas that get NoG. Maybe 5G will leapfrog over the current problems a lot of folks still have with getting high speed internet in their homes in poor or rural counties.
Click to expand...

Not without hard lines and close antennas. Think a high speed net line with a lot of wifi boxes along it to provide service. That's the mental picture I get anyway. Which may both be possible, at a cost. Now, the upside is it might be cheaper to do those things than to buy/lease land and build towers. But physically, I don't think 5g improves things with our current set up. The physical set up has to change with it.
 
From what I was seeing 5g will be all new boxes lines and pretty much it’s own by itself since it’s different wavelengths. That being said most big cities will get it and have it and probably be moving on to 6g before most rural areas even see 5g.
 
5g will be a decades long deployment in rural areas, just like 4g has been. It seems unlikely that the high band stuff will ever be deployed.

To work 5g really should have fiber backhaul. In lots of small towns there may be fiber to the school or to the library, but there isn’t fiber to where they need to build base stations, and carriers won’t build that fiber without a government subsidy.

Congress is working on a $9B grant program to help rural areas, but it’ll never be enough.
 
Resident tower guy here.....
5G simply means 5th generation technology. LTE stands for Long Term Evolution, which is using antennas, radios, and fiber that can handle the increasing bandwidth demands of 4G, 5G, 6G (already in the works), etc....
The “5G” just represents the newest deployable technology. It is still carried over RF, and they are using higher frequencies now, which have more bandwidth, but not as much power or efficiency, and higher frequency also means less penetration through walls, etc, so you will start seeing “small cells” appearing on streetlight posts, mounted to buildings at around 30-40 feet elevation.

RF is RF....you wanna get a buzz, hang out around a 50KW class B 6 bay FM antenna at 500’ on a big ol’ red and white stick....its a wonder I have kids....

ANY RF will hurt you if you are exposed to it long enough....we were building an AM tower in Harrisonburg some years ago, and the headache ball was just hanging about a foot off the dirt and it swung close to the next section we were stacking. There was a 5K AM station on the air on a tower about 500 yards away, and the RF was arcing into the tower section and we could hear the programming audio coming through the arc!!

Oh, and don’t grab a winch cable that’s near a 5KW AM station................

Got a couple tower hands that will never do that again!![emoji1]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Last edited:
JimB said:
Generally speaking the spectrum determines distance and relative capacity. 5g is more efficient than 4g so more capacity in each category, but in general lower frequencies travel further, penetrate foliage and buildings, but have less capacity. You can only improve the overall capacity so much in this spectrum because one broadcast site affects the other broadcast sites for miles around, so you can’t just squeeze more in. The mid band spectrum is the bomb for suburban areas, it travels a few miles, and does a reasonable job penetrating buildings and has good capacity. The high band is the ticket for the cities, it travels only very short distances and in some cases will not penetrate a single building (good when you want to build inside and keep it there) but it has crazy capacity. That’s a very simplified view of course.

So the issue isn’t really 5g vs older tech, it’s the availability of additional spectrum.

To the lay person none of this matters, it’s just kinda magical that we can get porn out of thin air.
Click to expand...

Very well presented Jim.
 
1911gobang said:
Resident tower guy here.....
5G simply means 5th generation technology. LTE stands for Long Term Evolution, which is using antennas, radios, and fiber that can handle the increasing bandwidth demands of 4G, 5G, 6G (already in the works), etc....
The “5G” just represents the newest deployable technology. It is still carried over RF, and they are using higher frequencies now, which have more bandwidth, but not as much power or efficiency, and higher frequency also means less penetration through walls, etc, so you will start seeing “small cells” appearing on streetlight posts, mounted to buildings at around 30-40 feet elevation.

RF is RF....you wanna get a buzz, hang out around a 50KW class B 6 bay FM antenna at 500’ on a big ol’ red and white stick....its a wonder I have kids....

ANY RF will hurt you if you are exposed to it long enough....we were building an AM tower in Harrisonburg some years ago, and the headache ball was just hanging about a foot off the dirt and it swung close to the next section we were stacking. There was a 5K AM station on the air on a tower about 500 yards away, and the RF was arcing into the tower section and we could hear the programming audio coming through the arc!!

Oh, and don’t grab a winch cable that’s near a 5KW AM station................

Got a couple tower hands that will never do that again!![emoji1]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Ah, y'all inadvertently made a crystal radio with a plasma speaker! :D
 
5G is a hodgepodge. Some would even say a cluster... There are no standards yet. Different countries are using, not only different frequencies, but different bands. There is a lot of 5G R&D at the "lower" (UHF) frequencies, but the sexy hotness is up in the upper microwave/lower millimeter wave bands, where folks are doing phased arrays on small boards. From my perspective, the real challenge there is COST. You need smaller RF devices, higher transition frequencies, increased manufacturing tolerances... If it weren't for the fact that low power is OK, all that would be a non-starter. But, you can accomplish some really high frequency things in silicon if you can accept low power and mediocre efficiency, or go to silicon germanium and get better performance with some more cost.

And just because the little icon in the phone display says 4G or LTE or some other name...that doesn't mean that it really IS. A phone display is what someone WANTS you to see. It is not necessarily an accurate representation of reality. The prime example of that is, just because the display is blank...doesn't mean the entire phone is powered OFF.
 
RFMan said:
5G is a hodgepodge. Some would even say a cluster... There are no standards yet. Different countries are using, not only different frequencies, but different bands. There is a lot of 5G R&D at the "lower" (UHF) frequencies, but the sexy hotness is up in the upper microwave/lower millimeter wave bands, where folks are doing phased arrays on small boards. From my perspective, the real challenge there is COST. You need smaller RF devices, higher transition frequencies, increased manufacturing tolerances... If it weren't for the fact that low power is OK, all that would be a non-starter. But, you can accomplish some really high frequency things in silicon if you can accept low power and mediocre efficiency, or go to silicon germanium and get better performance with some more cost.

And just because the little icon in the phone display says 4G or LTE or some other name...that doesn't mean that it really IS. A phone display is what someone WANTS you to see. It is not necessarily an accurate representation of reality. The prime example of that is, just because the display is blank...doesn't mean the entire phone is powered OFF.
Click to expand...
In the analog days everyone was looking at the number of bars on their phones to compare service availability from competing carriers, so we ran the signaling channels hot to show the most bars. Didn’t make a bit of difference to call completion or quality, but folks somehow got it in their head that it was important. I don’t know exactly how the display in the phone is controlled, but I’m guessing that it’s just a bit that the carrier sends out, may not mean a thing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom