Below is a video from Startcon, with Amy Peck, Senior Director of Enterprise Content at HTC Vive. She talks about the future of 5G with some really good insights.
- 5G is not an evolution of LTE or 4G, it is a full new mobile system.
- 5G's architecture is entirely different than any other mobile platform.
- Three Countries are ruling 5G as we write this: Korea, US, and China.
- 5G connections will easily surpass 1 billion by the year 2023.
- By 2025, the media industry will surpass $1.3 trillion from 5G.
Take a look at the future from a proven pro with a solid grasp on 5G. Here are some key points...
5G networks are digital cellular networks, and service areas are covered by providers and divided into small geographical areas called cells. Analog signals (outside the device) are digitized in the telephone, converted by an analog-to-digital converter and transmitted as a stream of bits. All the 5G wireless devices in a cell communicate by radio waves with a local antenna array and low power automated transceiver (transmitter and receiver) in the cell, over frequency channels assigned by the transceiver from a pool of frequencies that are reused in other cells. The local antennas are connected with the telephone network and the Internet by a high-bandwidth optical fiber or wireless backhaul connection. As in other cell networks, a mobile device crossing from one cell to another is automatically "handed off" seamlessly to the new cell. 5G can support up to a million devices per square kilometer, while 4G supports only up to 100,000 devices per square kilometer. The new 5G wireless devices also have 4G LTE capability, as the new networks use 4G for initially establishing the connection with the cell, as well as in locations where 5G access is not available.
Verizon and a few others are using millimeter waves. Millimeter waves have a shorter range than microwaves, therefore the cells are limited to a smaller size. Millimeter waves also have more trouble passing through building walls.[8] Millimeter wave antennas are smaller than the large antennas used in previous cellular networks. Some are only a few inches (several centimeters) long.
Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) was deployed in 4G as early as 2016 and typically used 32 to 128 small antennas at each cell. In the right frequencies and configuration, it can increase performance from 4 to 10 times. Multiple bitstreams of data are transmitted simultaneously. In a technique called beamforming, the base station computer will continuously calculate the best route for radio waves to reach each wireless device and will organize multiple antennas to work together as phased arrays to create beams of millimeter waves to reach the device.
