Vertical Divider
Special Report on 5G
January 14, 2019 At CES 2019, 5G was all over the place. The wireless technology promises to deliver cellular calls and data rates in the gigabits per second, making these networks a real threat to wired data networks for the first time for smartphones, TVs and AR. That’s why the cable TV industry — represented by the Internet and Television Association (NCTA), CableLabs, and Cable Europe — announced its own plans at CES to adopt 10G, or 10-gigabit-per-second data networks. Competition is spurring the cable companies to ramp up from today’s 1-gigabit-per-second cable modems to 10 gigabits per second and beyond in the coming years. That’s going to be a two-way data rate, with fast speeds in both directions. Currently, standard cable download speeds are ~200 megabits per second and upload speed are 5.3 megabits per second. CableLabs said the industry has moved from 4 percent of homes at a gigabit a second in 2016 to 80 percent in 2018. |
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However, the big news at CES was made by AT&T having launched its initial mobile 5G network in parts of 12 U.S. citieslast December, but is now preparing for full nationwide coverage — a dauntingly large task that its millimeter wave small cells won’t be able to handle alone. The carrier revealedthat it will “offer nationwide 5G coverage with our lower band spectrum,” specifically the sub-6GHz frequencies discussed by AT&T VP Gordon Mansfield. While the announcement wasn’t entirely surprising given that AT&T began to distinguish between “5G” and “5G+” in December, noting that it planned to call high-speed millimeter wave service “5G+” and offer it only in select high-traffic areas, this is the first official confirmation that AT&T’s nationwide 5G network will rely upon aggregating lower-bandwidth radio signals, which spread more widely from larger towers. Rival T-Mobile has similarly said that it will use low-bandwidth towers for its nationwide 5G network, while Verizon has focused largely on “true 5G” using high-capacity millimeter wave spectrum. Even so, all of the carriers will eventually rely upon more than one radio band to provide 5G services.Each carrier is expected to convert some of its existing LTE spectrum into 5G spectrum, though there’s a substantial likelihood of a speed penalty for doing so — enough that there could be a noticeable performance gap between millimeter wave and sub-6GHz 5G networks. AT&T plans to “begin deploying that lower band spectrum in the second half of this year,” suggesting that the allocation of some existing LTE spectrum for 5G will happen sooner rather than later, supporting an already announced Samsung sub-6GHz smartphone.In the transition from 4G to 5G, AT&T says that it has brought two interim technologies into more markets than expected: 1Gbps LTE-LAA is now in parts of 55 cities, with its controversially named “5G Evolution” or “5G E” — actually just 4G LTE-Advanced — in over 400 markets, offering roughly 400Mbps speeds on select 4G devices. Towers with the 5G E hardware will be capable of flipping to actual 5G service in the near future, but until then will confuse 4G users into believing that they’re using 5G technologies.AT&T will also expand its agreement with Magic Leapto include business solutions, including manufacturing, retail, and health care applications. Magic Leap’s current-generation hardware has no cellular hardware, but the company is expected to offer a 5G version in the future, in partnership with AT&T.
AT&T is facing quite the pushback over its decision to label its upgraded LTE network as "5G Evolution," and not just from rival carriers. In an interview with Tom's Guide, the company's Igal Elbaz defended the decision. AT&T had been "pretty public" about what it was doing for some time, he said, and the indicator helps them know they're in an "enhanced experience" coverage area. He added that all of the provider's relevant hardware investment was "5G ready," so it just had to flick a software switch to enable the new technology on its end once both the code and devices were available. The problem is that AT&T isn't really addressing the main concerns. While its souped-up LTE network can be significantly faster, the issue isn't whether or not there's an indicator -- it's that it's billed as 5G. Unlike when the carrier marketed HSPA+ as 4G,there isn't even the slightest change in standards. The technology is the amalgamation of multiple performance-boosting methods for LTE, and selling it as 5G is both misleading and potentially confusing to people buying 5G-capable phones.And while it'll be relatively easy for AT&T to make real 5G available that won't change the practical reality for customers who'll have to replace their devices. There's a concern they'll buy LTE phones now without realizing that proper 5G hardware is just around the corner.While 5G Evolution isn't likely to spend much time in the spotlight, it could lead to disappointed users. Below are responses from 2 of the leading network providers, as reported by Venture Beat (VB)
AT&T VP of RAN and device design Gordon Mansfieldprovided legitimate insights into the carrier’s 5G plans — and explanations for some of its recently controversial marketing decisions.
Gordon Mansfield: We’ve deployed a lot of our spectrum in the past year, so we announced 400 markets with what we call 5G Evolution, which is a lot of our spectrum in use, and that will continue to be built out through this year. A lot of the work we’re doing with FirstNet, getting that coverage expanded, and adding the new radios for that LTE build, is that those radios are all 5G NR standards ready. So when the software is ready to start upgrading those, then they also have an ability called dynamic coexisting, so I can simultaneously on the 5G radio serve a 5G or LTE customer. Over time, all of those towers that are 5G E will ultimately have 5G capabilities. A lot of that, the timing at which that flip happens, there’s a lot of dynamics — how much capacity do you have, what software capabilities are available, but we very much will. Where we’ve deployed that infrastructure to support it, a lot of it is software upgradeable to support 5G. But you have to worry about how many (5G) handsets, how many users you have, you have to continue to serve a base of customers that have current handsets.
When will phones have a 5G E indication on it and what spectrum is it actually using?
Mansfield: It’s actually using multiple bands. It uses our 700 MHz spectrum, 1900 spectrum, AWS spectrum, WCS 2300 spectrum, and some more bands — 850 are even used. When you get that indicator, it’s not one band or one frequency. We’ve deployed multiple radios at that site, along with the appropriate backhaul, along with all the capabilities that allow us to bring all of that together. When you see that indicator, there are at least three radios being aggregated together, and more often than not, four. We don’t turn that on until the area has three or more carriers with a lot of other advanced capabilities on those radios that enable the phone to get those final speeds.
Mansfield: AT&T’s 5G network will support sub-6 GHz frequencies and our current holdings for sub-6 range from 700 MHz up to 2300 MHz or 2.3 GHz. Certainly with CBRS coming around, we’ve started to do some work with CBRS at 3.5 GHz for fixed wireless. At some point that spectrum could also be used for 5G. All of the hardware we’ve deployed from day one is 5G NR capable.
Mansfield: The plan to deploy this up-to-2.3 GHz spectrum as the sub-6 “5G” service, and then millimeter wave will only hit relatively high traffic locations as “5G+”. The way to think about that is that millimeter wave is short distance but high bandwidth with multiple gigabit speeds. Today, millimeter wave is coupled with the sub-6 frequencies on LTE. Over time, these radios that are sub-6 on LTE will pivot into a 5G NR waveform and can combine those. The very high bandwidth of millimeter wave with those sub-6 frequencies, allows a very seamless mobility, because sub-6 gives very nice blanket. When in those zones with millimeter wave radios, it adds that and just throws throughput way up. Throughputalways comes down to how much spectrum there is. The reason the mm Wave throws off those multi-gig speeds is that 400-800MHz chunks of spectrum can be used. With sub-6 GHz, only a couple hundred megahertz is available. With our current holdings, there will be lift on those frequencies over what LTE provides, but not a significant lift. Today we’re deploying all of this bandwidth on LTE and getting those high speeds, they’re not going to magically have higher speeds on 5G. It all comes down to the bandwidth. So if someone only applies a small channel, it could be lower speed than what you now get.
Reportedly,Netgear’s 5G Nighthawkisn’t initially performing better than regular LTE. The same thing is true for services in the past — there’s a starting point from which you evolve. We stated very clearly and didn’t hide from the fact that we were starting with a 100 MHz carrier. There are a lot of reasons, but there’s a lot of complexity with everything we’re doing with mmWave, which should change very rapidly. Month over month, over the next couple of months, we will see a step. We’ve got things laid out of new functionality; we expect to software upgrade each of device and infrastructure on a fairly regular cadence. We’ll have step functions of speed improvements, I expect, month over month improvements just in the first quarter alone. Certainly by the end of the first quarter, we’ll be peaking well into over a gig. I’ll leave it at that for now. We intend to launch a Samsung smartphone in the first half of 2019. The first one, just to be very clear, is a millimeter wave. And the second one includes sub-6 (5G).
To say to someone, listen, we’re going to have 5G in two different flavors — 5G and 5G+ — but you’re only going to be able to connect to our “stadium 5G” with phone number one, and your “walkaround 5G” is going to be the one coming later…
Mansfield: The biggest gain in throughput performance is going to be with millimeter wave. So the fact is, with millimeter wave, and combining it with LTE technology on sub-6, and being able to take those sub-6 carriers and simultaneously, you get the benefit immediately of those sub-6 frequencies using an LTE waveform, adding onto its mmWave 5G NR waveform. You get that experience today. At the end of the year when there is NR on that (second phone), that device will have longer legs forward. But will you get a very similar experience on that device as you do on the device earlier in the year? Yes. From an evolution of technology, nothing happens flip of the switch. Everything builds on top of everything else. So by us pushing the core to the edge, a lot of the latency benefits that you get, guess what — our existing network is getting the benefit of that right now.
We’re typically latencies getting high 20s, low 30s (milliseconds). 5G and millimeter wave initially will be similar, a little less, like a couple of milliseconds less. But over time, I expect it to come down sub-20 for wide area. People aren’t going to want to do AR/VR going 70MPH down the highway. But if you go into stadiums, like AT&T Stadium, there’s things that can be done using edge compute capabilities, where the traffic from an AR/VR perspective never leaves the stadium and the latencies can reach sub-5 (milliseconds). There will be pockets where you’ve absolutely optimized the network for a specific experience that will be single-digit latencies. But when you think about the wide area, sub-20 (milliseconds), and it comes down to how far out have you pushed the (network’s) edge. With 5G, you can have different applications with different latency requirements. Like using AR in a manufacturing environment… You can go and build scenarios that are very special purpose. To get to real single-digit latencies, that’s important to understand. That will come first. Over time you’ll build the infrastructure further and further out that will allow it to come down on a broader basis for consumers. I think it’s important for people to realize that you can’t make an investment where everything happens everywhere at one time. It’s just not practical. A lot of those industrial AR applications, though, are wired, if they’re truly really good with granular abilities…For example, HoloLens is very limited in what it can do. What we’re talking about here is complete 3D you can look around. It’s very different than what HoloLens does. With 5G and edge compute, you now can do that wireless. That’s the big deal in enterprise with 5G, you can take things like robotics, manufacturing line that can take days to reconfigure. If you can do all of that wirelessly, and then also have the corresponding ancillary processes and capabilities that come with it, it starts to open up a tremendous opportunity. Some people have been trying to do Wi-Fi-based systems for the better part of a decade or more. Sure, they can get bandwidth and low latency, but where they struggle and fail every time is jitter. Jitter is not their friend. The latest and greatest Wi-Fi systems, with better throughput and with lower latency, take a cellular system — even on LTE, with localized edge compute, and slightly higher latency, the throughput’s pretty similar. But much better jitter. Think about drones. Jitter matters. On Wi-Fi, that drone crashes into the wall 9 out of 10 times. On cellular, it never did. The difference is jitter. It’s network instability. When you get into totally unlicensed, uncontrolled areas, it is very hard to maintain a consistent jitter factor. And it’s also hard in a noisy environment. Even on the same spectrum, we use LAA on 5GHz spectrum, as Wi-Fi uses, from a performance perspective, LAA outperforms Wi-Fi every time. Why? You’re not dropping as many packets. The 3GPP waveforms deal with those changes in environments because it’s a mobile system.
Regarding prices, the industry will not set the price; consumers will set the price. We set initial pricing, and our marketing partners took data they look at and set that pricing. We’ll see what happens over time.
Figure 1: 5G Smartphone Showing 5GE
AT&T is facing quite the pushback over its decision to label its upgraded LTE network as "5G Evolution," and not just from rival carriers. In an interview with Tom's Guide, the company's Igal Elbaz defended the decision. AT&T had been "pretty public" about what it was doing for some time, he said, and the indicator helps them know they're in an "enhanced experience" coverage area. He added that all of the provider's relevant hardware investment was "5G ready," so it just had to flick a software switch to enable the new technology on its end once both the code and devices were available. The problem is that AT&T isn't really addressing the main concerns. While its souped-up LTE network can be significantly faster, the issue isn't whether or not there's an indicator -- it's that it's billed as 5G. Unlike when the carrier marketed HSPA+ as 4G,there isn't even the slightest change in standards. The technology is the amalgamation of multiple performance-boosting methods for LTE, and selling it as 5G is both misleading and potentially confusing to people buying 5G-capable phones.And while it'll be relatively easy for AT&T to make real 5G available that won't change the practical reality for customers who'll have to replace their devices. There's a concern they'll buy LTE phones now without realizing that proper 5G hardware is just around the corner.While 5G Evolution isn't likely to spend much time in the spotlight, it could lead to disappointed users. Below are responses from 2 of the leading network providers, as reported by Venture Beat (VB)
AT&T VP of RAN and device design Gordon Mansfieldprovided legitimate insights into the carrier’s 5G plans — and explanations for some of its recently controversial marketing decisions.
Gordon Mansfield: We’ve deployed a lot of our spectrum in the past year, so we announced 400 markets with what we call 5G Evolution, which is a lot of our spectrum in use, and that will continue to be built out through this year. A lot of the work we’re doing with FirstNet, getting that coverage expanded, and adding the new radios for that LTE build, is that those radios are all 5G NR standards ready. So when the software is ready to start upgrading those, then they also have an ability called dynamic coexisting, so I can simultaneously on the 5G radio serve a 5G or LTE customer. Over time, all of those towers that are 5G E will ultimately have 5G capabilities. A lot of that, the timing at which that flip happens, there’s a lot of dynamics — how much capacity do you have, what software capabilities are available, but we very much will. Where we’ve deployed that infrastructure to support it, a lot of it is software upgradeable to support 5G. But you have to worry about how many (5G) handsets, how many users you have, you have to continue to serve a base of customers that have current handsets.
When will phones have a 5G E indication on it and what spectrum is it actually using?
Mansfield: It’s actually using multiple bands. It uses our 700 MHz spectrum, 1900 spectrum, AWS spectrum, WCS 2300 spectrum, and some more bands — 850 are even used. When you get that indicator, it’s not one band or one frequency. We’ve deployed multiple radios at that site, along with the appropriate backhaul, along with all the capabilities that allow us to bring all of that together. When you see that indicator, there are at least three radios being aggregated together, and more often than not, four. We don’t turn that on until the area has three or more carriers with a lot of other advanced capabilities on those radios that enable the phone to get those final speeds.
Mansfield: AT&T’s 5G network will support sub-6 GHz frequencies and our current holdings for sub-6 range from 700 MHz up to 2300 MHz or 2.3 GHz. Certainly with CBRS coming around, we’ve started to do some work with CBRS at 3.5 GHz for fixed wireless. At some point that spectrum could also be used for 5G. All of the hardware we’ve deployed from day one is 5G NR capable.
Mansfield: The plan to deploy this up-to-2.3 GHz spectrum as the sub-6 “5G” service, and then millimeter wave will only hit relatively high traffic locations as “5G+”. The way to think about that is that millimeter wave is short distance but high bandwidth with multiple gigabit speeds. Today, millimeter wave is coupled with the sub-6 frequencies on LTE. Over time, these radios that are sub-6 on LTE will pivot into a 5G NR waveform and can combine those. The very high bandwidth of millimeter wave with those sub-6 frequencies, allows a very seamless mobility, because sub-6 gives very nice blanket. When in those zones with millimeter wave radios, it adds that and just throws throughput way up. Throughputalways comes down to how much spectrum there is. The reason the mm Wave throws off those multi-gig speeds is that 400-800MHz chunks of spectrum can be used. With sub-6 GHz, only a couple hundred megahertz is available. With our current holdings, there will be lift on those frequencies over what LTE provides, but not a significant lift. Today we’re deploying all of this bandwidth on LTE and getting those high speeds, they’re not going to magically have higher speeds on 5G. It all comes down to the bandwidth. So if someone only applies a small channel, it could be lower speed than what you now get.
Reportedly,Netgear’s 5G Nighthawkisn’t initially performing better than regular LTE. The same thing is true for services in the past — there’s a starting point from which you evolve. We stated very clearly and didn’t hide from the fact that we were starting with a 100 MHz carrier. There are a lot of reasons, but there’s a lot of complexity with everything we’re doing with mmWave, which should change very rapidly. Month over month, over the next couple of months, we will see a step. We’ve got things laid out of new functionality; we expect to software upgrade each of device and infrastructure on a fairly regular cadence. We’ll have step functions of speed improvements, I expect, month over month improvements just in the first quarter alone. Certainly by the end of the first quarter, we’ll be peaking well into over a gig. I’ll leave it at that for now. We intend to launch a Samsung smartphone in the first half of 2019. The first one, just to be very clear, is a millimeter wave. And the second one includes sub-6 (5G).
To say to someone, listen, we’re going to have 5G in two different flavors — 5G and 5G+ — but you’re only going to be able to connect to our “stadium 5G” with phone number one, and your “walkaround 5G” is going to be the one coming later…
Mansfield: The biggest gain in throughput performance is going to be with millimeter wave. So the fact is, with millimeter wave, and combining it with LTE technology on sub-6, and being able to take those sub-6 carriers and simultaneously, you get the benefit immediately of those sub-6 frequencies using an LTE waveform, adding onto its mmWave 5G NR waveform. You get that experience today. At the end of the year when there is NR on that (second phone), that device will have longer legs forward. But will you get a very similar experience on that device as you do on the device earlier in the year? Yes. From an evolution of technology, nothing happens flip of the switch. Everything builds on top of everything else. So by us pushing the core to the edge, a lot of the latency benefits that you get, guess what — our existing network is getting the benefit of that right now.
We’re typically latencies getting high 20s, low 30s (milliseconds). 5G and millimeter wave initially will be similar, a little less, like a couple of milliseconds less. But over time, I expect it to come down sub-20 for wide area. People aren’t going to want to do AR/VR going 70MPH down the highway. But if you go into stadiums, like AT&T Stadium, there’s things that can be done using edge compute capabilities, where the traffic from an AR/VR perspective never leaves the stadium and the latencies can reach sub-5 (milliseconds). There will be pockets where you’ve absolutely optimized the network for a specific experience that will be single-digit latencies. But when you think about the wide area, sub-20 (milliseconds), and it comes down to how far out have you pushed the (network’s) edge. With 5G, you can have different applications with different latency requirements. Like using AR in a manufacturing environment… You can go and build scenarios that are very special purpose. To get to real single-digit latencies, that’s important to understand. That will come first. Over time you’ll build the infrastructure further and further out that will allow it to come down on a broader basis for consumers. I think it’s important for people to realize that you can’t make an investment where everything happens everywhere at one time. It’s just not practical. A lot of those industrial AR applications, though, are wired, if they’re truly really good with granular abilities…For example, HoloLens is very limited in what it can do. What we’re talking about here is complete 3D you can look around. It’s very different than what HoloLens does. With 5G and edge compute, you now can do that wireless. That’s the big deal in enterprise with 5G, you can take things like robotics, manufacturing line that can take days to reconfigure. If you can do all of that wirelessly, and then also have the corresponding ancillary processes and capabilities that come with it, it starts to open up a tremendous opportunity. Some people have been trying to do Wi-Fi-based systems for the better part of a decade or more. Sure, they can get bandwidth and low latency, but where they struggle and fail every time is jitter. Jitter is not their friend. The latest and greatest Wi-Fi systems, with better throughput and with lower latency, take a cellular system — even on LTE, with localized edge compute, and slightly higher latency, the throughput’s pretty similar. But much better jitter. Think about drones. Jitter matters. On Wi-Fi, that drone crashes into the wall 9 out of 10 times. On cellular, it never did. The difference is jitter. It’s network instability. When you get into totally unlicensed, uncontrolled areas, it is very hard to maintain a consistent jitter factor. And it’s also hard in a noisy environment. Even on the same spectrum, we use LAA on 5GHz spectrum, as Wi-Fi uses, from a performance perspective, LAA outperforms Wi-Fi every time. Why? You’re not dropping as many packets. The 3GPP waveforms deal with those changes in environments because it’s a mobile system.
Regarding prices, the industry will not set the price; consumers will set the price. We set initial pricing, and our marketing partners took data they look at and set that pricing. We’ll see what happens over time.
Figure 1: 5G Smartphone Showing 5GE
Source: Company
Mike Haberman Verizon’s VP of network engineeringalso chimed in.
We launched what we call 5G Home in 2018, and that’s a real system with real customers. That’s real 5G, using TF standard, technology form standard. Obviously, what happened is that TF was a bunch of the bigger infrastructure vendors and us leading the way, and we drove the industry to get 5G out, and what ended up happening was that the 5G NR standard was accelerated. Which was great from our standpoint. From a network perspective, all the ingredients are the same. It’s merely just upgrading that last leg, which will happen, and we’ll do that when it’s ready at no cost. It’s just a modem upgrade at the house, and it’s designed to be upgraded, and some of the equipment can be upgraded with software. It’s all millimeter wave (mmWave), so it has the same radio. We’re not using a different radio; it has the transmitter, same receiver. So the plan is when mobile is available, we will be very aggressive in deploying it. No change in stance there. From my perspective, I’m building in all sorts of places across the country, to really get ready for that when the September (2018) release standard hardware is available, which is happening right now. What’s going to happen is that when there’s (consumer premises equipment) CPE available on 5G NR that can do 5G Home, and then we’ll introduce NR gear that can do 5G Home. There will be an upgrade path that will be fairly straightforward. We’re moving forward quickly. At the end of the day, there’s going to be one (Verizon) network for 5G home and mobile. There’s not going to be two different networks. That’s not the plan. We’ll have one that can be scaled, with different attributes for different kinds of services, that’s the way 5G is designed.
Mike Haberman The question is, what’s 5G, when it comes down to it? You can take 5G and try to put it in 600 MHz (spectrum, like T-Mobile), a lower-band frequency, but technology-wise that doesn’t do anything for you. You’d wind up with a 5G NR carrier that would basically have worse throughput than LTE-Advanced, because you wouldn’t be able to aggregate bandwidth together. If you want to create a marketing message that doesn’t benefit the customer, you do that, but that makes no sense to us. So the question is, what are you trying to do with 5G? There are really two underlying principles with the way 5G was designed. One is massive bandwidth, so you need to have something on the order of a 100 MHz carrier for NR to start to be meaningful. Otherwise you’re just talking about LTE-Advanced. And mmWave is obviously a place where you can get a lot of bandwidth. The second thing is antenna technology. When you look at mmWave, one of its negatives is propagation, that (its signal) doesn’t propagate as far. But one of its positives that is going to become very apparent is that the antenna technology you can bring to bear with mmWave is immense. You can do a 64- or 128-antenna array where the beam of the antenna used to rely upon three antennas 120 degrees apart. With 5G, you can have 128 antennas in the same space, and you’re going to have a beam pointing directly at you to reduce interference and make sure you can communicate clearly with the cell site. So that will help as to how far you can be away, because we can be very spot on accurate with the beam coming at you. It’s only available with mmWave, because at higher frequencies, the array of antennas would be massive.A true 5G network needs to have massive bandwidth and you have to be able to use this antenna technology. There are shades of gray, like you can talk about mid-band and what have you, but the truest spec was meant to be mmWave, to take advantage of all the antenna technology. From our standpoint, what is worth looking at is the density of our sites in these bigger cities. You’d be amazed at how dense we are right now. If you have the densities required, and you bring in the antenna technology, and the bandwidth, it’s like, “wow, that is a different experience.” We’re interested in providing a different experience, not just more of LTE-Advanced, that’s not what we have in mind. It’s to provide a better experience, to change the dynamic in the industry. That’s why we’re looking at mmWave, and we’re going down that path, because that’s truly what 5G is.
Mike Haberman People have talked about sub-6 GHz. You’re going to look for opportunities like that as (5G evolves). As you get more of the handsets that have (5G) NR capability, then it makes sense to migrate some of the other bandwidth you have and then aggregate them together. The problem you have (now) is that you can’t aggregate (existing spectrum) together because you don’t have enough (capable) handsets. But as you get more penetration of NR-capable handsets, all of the sudden you can do things that are more meaningful with the frequencies. When you roll out a network, which god knows I’ve done this three times already, you can’t just do everything at once. That’s why this first step is truly the way to go, and then you’ll add elements on as you move along. The statements I hear from other carriers are just them trying to realize the limitations of what they have, and trying to create a story that sort of makes sense.
Mike Haberman We saw what AT&T did with “5G E” and you saw the reaction to that — it got the reaction we’d expect, quite frankly — the same thing that happened when AT&T upgraded from 3G to “4G” overnight, they did the same exact thing, and it didn’t help them. It begs the question, “what’s different?” They’re a laggard in terms of performance already, and they just change the name of it and say it’s better, but it’s still worse than our LTE-Advanced technology. That’s going to come out in the wash. People are going to compare 5G Evolution to LTE-Advanced; I bet you some third parties do it and it’s going to be rather embarrassing when our LTE-Advanced network is faster than “5G E.” How do you explain that? Regarding the future,there are 4 ingredients to make 5G work;
We launched what we call 5G Home in 2018, and that’s a real system with real customers. That’s real 5G, using TF standard, technology form standard. Obviously, what happened is that TF was a bunch of the bigger infrastructure vendors and us leading the way, and we drove the industry to get 5G out, and what ended up happening was that the 5G NR standard was accelerated. Which was great from our standpoint. From a network perspective, all the ingredients are the same. It’s merely just upgrading that last leg, which will happen, and we’ll do that when it’s ready at no cost. It’s just a modem upgrade at the house, and it’s designed to be upgraded, and some of the equipment can be upgraded with software. It’s all millimeter wave (mmWave), so it has the same radio. We’re not using a different radio; it has the transmitter, same receiver. So the plan is when mobile is available, we will be very aggressive in deploying it. No change in stance there. From my perspective, I’m building in all sorts of places across the country, to really get ready for that when the September (2018) release standard hardware is available, which is happening right now. What’s going to happen is that when there’s (consumer premises equipment) CPE available on 5G NR that can do 5G Home, and then we’ll introduce NR gear that can do 5G Home. There will be an upgrade path that will be fairly straightforward. We’re moving forward quickly. At the end of the day, there’s going to be one (Verizon) network for 5G home and mobile. There’s not going to be two different networks. That’s not the plan. We’ll have one that can be scaled, with different attributes for different kinds of services, that’s the way 5G is designed.
Mike Haberman The question is, what’s 5G, when it comes down to it? You can take 5G and try to put it in 600 MHz (spectrum, like T-Mobile), a lower-band frequency, but technology-wise that doesn’t do anything for you. You’d wind up with a 5G NR carrier that would basically have worse throughput than LTE-Advanced, because you wouldn’t be able to aggregate bandwidth together. If you want to create a marketing message that doesn’t benefit the customer, you do that, but that makes no sense to us. So the question is, what are you trying to do with 5G? There are really two underlying principles with the way 5G was designed. One is massive bandwidth, so you need to have something on the order of a 100 MHz carrier for NR to start to be meaningful. Otherwise you’re just talking about LTE-Advanced. And mmWave is obviously a place where you can get a lot of bandwidth. The second thing is antenna technology. When you look at mmWave, one of its negatives is propagation, that (its signal) doesn’t propagate as far. But one of its positives that is going to become very apparent is that the antenna technology you can bring to bear with mmWave is immense. You can do a 64- or 128-antenna array where the beam of the antenna used to rely upon three antennas 120 degrees apart. With 5G, you can have 128 antennas in the same space, and you’re going to have a beam pointing directly at you to reduce interference and make sure you can communicate clearly with the cell site. So that will help as to how far you can be away, because we can be very spot on accurate with the beam coming at you. It’s only available with mmWave, because at higher frequencies, the array of antennas would be massive.A true 5G network needs to have massive bandwidth and you have to be able to use this antenna technology. There are shades of gray, like you can talk about mid-band and what have you, but the truest spec was meant to be mmWave, to take advantage of all the antenna technology. From our standpoint, what is worth looking at is the density of our sites in these bigger cities. You’d be amazed at how dense we are right now. If you have the densities required, and you bring in the antenna technology, and the bandwidth, it’s like, “wow, that is a different experience.” We’re interested in providing a different experience, not just more of LTE-Advanced, that’s not what we have in mind. It’s to provide a better experience, to change the dynamic in the industry. That’s why we’re looking at mmWave, and we’re going down that path, because that’s truly what 5G is.
Mike Haberman People have talked about sub-6 GHz. You’re going to look for opportunities like that as (5G evolves). As you get more of the handsets that have (5G) NR capability, then it makes sense to migrate some of the other bandwidth you have and then aggregate them together. The problem you have (now) is that you can’t aggregate (existing spectrum) together because you don’t have enough (capable) handsets. But as you get more penetration of NR-capable handsets, all of the sudden you can do things that are more meaningful with the frequencies. When you roll out a network, which god knows I’ve done this three times already, you can’t just do everything at once. That’s why this first step is truly the way to go, and then you’ll add elements on as you move along. The statements I hear from other carriers are just them trying to realize the limitations of what they have, and trying to create a story that sort of makes sense.
Mike Haberman We saw what AT&T did with “5G E” and you saw the reaction to that — it got the reaction we’d expect, quite frankly — the same thing that happened when AT&T upgraded from 3G to “4G” overnight, they did the same exact thing, and it didn’t help them. It begs the question, “what’s different?” They’re a laggard in terms of performance already, and they just change the name of it and say it’s better, but it’s still worse than our LTE-Advanced technology. That’s going to come out in the wash. People are going to compare 5G Evolution to LTE-Advanced; I bet you some third parties do it and it’s going to be rather embarrassing when our LTE-Advanced network is faster than “5G E.” How do you explain that? Regarding the future,there are 4 ingredients to make 5G work;
- The first one is densification of the network, all the 4G densification, which has been going on for years.
- The second one is fiber, specifically dark fiber, because if you think about the bandwidth demands… we knew they’d get higher and higher.
- Third is buying spectrum in millimeter wave, we bought it from Straight Path and XO Communications.
- Fourth has to deal with reducing latency, is that we’ve been virtualizing our core. It allows you to move the components of the core out to the edge of the network, so you can get pretty close to the cell with core network elements, and improve latency. Devices will become a lot more snappy, and it also enables applications like AR/VR.
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