5G Cellular is HERE!
Forget for the moment that very few phones fully support the 5G. Forget that there is no formally adopted world standard on what constitutes 5G. Forget that some carriers are announcing 5G availability on portions of their networks. The real 5G you eagerly await is years away.
What? How can that be true?
If you’re like most cellular fans eagerly awaiting 5G, the most you’re going to experience during these early years of the 5G rollout is marginally better LTE bandwidth and download speeds. An encounter with a true 5G experience will be a freakish event. Even then, no one is going to download feature length movies in a few seconds.
Why? There are multiple issues: frequency, depth of coverage, back haul, and county/city licensing—just for starters (here and here and here).
5G is a brand name assigned to a varying set of frequency ranges managed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Early 5G rollouts are using the lower frequency ranges. Unfortunately, real bandwidth comes with the higher frequencies. Think gigabits instead of tens and hundreds of megabits. The rollout of the high bandwidth higher frequencies is in the future. It will happen. Just not at the outset.
So, if you are one of the few to own a 5G capable cell phone now—and there aren’t too many of you, and if you’re within range of a 5G coverage area, you may experience an increase in download bandwidth. If you’re a bit of a cynic in such matters, you might characterize the improved bandwidth as 4G or LTE on low dose steroids.
Just how much extra bandwidth you’ll realize today depends on the distance between your phone and the 5G tower and what may stand between the two. The longer the distance, the lower the bandwidth. The more obstructions along the way, the lower the bandwidth. The more cell phone users competing for that same 5G tower, the lower the bandwidth.
5G requires carriers to saturate high use areas with many small mini towers, like light poles with small transmitters and broadcast antennae. One article I recently encountered suggested a broadcast distance of 800 feet. While that sounds like a good distance, it isn’t for many reasons. In the 4G, LTE days, the distance between cell towers is greater. This is one reason why 5G deployments will prove far more costly for 5G carriers.
The higher 5G frequencies require even more mini towers in a given coverage area. Signal strength at higher frequencies drops. Higher frequencies can carry more data and provide greater bandwidth, but they don’t penetrate walls, windows, doors and other obstructions particularly well.
If you’re on the move in a 5G urban area, and you’re downloading a large file, it won’t take you long to determine whether continuing to walk is a good idea, at least until the download is completed. Of course, you may have good luck. Your travel path may directly lead to a 5G cell or mini-tower site with a signal that grows stronger, and more bandwidth is available the closer you come to the broadcast site.
You can expect the location of 5G towers to become public knowledge. Don’t be too surprised when people change their urban walking patterns to pass nearby the best towers. That business about the shortest distance between two points is a straight line? Well, maybe not so much. I wouldn’t be surprised if sites, like Wayze, adds suggested routes that maximize access to high bandwidth. Don’t be surprised if Apple Maps marks the locations of 5G broadcast points and offers suggested walking routes to your destination with quick calculations about the density of bandwidth. You know, you can get to your destination faster with this route, but you can download far more if you take this out-of-the-way route instead.
This is an unglamorous term for a very ugly fact of cellular life. All of the bandwidth in the world between your phone and a cell tower means little if the tower has a constrained connection to the internet, or a private network connecting to the internet. A path of high bandwidth between your phone, the cell tower, and the site on the internet must be available along the entire digital route.
During the early days of cell towers, a tower might be connected by a copper line, known as a T-1, to the internet. T-1 speeds maxed out at 1.5 mbps. No one streams anything on a T-1 line, even if they have the entire 1.5 mbps all to themselves. That’s why cell carriers undertook the expensive proposition of extending their fiber networks to their cell towers. For 5G to succeed, especially at higher frequencies with lots of small broadcast towers, fiber will have to be everywhere.
Of course, cell carriers will initially try to build 5G networks on the cheap. They’ll connect the mini towers in a given geographic area by a private network served by a single fiber connection. That’ll work—initially, but I smell the inevitable approach of fiber.
All of those mini towers have to land on light poles, buildings, and other fixed infrastructure the carrier doesn’t own. Municipalities recognized early on that 5G is a bonanza of a cash cow. Want to place a mini tower on a city or county owned light pole? Pay the annual licensing fee, some of which are now set at several thousand dollars annually—per pole! Both the FCC and the carriers believe the annual charges should be much lower. How much? Think under two hundred dollars per pole.
Anyone see a problem here?
Cable companies want in on the 5G action too. Cord cutters are killing their revenues. Cable companies respond by raising their rates to partially offset the loss of subscriber revenue. The rate increases drive away even more subscribers. So, the cable companies look at the cell carriers and ask why they can’t get them some of that?
Cell carriers are getting squeezed at the outset of the 5G deployment. They must deploy hundreds, maybe thousands, of mini towers in urban areas, especially as the 5G frequencies go higher for more bandwidth. Municipal treasurers are welcoming them with open arms. And cable companies have extensive backhaul networks in urban areas already built and deployed just about everywhere. Why shouldn’t cable companies move into the cell carrier space?
Remember, cable companies punish cord cutters by imposing monthly bandwidth caps and penalties. Some carriers have done so for years. As the carriers deploy more 5G to customers who are intent on consuming bandwidth, those monthly caps will be an additional source of sorely needed revenue.
I just purchased a new front-loading washing machine that sends me an email whenever I do 30 loads: It’s time to clean the unit. This is the long-promised Internet of Things (IoT). My smart home—still not a genius but getting smarter and more capable all of the time—communicates with me as well as others. All of this takes bandwidth. Soon, I’ll own a refrigerator that manages my refrigerated and frozen food stocks, and I’ll want the frig to text me a real-time shopping list whenever my telephone realizes I’ve walked into a grocery store.
Back in the day of black and white television, if someone had told me that I’d be paying, say, over a hundred dollars a month for what I watch on a screen, I would have thought they were crazy. Some are paying far more than that today. Make it easier to consume content, make it more convenient to my lifestyle, and become an even more prodigious consumer of bandwidth.
5G, a luxury today, is tomorrow’s necessity. True, competition for my 5G business will help moderate what I pay, but the scale up in infrastructure and cable companies in search of their next victims? It’ll be a while before the cost and capabilities of 5G will be a necessity I’ll gladly pay.
Copyright 2020, Howard D. Weiner
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