“The FCC will consider making new bands of licensed and unlicensed radio spectrum available for 5G data networks, Chairman Tom Wheeler announced today,” Tom Brant reports for PC Magazine.
“His proposal would allow 5G communications to operate in a 14GHz unlicensed band, in addition to opening up some licensed high-frequency spectrum in blocks of 200MHz,” Brant reports. “If the FCC approves it in a vote scheduled for July 14, it will be welcome news to cell phone providers and chip manufacturers, which can take advantage of the higher spectrum thanks to advances in antenna technology.”
“High-frequency transmissions and milimeter wave technology are prized for their low latency, which makes websites load faster and improves the quality of VoIP calls, among other benefits,” Brant reports. “Carriers and antenna manufacturers are already testing lower-latency, high-frequency transmissions. AT&T and Verizon started last fall, and Google and Facebook are also evaluating the technology. While much of the focus of those tests is boosting speed — AT&T said it has reached speeds above 10 gigabits per second — Intel is touting 5G’s ability to intelligently prioritize critical but low-bandwidth emergency communications over bandwidth hogs like music streaming.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, please!
5 whole G’s. Wow!
i’m holding out for 7G..
^^^with the LiquidMetal antenna!
Mine goes to 11.
“licensed and unlicensed radio spectrum”
So, what kind of licensed users is the new proposal going to move into?
All radio waves travel at the speed of light. Latency has nothing to do with carrier frequency.
The author can’t spell millimeter correctly. I don’t think he has much understanding of the physics of EM radiation.
Regarding the actual causes of wireless network latency:
What Causes Latency, How to Measure It, and How to Control It
Latency typically originates from two different sources: routers and distance. Each router that a packet travels through has to copy the packet from one network interface to the next. This introduces a very slight delay-typically only a few milliseconds. However, traffic on the Internet might have to travel through more than fifty routers when making a round trip between two computers, so the delays do add up. Busy routers and networks that are near saturation can introduce more latency because the router might have to wait several milliseconds before it can place a packet onto a network interface.
Distance also introduces latency. Packets travel across networks at a speed slightly slower than the speed of light. A rough estimate of the speed packets travel would be about 100,000 miles per second. Although the speed is still very fast, a packet that has to travel to the other side of the Earth and back would have at least 250 ms of latency (before you calculate latency introduced by routers). Satellite connections add about 500 ms of latency sending the packet to and from the satellite. In addition, network paths are often very indirect, and packets often travel several times farther than the distance of a straight line between two computers. VPNs, in particular, can cause extremely indirect routing between computers.
The most common tool to measure latency is the command-line tool Ping….
Yes. The classic rant “It’s the Latency, Stupid” is still worth reading.
https://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html
A bit premature, I’d say. We haven’t even got universal REAL 4G in the USA (as in LTE Advanced) and 5G is a mere fantasy of stupid marketing executives at this point. We won’t see 5G for YEARS.
And yes, I’m pointing out that Verizon are liars.
Verizon claims that more than 98 percent of the US population already has access to 4G LTE <–Lie, created by misguided, stupid marketing executives.
I agree with you about Verizon. Their definition of 4g LTE coverage is spurious at best. In our area for example, Verizon has typically had the best voice coverage since about 2002, but the data network runs at a paltry ev-do or 1x a lot of the time due to the mountains even though LTE is available in the metro areas…. But! It only runs at about 17mbps, all of our mobile hotspots are with Verizon and this drives us nuts. By contrast AT&T’s voice quality in our area isn’t quite as good but their data network is vastly superior. They truly do have LTE deployed and my iPhone’s and iPad’s run very close to their theoretical maximums. For example, my 6s typically pulls 80mbps while driving and only drops below 60mbps when it’s congested. It’s the same topography, the same mountains, the same everything, except that AT&T has obviously out up the towers necessary to make it work in our area.
Wow, at 5G speeds my kids will be able to bust their data plans much quicker!