2 Silicon chip Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au
Will 5G mobile networks
live up to the hype?
Nicholas Vinen
Editor Emeritus
Leo Simpson, B.Bus., FAICD
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Nicholas Vinen
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John Clarke, B.E.(Elec.)
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Editorial Viewpoint
Lately, stories are popping up about how 5G wire-
less networks are coming soon and will have amaz-
ing performance. A few handsets with 5G support are
now on sale, and a few 5G networks have been set up
in dense urban areas.
While it’s certainly impressive technology, provid-
ing very high data speeds, 5G networks probably won’t replace the 3G/4G
mobile networks currently in place. Even if you have a 4G phone, you’re
likely still relying heavily on the 3G network.
Many mobile devices which are advertised as being 4G only actually
use it for data and still use 3G for voice. Voice calls on the 4G network use
what’s known as “Voice over LTE” or “VoLTE”. This isn’t supported by all
handsets, including even fairly recent 4G-capable models. And even when
they do support it, it is often not enabled by default. And for good reason!
My father bought an expensive flagship Samsung phone about a year
ago and had incessant problems with call dropouts and unavailability. Of-
ten you would dial his number, but his phone wouldn’t ring, even though
he had good reception. He contacted his carrier on multiple occasions but
they were unable to fix the problem. I eventually figured out how to solve
this: disable 4G.
If major networks and giant multinational manufacturers still can’t get 4G
to work properly, it seems premature to be talking about rolling out 5G. I was
pretty shocked when I read that the 3G network may be shut down soon;
possibly in as little as 12 months! Given how few phones support VoLTE
properly, that would be a disaster.
And there are many devices out there which only support 3G, some of
them relatively new (alarm diallers, GPS trackers etc) which will simply
cease to work if the 3G network is no longer operating.
Then there’s the problem of coverage, especially in a country as vast and
sparsely populated as Australia. Our 3G operates at either 850MHz, 900MHz
or 2.1GHz while 4G is from 700MHz to about 2.6GHz. Both technologies of-
fer reasonable coverage with enough mobile towers.
But 5G operates up to about 39GHz(!). Such high frequencies are not good
at penetrating obstacles like trees, walls, roofs etc. So 5G networks will need
a lot more ‘towers’ than 3G/4G networks. That is, if they are to provide the
promised higher performance with coverage at least as good as 3G/4G.
And there will also need to be a lot of indoor ‘towers’ in places like shop-
ping malls to ensure reasonable coverage.
That may be feasible in a densely packed, relatively flat city like Tokyo.
But Australia is a different story altogether, and Sydney has some serious
topological coverage challenges. Without a massive investment, indoor re-
ception will be very spotty, and there will be plenty of ‘black spots’.
You have to wonder what the payback will be for such a massive invest-
ment. 4G is already really fast, although I’ve noticed that the networks have
become significantly more congested (and thus slower) in the last couple of
years, as data caps have gone up and prices have come down.
I don’t know how much of that is congestion in the airwaves and how
much is due to other bottlenecks. Faster mobile data networks will do noth-
ing to solve bottlenecks that occur elsewhere.
So I think it’s vital that the 3G networks continue to operate until 4G and
5G are fully proven and widespread. And we should adopt a “wait and see”
attitude to 5G. There’s no point rushing to switch over to it just because it’s
a new technology. It needs to prove itself useful first.