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HOME AND AWAY
5G handsets are grabbing the early YouTube and social media bandwidth,
but 5G is actually far from just a mobile technology. Indeed, when
Verizon launched its first 5G services last year, it actually implemented
its home 5G product first, following with a mobile service later.
The immediate benefits of home 5G are obvious enough. It enables
fast broadband to be delivered without the need to connect to a wired
infrastructure. In other words, no more digging up streets to lay cables
and fiber.
Verizon charges either $70 dollars a month for a standalone service
or $50 to its mobile customers who have an existing plan of at least $30
per month. The first three months are currently free, and there are no
other up-front fees. For that you get claimed speeds of 300Mb/s. The
service can also fall back to 4G connectivity if there are issues with the
local 5G cells.
Early reports from customers suggest the performance claims are
fairly realistic, while latencies in the very low double digits are often
reported, meaning there’s little if any penalty in that area versus a wired
connection. If that all sounds good, the service’s roll-out hasn’t been
entirely smooth. In fact, Verizon has put the brakes on adding coverage.
Verizon said in January that it was waiting on new standards-compliant
hardware before resuming the roll-out. However, some commentators
reckon the problem is more serious.
According to a report by research analysts at MoffettNathanson,
the effective range of the small millimeter wave cells is smaller than
expected, so more cells will be required at greater cost to Verizon.
Allegedly, Verizon has installed 200 cells in one of its initial locations,
in Sacramento, California, but that covers just 10 percent of the city.Verizon’s first 5G
service was actually
for homes, not mobile.the first 5G services in the US, some noted that
speeds seemed to drop off behind plate glass.
That’s likely because of a combination of what’s
known as low-E glass and millimeter wave signals
used to provide high-speed local 5G connections.
The problem is that many modern buildings
now use low-E glass. That’s glass with a special
metallic coating that reduces heat radiation and
thus provides improved insulation. Unfortunately,
millimeter wave radio doesn’t penetrate low-E glass
terribly well. However, there are workarounds that
can solve the problem, including active antennas
fitted to window surfaces, but they do increase the
complexity of implementing 5G, and it’s not clear
how much latency they introduce.
Speaking of latency, that’s arguably an even
more complicated question. 3G networks offer
approximate latencies of around 65ms, while
4G clocks in anywhere from 30 to 50ms. For 5G,
figures of just 1ms are being mooted. But that’s
a highly theoretical number. Ultimately, there’s a
limit to how far latencies can be reduced. The laws
of physics, including the speed of light, make sure
of that. That oft-touted 1ms spec for 5G buys you a
little under 100 miles in each direction of a round
trip in terms of the distance that can be pinged
at the speed of light. Much, then, depends on the
location of the physical client and the data source
it’s connected to.
By way of example of the physical limitations
involved, the fiber-optic link between the
Chicago and New York stock exchanges has been
painstakingly optimized for low latency, even to the
point of ensuring the paths of the cabling are as
straight as possible. Even then, the round trip for
pinging the opposite exchange could not be reduced
below 13ms. The take home point here is that 5G
can’t remove the baked-in latencies associated
with significant geographical distance.
In some ways, then, 5G has been overhyped.
You’re not going to get 10Gb/s and 1ms latency. Not
today and, in most realities, not ever. But 5G is still
going to change the world. It’s going to make the
Internet even more ubiquitous, power a whole new
class of connectivity, and enable new applications
that have yet to be dreamt up. It’s not going to
happen tomorrow, next week, or next year. But over
the next decade, 5G is going to revolutionize not
just the Internet, but the way we live and work.Yes, even farming is set to
be revolutionized by the
combination of 5G and the
Internet of Things.maximumpc.com SEP 2019 MAXIMUMPC 49