A towering problem
Sci-fi author William Gibson’s observation that the “future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” rings especially true for 5G.
The Los Angeles Convention Center, which is owned by the City of Los Angeles, is the first venue in the U.S. to install a permanent 5G wireless network, which it did earlier this month.
The U.K. carrier EE is already testing 5G in London. It expects to roll out 5G coverage in the city next year or the year after.
T-Mobile promises to launch in 30 U.S. cities next year, and Sprint in six cities.
China and South Korea are expecting to roll out 5G next year as well.
Unfortunately, these rollouts sound better than they actually are. When carriers promise rollouts in cities, it’s easy to imagine citywide coverage. But that’s not how 5G works.
How 5G works
Importantly, 5G isn’t one technology, but a complex collection of technologies, many of which have not been sorted out by the standards bodies.
In general, however, it’s helpful to oversimplify the explanation about how 5G works. So here goes.
The technologies behind 5G enable the use of very high frequencies. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength. Shorter wavelengths enable faster speeds and lower latency.
But there’s the catch: With shorter wavelengths, the distance between the device and the “tower” has to be much shorter, and the signal has a harder time penetrating through materials such as walls and trees. To get around those obstacles, companies need to deploy vastly more towers than existing technologies do. And companies such as Verizon are using beamforming to direct signals around objects and toward devices.
In order to have reasonable coverage, providers have got to build 5G antennas and towers all over the place, and very close to users. It’s time-consuming and expensive to place these devices everywhere, so the rollout will be slow and uneven.
When companies such as Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon say they’re going to roll out 5G in a city, what they mean is that 5G will be available in some limited pockets in that city.
Because 5G connections suck more power, the chips that power 5G will be designed to favor 4G and kick into 5G mode only when the application demands high bandwidth.
Because of the need to save battery, because of limited distribution of antennas and towers and because of interference issues, our 5G-enabled smartphones will face huge barriers to actually making 5G connections.
Let me be very clear: Five years from now your smartphone will be using 4G almost all the time, even when you’ve got a 5G phone in a 5G city.
Reliable 5G networks will be few and far between, and won’t often be available while you’re out and about. The consistent, fast and reliable 5G nirvana everybody talks about will be available in some offices, entertainment venues and other locations, but not generally.
The wireless carriers hope 5G will enable them to compete with or replace ISPs, cable companies, and satellite internet and TV companies. So that’s nice. But it will probably be more than 15 years before 5G replaces 4G for most users most of the time.
5G won’t be reliable enough anytime soon for companies such as Apple and Samsung to remove the supercomputer-like processing power from smartphones and move everything to the cloud. I’m afraid that $1,000-plus smartphones are here to stay.
And because of the way 5G works, rollouts will soon face another huge hurdle.
