The PROBLEM with 5G...

Timmyfox · December 13, 2019

16 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

AFAIK, that's not the case. There is a "mesh" of mmWave cells, using mmWaves as the backhaul when there's no physical connection available. Cheaper than installing fiber to every single cell, but adds latency and waste bandwidth.

Mesh with end-user devices has been researched, it does work, but significantly impacts power usage and ended up being abandoned. Nobody wants an empty battery without using their devices.

MU-MIMO is pretty expensive in terms of processing, it's usually left to base stations.

Like I said I'm not 100% on it as I don't know too much myself. Just know that during one of the event, one of the key people working on their 5G antennas was telling something about how the end-user devices are used to create a network of small receiver antennas to increase the coverage for everyone in densely populated areas rather than to have each device be its own isolated unit communicating exclusively with the closest base station.

Not sure if that's exclusive to the mmW band but it was touted as one of the solutions for the poor object penetration ability of such high-frequency signals.

leadeater · December 14, 2019

On 12/13/2019 at 9:38 PM, WereCatf said:

Hm. For some reason, I don't see running thousands of fiber-optic cables quite literally everywhere as any sort of a reasonable plan.

Not every lamp post is actually required and one of the big usage cases for the high band is meshing between towers/stations so you don't need to run data cabling to all of them, just power. High band bounces rather well, high band also requires less transmit power over the same distance (line of sight unimpeded) because in a practical deployment low power stations will be used and over short distance (because short distance is the only practical usage real world).

Going to an area where there is only a single tower is an extremely flawed test, yea the purpose was to try and shit can a competitor and it's deployment and maybe to try and de-emphasize high band overall but if everyone applied a bit more analysis to what is being shown and the conditions we should all be able to figure out that what is shown does not represent a real world high band 5G deployment, because a single tower/station is not that. One tower is no different to "first' comments on YouTube, just ignore them.