What will 5G mean for you?

Is 5G going to save those people with bad internet connections? As the world moves more towards mobile platforms, users want faster and more reliable services. I know I do. 5G is being touted as the way to that future, with the promise of a high-def movie download in seconds and other benefits, like better access to the often-mentioned Internet of Things, or IoT.

The first commercial 5G networks should be available sometime in the next five years, but despite the marketing hype, everything is still in the planning phase. There is no definite and agreed 5G standards today, other than a desire for the ability to handle a lot more digital traffic. This will require a new collection of technologies working seamlessly together, something that is not yet achievable. The target is sub-millisecond delays versus the current 70ms with 4G and downloads at 20 GB/s compared to 1 GB/s. It will achieve this through millimetre waves, small cells, MIMO, full duplex, beamforming and other technological solutions.

In a nutshell, millimetre waves are frequencies above those now saturated by mobile phone users. Currently used by satellites and between some base stations, the problem is that the higher the frequency, the less penetration there is through walls and obstacles. Enter small cells. These are small, portable base stations with low power needs, placed about 250m apart. The antennas are small, so can be easily placed on top of buildings and power poles. This dense network works well in the city, but not so well in rural locations. With lots of antennas, this brings in massive MIMO. MIMO stands for multiple-input, multiple-output, and is already in use on a smaller scale. 4G supports 12 antennal ports, eight to send and four to receive. 5G supports a hundred ports, meaning more users and more capacity. More antennas also potentially introduces more signal interference, so 5G needs beamforming. This technology tries to minimise signal interference by working out the best route to a given user by using an antenna that points in the right direction to the next base station. Then there is full duplex. Current technology works by taking turns on the same frequency to send and receive. Full duplex allows this to happen at the same time. This however can cause more signal interference and an echo. So there are still some challenges to solve.

What’s wrong with the announcement from Huawei that its first 5G-capable phone will appear in a little over a year? It will have their own modem and in China will be able to allot 20 GB/s per user. Yes, you guessed it, with the 5G standards not yet finalised, anything Huawei delivers will be a best guess, probably incompatible with the real 5G released a year or three later. While they may simulate some of the expected 5G properties, it will not be a true 5G system. Be wary of any 5G claims over the next year or two, as it will be more of a marketing exercise than full system delivery.

Microsoft has designed a family of Arm-based system on chips for IoT devices that runs its own version of Linux. I know you just reread that sentence, perhaps more than once. The plan is to sell this to manufacturers of things that will then connect to an Azure back end. It is quite clever. Rope in device makers, and make sure only official firmware is used so that devices can only connect to the Microsoft platforms. The chip contains Arm cores, wireless support, memory, IO handlers, a custom security controller and of course Microsoft sandboxing. This type of approach has been tried before and I’m not convinced it will work out well in the long run.

So, as result of the recent data-sharing revelations, you want to get off Facebook. Simple. Head to the account deletion page, click the “Delete My Account” button, enter your password and a captcha, and voila, it’s done. Or is it? There is a 14-day cooling off period wherein you can reverse your deletion by logging in again. After that your account data will be deleted, theoretically, up to 90 days later.

The hardest part is what do you replace it with? During his recent testimony before the US Congress, Mark Zuckerberg denied that Facebook was a monopoly but couldn’t name a competitor. There is currently no real replacement to use to easily notify all your family that you are on a beach in Fiji. If you are a regular user now, it is a bit like being hooked on drugs, so good luck giving it up permanently.

Finally for this week: exoplanets, the ones orbiting distant suns. They are difficult to spot, so to help look, astronomers are building a new ground-based, superconductor, 10,000P integral field spectrograph. It will be called Darkness, or dark-speckle near-infrared energy-resolved superconducting spectrophotometer.