What if I told you they can add a number in front of the G any time they want to sell you slightly different shit?

Marketing people will, and have done so. Engineers won’t. I fail to see any point to your comment.

How about try to improve the 4G infrastructure.

That’s what 5G is doing.

What is the slight difference between 4G and 5G?

Gonne need to reintroduce a new virus by then so that they can implant us with 6G

What if I told you that they make slightly different shit all the time and adding a new number to the G generally means it’s a significant change and not “slightly different shit”?

Crunch time for all the devs working COVID-20.

5G in my area is painfully slow, it would be super to get that up to speed first.

If that’s consistent you could try setting your phone to LTE only. Is it slow only when the symbol shows 5G UW?

Not really. It's a different band with a wider spectrum but less bandwidth over distance.

So it's adding additional layers on top of 4g but not improving it. 4g improvement means more 4g hardware deployment.

What if I told you that you have no idea what you’re talking about?

That’s a very simplistic way of looking at it. The entire network architecture has been changed with 5G. Aside from the millimeter wave bands, most of the rest are compatible with LTE. 5G also brings many enhancements like power saving, decreased latency, and support for massive IoT.

Yes most future tech has legacy bridges built in, so I suppose you would be correct in the sense that 5g deployment brings additional 4g coverage.

There are evolutionary cellular technologies. The intention is to shift away from 4G over the next 5-10 years. The same thing happened with 3G. You should think in terms of overall cellular coverage. As it is, a 5G-capable phone can simultaneously transmit and receive on 4G and 5G cells, so it’s literally an expansion of current 4G service.

I’m in this field. This might have been novel a decade and a half ago. This particular research group also has a history of sending grad students/postdocs to U.S. universities to scoop ongoing research, crudely duplicate it in China, and publish it first (at a lower quality).

In my experience a minor speed improvement for a major range reduction. Speed was already good enough.

Yeah, LTE speed is very good, but it’s not easily expandable. To get very high speeds you have to connect to several towers or be very close to one with a high bandwidth. And, with increased bandwidth, higher resolution video, and more downloads and uploads will be supported. There are new applications that would saturate LTE infrastructure. Also, 5G is used for home internet service, which requires much more data volume than mobile devices do.

Edit: Additionally, 5G deployed in current LTE bands will only show a minor speed improvement, especially when only connected to one cell. It’s still confined to the limits of physics.

I'm sorry but I can't get past the title. "Novel" means "new in an interesting way," so it's saying a new, new antenna. That is repetitive and rendundant.

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Latency, throughput etc… actually loads of improvements but the major benefits are to enterprises not consumers at the moment

Poor darling. Webster's 2nd definition is "original or striking in concept or style" doesn't use the word new! Semantic crisis that never happend is over! Now you should be able to get past the title and read the article now.

FYI, novel = new.

Edit: oh wow, that was what the article was titled. Terrible editing then.

I wouldn’t really consider the difference to be slight. That said, it’s easy to get lost in the hype, which can easily overshadow the important parts.

Ditto. No decent writer would put those words together.

And for those who don't understand writing and are happy with high-school-level journalism like /u/SirRockalotTDS: Part of proper stylistic writing is concision; the word "new" in the title is extraneous and, yes, redundant.

And if your headline is that poor, what kind of illiterate would continue reading? I guess we've found out!

But 5G still sucks lol maybe let’s work on that for a bit?

We just got 5g. Can we wait for a few years at least?

Update: I took your sage advice and read the article, only to find that the rest of it is also poorly written. It's mostly technobabble that reads like a sales brochure for potential investors.

It’s definitely still being worked on. New generation development starts 10 years in advance.

New generation development starts 10 years in advance. 5G is still being worked on.

Literally just different frequencies. Multiple different frequencies from "both ends" and the "middle". We've been utilizing these frequencies for other things previously, but with 5G they've specifically started utilizing them for mobile networks.

The low-band 5G is close to 4G in every aspect - including speeds.

Mid-band 5G offers faster speeds in the hundreds of Mb's but has various downsides, like crappy range and getting blocked by thick walls etc.

High-band 5G or "the gigabit internet" is like mid-band on crack. Extremely high speeds, but absolutely lousy range and penetration. The idea on the implementation is more like high-range WiFi than an actual cellular network: antennas on top of every house in dense urban areas.

6G would likely utilize same frequencies as high-band 5G and then up from there, which makes one question how they are going to make it viable. The whole article seems to me like an excerpt from some 10-year-old's sci-fi book, with terms like "space-time coding" and "sideband-free metasurface antenna", but I'm not an expert so I'm not going beyond anything but healthy skepticism.

Well, they are way past due date, as 2020 came and went. It'd have to be COVID-23 by this point.

5G only adds different frequencies?

Its not going to matter unless carriers actually invest in it. Your 5G is slow because they were not allowed to use Huawei equipment, that was half the cost. They had a choice, keep going and put more into it or keep the numbers promised to the investors. They chose investors and stopped talking about 5G for awhile.

How the hell has Trump not yet fled the country?

Ah, okay. I like 10 years.

Well, it's a simplification, but yes. All different generations are just different frequencies. And the borders between them are mostly arbitrary.

The G after the number just means "generation", by the way (5G being the 5th generation of telecommunication networks).

There are international groups that declare the "official" criteria for every generation, and seems that usually they are just expansions on the frequencies of the previous generation - with some speed, latency, bandwidth and coverage requirements tacked on top.

They’re using the Madden-style namespace? I’m not sure what exactly that explains, but I feel like that explains a lot.

Why are there huge changes to the core network and to the physical layer between 4G and 5G then? Aside from some changes to support millimeter wave, the difference should be minimal, if you are correct.

COVID-19 was named after the year it was found, which was 2019. Even though it took until 2020 to become an actual pandemic.

LTE is slow now too :/

Strange. I consistently get over 100Mbps on LTE in the city. Maybe there is bad coverage on your carrier where you are. Check Open Signal to see if you’re in the ideal carrier. Are you on an MVNO like Metro or Cricket?

Except ATT did so.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/22/18511741/att-5g-e-marketing-ploy-disaster-misleading-claims-lawsuit-confusion

Perhaps it's a new book antenna?

6G? Don’t wake me up for anything less than 8G.

ATT did 5Ge which is not the same as 5G. Did it confuse consumers? Yes. Does all tech confuse consumers? Also, yes.

Because of the frequency? Obviously, if the range of even the mid-band 5G is a fraction of 4G, you need to build a lot more cell towers. And you know where that 4G, 5G and future 6G data travels the majority of the time? In the same fiber-optic cables as everything else. Operators need to build the cables all the way up to the 5G towers. And as far as I'm aware, the 5G towers don't generally communicate with each other.

Also, the core network needs to be fast enough to accommodate increased traffic. More undersea cables between continents, more underground cables within countries.

So no, the difference in infrastructure is obviously not minimal.

There are probably tons more nuances. Like I said, I'm not an expert.

Which research group is this?

And Reddit gifs still won’t play unless I’m on Wi-Fi.

Specifically Southeast Nanjing's metamaterials group. Anything affiliated with them I scrutinize more. Which is not to say their work should be automatically dismissed, but diligence is required. The book Spy Schools has an entire chapter on one of their most infamous examples, which happened ~2006-2007-ish.

Now you should be able to get past the title and read the article now.

I can see why the tautology isn't a problem for you

“A new novel antenna”? That headline was written by the department of redundancy department.

Novel means new.

It's more likely they just lack either spectrum and/or backhaul to the tower where they are. For example, TMobile in many areas has only 1gbps to many towers despite sharing that spectrum across 3 or even 4 sets of panels. Where I am, the spectrum itself could easily support 1.5-2Gbps or more per sector on the tower, but they'd need at least 10Gbps to allow each sector to max out the deployed spectrum.

That’s true. Time of day is a huge factor.

FYI, not all 5G is the same. AT&T is among the worst. I switched carriers and noticed a huge improvement. Plus, by it's nature, you get better 5G performance in urban settings with multiple signal paths and in areas not buried under/behind concrete.

5G is shit.

I have way slower speeds and more spinning wheels than LTE.

WTF?

> Literally just different frequencies.

There are many more changes than that. But it’s true that 5G NR uses the same overall modulation scheme as LTE.

No. There are other changes as well.

Will 6G need an antenna every two feet? What a joke.

We haven’t even seen 5Gs magic…. Hey look! 6G!

It was more rhetorical. But I think marketing has really created jaded consumers.

Yes, changes that were required due to the different frequencies mainly.

No, in general 5G NR is an evolution of LTE, with improvements in many areas (such as latency and flexibility). Most are just too technical to make sense in marketing.

I said mainly, not completely.

The changes were required for decreased latency, less time required on the network for power saving, bandwidth agility to support less capable power-conscious devices, and increased performance by making more efficient use of the available bandwidth. Many improvements were made to support higher frequencies of course, and the ability for the core network to effectively load-balance is essential for supporting the throughput requirements of the higher bandwidths.

I think each carrier has regions with better throughput than the others.

I still don't see a big difference from 4g to 5g in the LA area.

What carrier are you on?

6G is just in the research phase at the moment. It takes a very long time to come to consensus on what the next technology should look like. You’re talking about every cellular provider, every base station manufacturer, every government, and every cell phone and cell phone chipset manufacturer agreeing. It’s intense.

Yes. I’m and I wasn’t really fair. This is r/technology. So I should have just scrolled on. I’m aware of all those hurdles, by have no interest in 6G. I’m 56. Based on the 3G - almost 5G timeline, I’ll be retired before 6G is a thing.

Haha. And I’m familiar with the field and I still set my phone to LTE only sometimes. Growing pains are real.

Damned physics.

Still waiting for 4G to come out in Texas lol

Can’t wait for our kids to be using 42G

Geesh, just as I was starting to be really disappointed in 5G, now I’m going to have to upgrade so I can get another technology disappointment.

Lol where I live, I'm still excited when my phone somehow manages to pick up a 3g signal and I go from just having g two bars of zero g to 3g and maybe could even listen to a song, maybe.

I’m using tmobiles 5G UC and am almost always getting over 200 mbps

Man I just want 5g that don’t suck ass

Great, I need a COVID-20 vaccine now.

Prepare for the crazies losing their shit!

The jumps between generations allow for more bandwidth by multiplying existing space to send more data at once. This allows finer tuning of signals to increase available channels to send data.

It's made of meta atoms...

I know right? Doesn't matter what new wireless speed they pursue, if the connections are over saturated or they have a small pipe back hauling to the internet people are going to get craptastic speeds. She should be addressing the over saturated connections and any bottlenecks in back hauls so that when 6G or whatever new wireless speeds are implemented that it's a better experience for anyone and everyone connected.

>new novel antenna

Department of redundancy department calling.

I was hoping that bothered them, not you.

Personal insults aside, how do you read any reddit posts at all with standards like that?

Refering to anything outside of implemented infrastructure as novel and discribing this particular example as new because it's new is completely out of the question? There is absolutely no place for that in the English lauage? So dispicable that any self respecting person wouldnt even be caught in the comment section?

Welcome to reddit. The forum where well written technical articles are as common as pots of gold under rainbows, titles are made up, and the points don't matter.

Would you mind if I DM you? Wanna know more about this

They should just skip 6g and do 7g

Our amplifiers go to 11.