Despite all the hype about 5G, the practical early implementation will largely be to shore up capacity in urban areas, as the ability to keep boosting 4G speeds will begin to diminish in a few years, compared to what is possible with 5G.
“It's clear that wild swings in speed are even more common at a city level than they are nationally,” says researchers at OpenSignal. “In Paris, our analysis showed that 4G Download Speed can climb as high as 51.4 Mbps one hour, but later in the day drop to 21.5 Mbps.”
Many of the new 5G-only spectrum bands in the millimeter region are ideally suited to cities because of their short range and extremely high capacities. In no small part, that is because channels are bigger, capacity inherently greater and typically will use small cells, which multiples the ability to use any particular block of frequencies.
Low-band channels of the 2G era tend to be 5 MHz or 10 MHz wide. In the legacy mid-band (around 2 GHz), used by 3G and 4G, channels are 20 MHz wide. Channel aggregation is possible to boost channel width to perhaps 40 MHz.
But 5G channels will feature hundreds of megaHertz. That alone would boost potential bandwidth by an order of magnitude. Also, wider channels can use more of the available bandwidth for bearer traffic, and there is less bandwidth devoted to guardbands. And since frequency and potential bandwidth also are directly related, using millimeter wave bandwidth supplies more capacity than lower-frequency systems.
The point is that 5G can be thought of as the next platform required to boost consumer internet access demand. Everything else--support for ultra-low-latency services, network slicing and virtual private networks--is a plus, but a potential additional source of value.
Moving to 5G would be necessary, in any case, simply to support consumer mobile internet access demand.
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