The Four 5Gs

The news has been full of excitement and promises around 5G over the past few years, but unfortunately there has also been a fair amount of confusion. One thing that everyone agrees on is that appetite for internet continues to grow and many of the technologies included in 5G can help supply that demand. However, “5G” has become a blanket term for all kinds of innovation in the wireless space and it can be hard to separate out the real, exciting innovation from the marketing hype.

To better understand 5G there are really 4 distinct use cases that we have to talk about: Mobile/Microwave, Fixed/Microwave, Mobile/mmWave and Fixed/mmWave.

Mobile means systems that are designed to deliver service across a broad area, even as you move at high speed. Your smartphone service today is a great example. Fixed is access in a location that never moves, like a home or business.

1. Mobile/Microwave

The first 5G flavor is mobile/microwave and it covers the majority of improvements we’ll all see to our existing smartphone service. This will be like the 3G to 4G transition: we’ll see higher speeds, better coverage and lower latency. It’s going to take a really long time to roll out, but we’ll eventually see speeds 25–50% faster and latency drops of up to 75%. The major mobile network operators are starting this roll out now, which will cost tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone over the next decade.

2. Fixed/Microwave

Next, let’s look at fixed/microwave. This wireless scenario has been around for a long time and is going to continue, with some improvements to speed and latency, but will still serve almost exclusively rural customers. There are two kinds of companies that provide this service today, the big 4 mobile carriers (T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T and Verizon) and thousands of local Wireless ISPs. On one end of that spectrum, AT&T is on track to serve another 1 million rural customers on their LTE network by 2020, providing speeds of about 10mbps. On the other end, the Wireless Internet Service Provider Association (WISPA) estimates that there are ~2000 of these businesses with around 1000 customers each on average serving under-served rural and remote markets.

For the major mobile carriers, this is a good solution in areas that don’t have a lot of mobile demand. They can use underutilized towers to deliver home internet access. However, this doesn’t work in suburbs or urban areas where mobile demand and load is higher. When there are limited resources (spectrum, radios, backhaul, etc), operators prefer to use those resources on more profitable mobile services.

Upcoming new competitors in this space will be low-earth orbit satellite systems, like SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and OneWeb.

3. Mobile/mmWave

This use case has been the most hyped and, unfortunately, the most misunderstood. While millimeter wave transmissions can carry a tremendous amounts of data (2gbps+), these frequencies require totally clear line-of-sight between a phone and a base station. Frequencies this high can’t effectively penetrate walls, windows or people and they don’t go very far. If you’re in just the right spot outdoors and hold your phone in the right orientation, and the local cell site isn’t busy, you could see super high speeds for brief periods of time. Practically speaking, we’re going to be back in the eras of “can you hear me now?” and “you’re holding it wrong”.

With technology available now and in the near future, mobile/mmWave would require approximately one base station per street corner to provide adequate, reliable coverage — and even then, it would only work outdoors. The costs of that sort of deployment completely dominate any possible potential revenue. As a result, we don’t expect to see widespread mobile/mmWave in 5G in the next 5–10 years.

4. Fixed/mmWave

The fourth and final 5G, fixed/mmWave, is where the most exciting innovation is happening, and it’s what we’re working on at Common Networks. Today there are a few companies bringing customers online with this kind of service including Starry, Verizon, and Common Networks.

While most others are focused on dense urban deployments, we’re focused on bringing next generation access to the suburbs, where most people in the U.S. live. This is a particularly challenging environment because there is a lot of demand, but folks are spread apart just enough to make fiber deployment economically infeasible. Over the past decade, technologies like DSL and DOCSIS (cable modems) have been good enough to provide adequate service, but we are now reaching the limits of what those technologies can deliver without expensive and time-consuming infrastructure upgrades.

At Common Networks, we’ve designed a very different technology stack and deployment model from other companies in this space:

• Our network is a multi-radio/multi-hop graph-topology network. It’s a next-generation mesh wireless network that can finally provide the speeds and reliability folks demand.
• We’ve had to build all new hardware and software to make this model possible. We’ve had to re-think operations and marketing to make it scalable.
• We can hop around obstacles in the neighborhood to preserve line-of-sight which lets us deliver high speeds and reliably low latency.
• We avoid the high costs of a small-cell or tower-based deployment model by building our infrastructure as a distributed system; all our customers work together to bring faster internet to their communities.
• Every customer has multiple paths through our network back to the broader internet, which lets us to achieve best-in-class reliability without “Big Iron” telecom equipment.

Today Common Networks is live in the San Francisco Bay Area with the largest multi-hop/multi-radio network in the world. We’re delivering speeds up to 1 gigabit per second to happy and paying customers.

The first and best opportunity for 5G is in fixed access. The mobile flavors of 5G will deliver benefits to millions of people, but don’t have the same massive disruption opportunity that fixed access has. For the first time in a generation, the way people access broadband in the US and around the world is going to change dramatically. When you combine this insight with the constant growing customer demand for bandwidth, you can see why we’re so excited about what’s about to happen over the next few years. Here at Common Networks we’re pioneering how this new approach to broadband will be rolled out to deliver better, faster, more reliable internet access to customers.