A first taste of 5G with Fixed Wireless Access
5G has been a buzz word for so long now that it’s a little like the boy who cried wolf. When the 3GPP organized the 70 use cases it came up with, it found three groups: Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Low Latency and massive IoT.
3GPP has finalised Release 15 which covers eMBB in 2018. Release 16, which is needed for Ultra Low Latency and Massive IOT isn’t expected to be approved before the end of this year (2019).
My humble ambition here is to show that (1) improved network performance in early 5G deployments will already be enough to get excited about. The more disruptive changes of (2) lower latency, that will (3) enable the IoT, may still be few years away.
When new network technology requires specific hardware in devices, the chicken and egg problem arises: it isn’t worth investing in either devices or the network until the other one is ready. But as the first 5G network have been tested, as early as 2016 and initial commercial rollouts started late last year with Verizon launching 5G Access for USD 50–70/month, so, devices are now late. There are many reasons for this, the licensing dispute between Apple and Qualcommis a trivial but telling example. The ongoing court battle means that Apple will only use Intel chips, which won’t have a 5G modem ready until 2020. Android devices are expected to start shipping this year with several announcements at Mobile World Congress.
5G to-the-home is an early opportunity already delivering higher speeds, as we’ll see, but it faces challenges, as some of 5G’s very high frequencies don’t travel well. Some network equipment vendors achieve significant marketing mileage with their Wireless PON that addresses this.
Improving network speed — coming first
Mobile networks improve all the time, even between the major generations that last about a decade. Few of us understand all acronyms we’ve come to see over the years to describe our data connection, but from 1 to 5 there weren’t the expected five stops, but 10 to reassure us that it’s getting better all the time: 1G, 2G, GPRS, Edge, 3G, HSDPA, HSPA+, 4G, LTE, 5G, and I’ll stay away from the 6G that president Trump has asked US firms to start working on.
4G’s theoretical data throughput was 500 times faster than 3G’s, and 5G with a constant 1 Gpbs (peaks of several Gbps) will eventually bring another theoretical overall 100-fold increase over 4G, once all the promised spectrum is allocated. Note that improvements due to better use of radio will be limited to 1.5 x in lower frequencies, whereas newly used high bandwidth (also called millimetre waves) will see nearly 20 x improvement.
There are two main configurations in which mobile data is delivered to customers. Mobile Broadband Access or MBA is the well-known use case in which the user’s mobile device uses or shares data as in with a mobile hotspot. Networks can never be fully optimized for this as the operator cannot know how and when their subscribers will use the service let alone roaming users. As I write this in 2019, 5G will not necessarily bring significant advantages to MBA, mainly because, despite early agreement, unlike in the US, the radio waves that 5G is set to use have not been attributed throughout Europe, in fact, with the notable exception of Switzerland, most EU nations still have to organise auctions.
Some of the many frequencies that 5G uses are higher than previously and offer the advantage of enabling higher device density, but they also require more base stations with higher vantage points and can be sensitive to obstacles, even leaves on trees in some cases.
This mix of pros and cons makes 5G an excellent candidate to offer services in a stadium where crowds are dense and in close line-of-sight to the operator’s base stations.
Mobile networks are faster and cheaper to set up than fixed ones, and there are more and more situations where mobile data is better than fixed-line data. Fixed Wireless Access, or FWA, is the second major use case I’ll look at. It already provides Internet access to homes using wireless mobile network technology rather than fixed lines. Contrary to MBA, FWA allows the network to be designed and optimized so that the operator can manage quality and make firm commitments on available bandwidth.
FWA is relevant for millions of households in rural or semi-rural areas where copper lines are just too long to deliver the few Mb required for the modern home. Developing markets, with little fixed-line infrastructure, also offer a massive potential for FWA. For millions of homes, 4G is already better than DSL, and 5G will only make the mobile alternative even more compelling. One of the beauties of FWA use cases is the lack of device constraints such as battery life or even availability of 5G devices. Vendors such as Samsung or Ericsson are heavily promoting FWA.
The industry still needs to create a sustainable business model for 5G, but it has already started modestly improving bandwidth to customers in 2019. This improvement is expected to deliver its full potential by 2023. The new technology also promises to lower latency and be able to support many more active devices by then.
Lower latency — coming next
What constitutes high (bad) or low (good) latency varies by orders of magnitude depending on use cases. To participate in a vote at the end of a TV contest, a lag in minutes is usually good enough. To watch a live stream, “low latency” is achieved somewhere between 1 and 5 seconds. Hardcore gamers will change from one operator to another to reduce in-game latency by just a few milliseconds. 5G network will soon offer much-reduced latencycompared to previous generations and eventually be able to provide a latency below 1ms compared to today’s best 4G latency of about 35ms. This is a showstopper for Fornite or Apex Legends champions.
High throughput, when associated with low latency, will enable much more cloud processing. The impact of latency reduction will be significant in a few critical cases to start with, like, for example, a game where you fly a real drone from your home, self-driving cars or a factory automation scenario where robots cooperate on a manufacturing plant, a but we expect low latency to create a more extensive demand once it’s available.
The real IoT — also coming next
R&D labs have been working on IOT for almost 20 years, and the market has seemed on the verge of taking-off several times over the last decade. The convergence of several trends gives us confidence that the time is finally upon us. Solutions to provide stronger identity management will bring the needed security.
The previous factory floor example is a typical B2B illustration of IoT, but even for more straightforward inventory management use cases, when lower latency is achieved, it will enable much greater IoT efficiency, driving tagged or barcoded inventory in front of sensors will, for example, become possible at much higher speeds.
In the consumer space, IoT is exemplified by the ever-growing number of connected devices at home. 5G’s internal architecture and the support of low-powered radio protocols — Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technology — will allow for the connection of orders of magnitude more devices within a given cell. Operators will be able to offer dedicated connectivity packages that could help reduce churn. Although devices will require less power, there is still controversy over the total power requirements of a 5G network.
SoftAtHome’s solutions let operators deliver the best home network. Subscribers now see their Wi-Fi merely as “the Internet”. We are agnostic to the access technologies in the Home Gateways we power. 5G’s early offering of FWA alongside our solutions means operators no longer need to tailor service offerings depending on where subscribers live. Because we are agnostic, we help simplify both marketing and technology, offering the equivalent of an abstraction layer while ensuring the best Quality of Experience thanks to our monitoring solutions.
