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Apple Files FCC Application to Test Next-Generation 5G Wireless Technology

entropys said:
But the carriers wouldn't be building a network from the ground up. They already have fibre backhaul. They already have towers, they already have a customer base. they might be making money now, but they want to also make money in the future. That requires supporting customers who happen to be increasingly mobile, and minimised infrastructure costs, including R&M. As for data caps, which would ramp up capacity more quickly, building up capacity on a tower, or laying new cables?

A line will always be faster. Wireless however, is mobile, more easily updated, replaced more quickly, and [eventually] will lower costs both for the provider and the the customer. You might not be going anywhere, but Wireless customers certainly are.

I am on 100 Mbps cable at home, but on my 4GX network I have got over 180 Mbps on my iPhone. I saw the future when I ran speedtest that day.
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You should try gaming on a connection that is wireless. Unplayable because of the latency(satellite), it would seem that the government is going to have to mandate that all homes be able to get fiber optic internet like utilities. My area only gets 3mbps and it's not because I don't pay my bill every single month, it's because my ISP is in cahoots with the electric company so no other cable or dsl can be on the electric poles. That is not right at all.
 
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entropys said:
I am on 100 Mbps cable at home, but on my 4GX network I have got over 180 Mbps on my iPhone. I saw the future when I ran speedtest that day.
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For the data users in the US, it is a totally different story.

Many people have 200 Mbps and higher speeds using home ISPs, but the wireless speeds are pretty crappy when compared to other places around the world.

Actually, Fios is advertising 300Mbps and 500Mbps for my home, and Comcast has 3Gbps. This would be overkill for my family, but the hard lines are definitely faster here.
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WRChris said:
You should try gaming on a connection that is wireless. Unplayable because of the latency.
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I was going to mention latency, but I noticed that wireless latency has improved a lot over the past few years where I live.

It still isn't as good, or as consistently good a hardline though.
 
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entropys said:
But the carriers wouldn't be building a network from the ground up. They already have fibre backhaul. They already have towers, they already have a customer base. they might be making money now, but they want to also make money in the future. That requires supporting customers who happen to be increasingly mobile, and minimised infrastructure costs, including R&M. As for data caps, which would ramp up capacity more quickly, building up capacity on a tower, or laying new cables?

A line will always be faster. Wireless however, is mobile, more easily updated, replaced more quickly, and [eventually] will lower costs both for the provider and the the customer. You might not be going anywhere, but Wireless customers certainly are.

I am on 100 Mbps cable at home, but on my 4GX network I have got over 180 Mbps on my iPhone. I saw the future when I ran speedtest that day.
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Cable providers already have fiber into all the neighborhoods. Just because you have 100Mbps home service doesn't mean they can't push faster. DOCSIS 3.0 supports 300Mbps. That's the standard across most cable networks today. 3.1 brings capacities of 10Gbps both up and down. That should hold most over for quite some time and outdoes 5G wireless (and realistically you're never going to see those speeds with wireless but you certainly can with wired).
 
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LordQ said:
I would throw my money to an Apple carrier.
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farewelwilliams said:
apple should just be a carrier so we can stop dealing with AT&T's/Verizon's BS. one plan that works worldwide would be AMAZING
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Question to you both. Why? Is there something you think Apple would do differently? I think they would improve customer service some, but other than that... You wouldn't be getting lower pricing (more likely higher) since we all know Apple doesn't do low margin crap. The telecom business is all low margin crap.
 
I'm not going to make any brain cancer statements.
Unless you consider that to be one
 
Andres Cantu said:
Hope it doesn't take as long as LTE did in the iPhone 5.
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Don't get in a rush!!! First: "Apple will use the 28 and 39 GHz bands," are very high frequency bands that frankly will have all sorts of problems for users on the ground. It could be fantastic when you get a connection but pretty terrible if you are out of line of sight. Remember all the problems people had with 4G when it was operating at the higher frequency ranges, lie only gets worse in the GHz range.

RF technology is very interesting at these frequencies electronic components are sometimes machined and the antennas are referred to as optics. I would expect that Apple would need plenty of time to debug and engineer. They might even be thinking about space based deployment.
 
OldSchoolMacGuy said:
That's not true at all.

  1. The cost of building an entire network from almost the ground up would be huge. You're talking about billions of dollars to build something like this.
  2. It takes anywhere from 2 months to 2 years to get approval for a permit to build a wireless tower. While you may be able to get approval quickly in the middle of nowhere in Texas, it's currently around 2 years for approval in areas like San Francisco or NYC. It would be a LONG time before they could create a decent network.
  3. You're ignoring data caps. Right now the average home uses 190GB per month and that number is only rising as video becomes more and more popular. Which carrier is going to be cool with streaming truly unlimited data with no speed caps?
  4. Why would an existing provider who is currently making money and has existing infrastructure want to make this huge left turn and go a completely different direction? There's no need. At home, you don't need wireless. You aren't going anywhere.
  5. Wireless isn't a great solution for homes. Many currently struggle with signal issues and other problems due to the location of their home. Traditional cable modem, fiber, and DSL solve this issue by bringing reliable service into the home.
Sorry, but it'll be a very long time before we see these technologies replaced by wireless.
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I'm not sure you'd need any new towers. I could easily see cable and DSL companies falling by the wayside to wireless providers who already have the towers built. And it'd be worth the money -- home internet is a gigantic market to steal from the Cable and DSL folks. And issues receiving signal indoors come from walls. Stand by a window or on a roof, where an antenna would be constantly, and signal's fine for almost anyone, anywhere outside of rural areas that are underserved by Cable and DSL right now anyway.
 
4G, 5G, whatever. I'm still waiting for more than 1-2 bars on my AT&T iPhone. Yes, I live in a "dead zone," and if it weren't for Wi-Fi Connect, more than half of my incoming phone calls would drop out. (T-Mobile had even worse coverage.)
 
Line of sight? Doesn't sound useful for cell phone.. but rather for the last 500 ft: attach transmitter to every other utility pole to provide internet access to homes and offices without needing an installer's visit.
 
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JungeQuex said:
I remember how excited I was when my college town got 3G.

The good old days...
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AT&T here has slowed down "4G" after they introduced "LTE". I remember 4G as being much fast then it is now. If I turn off LTE or my phone slips into 4G I am lucky if I get 3kbps.
 
djbuddha said:
I'm in Canada where our highest LTE plans are close to 10 GB with text and calling which is around $90 if you argue for hours and threaten to leave the carrier in question. I hope 5G takes off in the US... it could help us in the end. We'd kill our 6 GB plans in seconds with 5G as we don't have unlimited options on the larger carriers.

Meanwhile in Toronto, internet uses you :mad:
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My only hope is CRTC finally letting the smaller incumbents to enter the race by then the big3 will truly feel threatened!
Freedom/Wind I'm looking at you to make all this happen(sadly I know they can't/won't and will join the big3 to become the big4).
 
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lkrupp said:
It’s beginning to look like DSL, cable modems, and even fiber optics to the home are circling the drain. It will be much cheaper for service providers to build a tower and put an antenna on your home than to run copper, coax, or fiber to your house. Virtually no infrastructure maintenance and very high speed. Let’s hope the engineering hurdles get overcome quickly. The vast majority of homes will do just fine with a 1gigabit wireless connection.
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We haven't even started to tap the possibilities with fiber. Copper and coax might soon be at their limits, but fiber can be pushed so much further.

255Tbps: World’s fastest network could carry all of the internet’s traffic on a single fiber.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme...d-carry-all-the-internet-traffic-single-fiber

Let's see 5G... or 6G... or 10G keep up. Long live fiber optics.
 
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OldSchoolMacGuy said:
DSL solve this issue by bringing reliable service into the home.
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AHAHAHAhahahahaaaaaa. Ha.

vertical smile said:
Another reason being the current data caps that wireless carriers currently have would be way too low for even a light internet user at home.
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Nope, wireless internet doesn't mean you're using a cell phone plan. There are a number of wireless providers with no data caps; they specifically provide internet for home users (fixed wireless).

WRChris said:
You should try gaming on a connection that is wireless. Unplayable because of the latency(satellite)
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Wireless doesn't mean satellite. Satellites at geosynchronous orbit have high latency, since the speed of light is not infinite. However low-orbit satellites don't have this issue. The problem is that you need more of them, and it's more complex to operate (have to track them instead of just aiming a dish and leaving it there). Standard fixed wireless does tend to have higher ping than wired connections, though, but usually not nearly as bad as geosynchronous satellite.

--Eric
 
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The shoe being dropped that has been totally missed in this marvellous conversation is that Apple apparently has recently started testing 5G. That is, probably ready to be deployed for the launch of the iPhone 10S.
 
lkrupp said:
It’s beginning to look like DSL, cable modems, and even fiber optics to the home are circling the drain. It will be much cheaper for service providers to build a tower and put an antenna on your home than to run copper, coax, or fiber to your house. Virtually no infrastructure maintenance and very high speed. Let’s hope the engineering hurdles get overcome quickly. The vast majority of homes will do just fine with a 1gigabit wireless connection.
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The problem is cellular is a shared medium. One person can degrade service for everyone that tower or sector antenna is hosting.
 
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There are several reasons for why cellular can't and shouldn't replace DSL/DOCSIS/Fiber to homes. First off, most wireless connections will work in half-duplex so you will loose half the bandwidth when you have traffic going each way on the same connection/frequency.

You also have a huge problem in terms of scaling and competition on wireless. 5G will utilise 200MHz width, meaning it will eat up a whole bunch of the spectrum in order to achieve high speeds and lower latency. What does this mean? Well, you can't have a bunch of competing 5G networks utilising 200MHz width in the same areas without having interference.

Compared to cable, where everyone is fully able and capable of putting addition cords in the ground (or through the air) and thus get themselves their own and fully working solution that can compete with whomever is already established in the area you can't have the same freedom with wireless as it relies on specific frequencies which have to be allowed and approved for use in the first place, and you simply can't have too many companies occupying the same space as that will cause interference and degradation.

And the more we push the speeds, the wider spectrum is being used so for every new technology that brings us improved speeds it keeps swallowing additional frequencies in order to aggregate the improved speeds and throughput. In other words, we get less space for multiple carriers to compete in the same areas without overlapping and causing interference.


One also have to remember the major drawback that exists with wireless connectivity. You have no control over overall network load, what throughput you will actually end up having at your specific location and that relies heavily on the signal strength you get, the current load on the network, the amount of active users etc.. And you can bet that no carrier will sell you a specific speed, they will only sell you a "up to XXX mbps" so even when you think you pay for that sweet 500 mbps, you have nothing to say when you suddenly drop down to 20 mbps when you need the speed the most etc... Latency is also much higher, making it less ideal for latency sensitive tasks like gaming, remote streaming etc..

Not to mention the fact that all carriers apply data caps on wireless connections. Most homes see downloads way above 100 GB per month. How much will this cost? And who wants to be in a situation where they have to be concerned about their data usage at home?
 
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dominiongamma said:
They did it at the right time. The first let phone was the thunderbolt on Verizon and battery was so battery. Apple waited and got it right.
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They were 6 months late. The one that got it just right is Galaxy S3.

Let's hope they plan it better this time
 
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