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  • Unlikely. 5G hit the wall on UWB (Ultra Wide Band; 10-100GHz) because geniuses who were doing marketing for its transfer speeds did not realized that such high frequencies are disrupted with minimal amount conductive material in the air - so surprise surprise, 5G UWB does not work when you are behind a wall, it does not work when your big head full of water is in the way of BTS and most perplexing for common folk, it does not work behind a glass because regular glass is full of iron - so forget on 5G UWB on a train, tram or bus, unless somebody put mini BTS inside the vehicle.

    So 5G for most folks is just marginally better LTE and that's about it. Any higher frequencies like 6G (30GHZ~3THz) or 7G (???) won't achieve much of anything outside of laboratory, because they will hit exactly same walls like 5G UWB.

    by general1465
  • 7G? Man I hope not. I watched a fine documentary a few years ago about what happens when they try rolling 7G out...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_the_End_of_the_World

    by shawn_w
  • Well, I suppose the rolling out of 5G must happen at some point, but otherwise his/her take in Section III.A is spot on and the most important takeaway.
    by jruohonen
  • I sure hope not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_the_End_of_the_World
    by krackers
  • 5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?

    I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM.

    Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are famous for suffering this much.

    by BlackRabbit1
  • There will always be new Gs...marketing teams require it.

    I hope they go into the direction wifi is taking though - stability rather than speed.

    I never think about cell speeds being slow anymore but irritation at lack of coverage is still frequent. Esp in urban jungles where buildings block it

    by Havoc
  • Note that "G" generally is a marketing term for consumers, the actual tech is 3GPP rev-whatever

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP

    Like 3GPP release 15 or 16 is what we currently know as a lot of in production LTE/LTE-Advanced stuff.

    by walrus01
  • It needs to work backwards, much like Video Codec and ask what do the stakeholders really want or need?

    We are closing in to rolling out the last / final phase of 5G. And yet none of the Massive MIMO on FDD is happening. We are still stuck on 32T32R, hardly that impressive considering we have that in LTE already. Not to mention the insane complexity increase from 4G to 5G. And judging from the previews of 6G that seems to be event worst.

    If you ask an average user, they will tell you they don't feel much different between 4G and 5G. Yes there are capacity increase and other things. But at this stage I don't think the benefits outweigh the cost of switching. That is both from MNOs and End user perspective.

    by ksec

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