Samsung claims 5G mobile data transmission breakthrough

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22507512

by dialsquare1886 • 13 years ago

31 37 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

commiebob• 13 years ago

In other news, 5G users can now burn through their data cap in under 10 seconds!

FooBarWidget2• 13 years ago

Not to mention, drain their battery at 10 times the speed.

timmm3• 13 years ago

They said that about 4G and about higher screen resolutions, and about higher display dimensions.

They will innovate.

Retric• 13 years ago

Data cap's are indirectly related to transmission speeds so you may always be able to burn though the data cap in under 10 seconds, but competition will still slowly raise the cap as technology improves.

IMO, the current 2+GB caps are not that bad, raise that to 20GB and you can watch a fair amount of hulu for example (~50+hours) without a problem.

dagw• 13 years ago

competition will still slowly raise the cap as technology improves.

Has not been my experience at all here in Sweden. Data caps have been lowered across the board over the past year as data speeds and availability has improved.

OGinparadise• 13 years ago

Brilliantly put. I see some tech bloggers go through "specs" of speed, only to forget the data cap. If money is not an issue, then maybe, but most people usage over the cap will truly bite.

timmm3• 13 years ago

Sprint has no data cap...

whyrusleeping• 13 years ago

Correct me if i'm wrong, but wasn't 4G supposed to be 1Gbit/s?

NegativeK• 13 years ago

1Gbit/s stationary, 100Mbit/s when moving.

dhughes• 13 years ago

That's good to know I just assumed transmission speeds always meant while moving since it is a phone, I never even thought it meant when stationary.

DougWebb• 13 years ago

For Sprint, in most areas, 4G means 50Mbit/s when stationary within range of a WiFi access point, and 50 kbit/s otherwise.

Havoc3• 13 years ago

We might as well drop the whole ?G classification. Since the US carriers started branding stuff 4G that wasn't anywhere close to spec its been a free for all.

Marketing aside, the tech might have merit in its own right though. I think the Ka band isn't available for use in my country though...

300bps2• 13 years ago

Even people who should "know better" were fooled by AT&T claims of being 4G on the iPhone 4s:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-57408432-266/is-the-at-t-i...

Havoc3• 13 years ago

Not to judge the Americans too harshly, but it seems to invariably be American companies who spin this bullsht. In other countries the carriers at least have the decency to call it LTE (with 4G sometimes mentioned in brackets).

As for the article linked - I wouldn't even call that "fooled by". That implies that there was a plausible case & the journalist was deceived via some active plot. If the reporter had done even vague research as to what 4G is (the topic of his article [lol]) then he/she would have smelled a rat. That to me is a straight up failure as a journalist, rather than "fooled by".

sp3323• 13 years ago

4G actually means something, it's just not enforceable. The trouble is, the trademark was not acquired in time before it became a "generic term" which means anyone can call anything 4G.

Havoc3• 13 years ago

>4G actually means something, it's just not enforceable.

So? Its still entirely dead. More than that...they falsely claimed 4G and made millions off it. Yes its still means something from a technical point of view, but the concept in its true form is dead to the world - though very profitable.

>the trademark was not acquired in time

How do you propose trademarking a two character term that refers to a multiple of the gravitational constant? (It doesn't but in a courtroom many things are possible...)

soperj2• 13 years ago

But I thought Samsung didn't innovate?

mwfunk• 13 years ago

Well, if you read the article, it's not actually a Samsung thing. This is university research that was partially funded by a grant from Samsung among others.

soperj2• 13 years ago

I did read the article. The University research partially funded by Samsung is completely seperate from this announcement. Thanks though.

mmahemoff• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the 5-blade razor story, from parody to reality.

http://boingboing.net/2005/09/14/gillettes-5blade-raz.html

kalleboo2• 13 years ago

> "In my opinion 4G achieves a decent speed and what we need to do is crack the capacity crunch we are facing."

Translation: "The theoretical numbers we sold LTE with are a good target, maybe this technology lets us deliver that in the real world to all the users who want it."

From what I can tell, this technology isn't about making spectrum more efficient, but opening up new parts of the spectrum (10+GHz) that weren't usable before. edit: nice map of radio spectrum. Being able to use 28GHz seems like a massive leap. http://www.telecomcircle.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Spec...

The short-term solution is to open up more spectrum to mobile use, but things are looking pretty congested. http://siliconangle.com/files/2011/03/spectrum_map1.jpg

sp3323• 13 years ago

I thought 28 GHz signals would be stopped by relatively small obstacles (thin walls). It's not a matter of detection; the signal is absorbed and there is none left to detect on the other side. How could they overcome this with an antenna array?

Edit: According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka_band this band is used for satellite communications, but it very susceptible to attenuation in rain. So it's very cool that a new antenna tech could improve on satellite downlinks, but it still doesn't seem practical for a cell phone.

r00fus• 13 years ago

So great theoretical speeds, but will likely fail consistenly in real-world use.

I'm going to wait until field trials in actual units are underway before becoming excited about this one.

hexedpackets• 13 years ago

Absorption is directly correlated with frequency, yes. Their 2km mile is probably a lab condition free-space number which will never even come close to being reached in the real world, especially in urban areas.

This could be useful to a telecom if they implement an expensive design that uses obstructions to their advantage. Essentially blast the radio waves down streets as if they are isolated tunnels. That would reduce interference to almost nothing, but require many more access points than they currently have. They would also still have the problem of penetration indoors.

jlarsson• 13 years ago

Ericsson did an LTE-Advanced demo reaching around 950Mbps from a moving van almost 2 years ago ...

gcb0• 13 years ago

I honestly have a hard time wanting more than 3G at any time.

if anything, i'd like better latency and coverage.

msh2• 13 years ago

my LTE connection got much better latency than 3g on the same carrier (maybe around 15-25 ms less)

pieter• 13 years ago

All these faster speeds won't do anything really for heavily populated areas. The most important thing is total available bandwidth (bytes/sec/hz), and it's unclear how better that will get. LTE itself doesn't improve a lot over 3G techniques, the thing that's making LTE faster in saturated conditions right now is that there's just more bandwidth compared to 3G.

Samsung claims 5G mobile data transmission breakthrough

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