I don't think there's enough detail here to decide whether or not to be mad. The L band is huge, 1000MHz-2000MHz. GPS uses a few tiny slices of this band. Cell phones, amateur radio, weather radar (though not precipitation-detection radar), ADS-B, and a ton of other non-military things are in that band. Adding 5G may or may not have any negative effect on GPS. I doubt they are proposing to run their 5G network on top of the GPS frequencies, after all, because everyone knows that would break GPS (which already operate well below the noise floor).
One time when we were working on testing Wifi interference, we tried to buy every possible 2.4GHz device to see what they did to our routers. We found these TV extenders (connect camera to one end, connect TV to the other) that claimed to be 2.4GHz but didn't interfere at all. We looked more closely with a spectrum analyzer and they were actually 1.3GHz and completely stepped all over the GPS frequencies. Did the FCC stop Amazon from importing these things? Nope. I guess my point is... the threat is real, but someone going out of their way to request permission from the government (as is legally required) is probably not going to cause many problems.
Your GPS receiver is not going to be able to "see" the current satellites. All of the other people who share this spectrum do so "horizontally" if you will, this frequency band isn't reflected by atmospheric effects so omni-directional emitters are not visible to antenna that are looking "up" to the sky. The problem with this proposal is that the company wants to broadcast DOWN from satellites which these antennas will see and it will reduce their sensitivity to neighboring signals in the same band. Since you need 4 - 6 satellites for a good tracking lock on GPS, the likelyhood is that you won't be able to get that because of inter-band interference.
Can you fix it? Sure, you can add a $10 - $50 front end selector on the GPS devices to increase their selectivity to GPS only bands. That will raise the cost of "having" GPS across the board and legacy devices won't see the benefit so they will become useless.
It is hard to imagine that any technical voices at the FCC thought this was a good, or even reasonable, idea.
And on a humorous note, "U.S. Space Force Gen. John Raymond." I chuckle that the Space Force already has generals but of course it does, but not ones that "came up through the ranks, from Spaceman 1st class."
Chuck your comments are always filled with great information and humour. Thank you for your years of contribution to HN so that lurkers like myself can be informed and entertained.
I'm not an RF person, but the way it was explained to me is that GNSS signals are in the neighborhood of 1560mhz-1610mhz. With the advent of GPSIII, even more of the important signals are getting pushed outwards towards the extremes of that range. Ligado/Lightsquared initially wanted permission to basically surround GPS (1526-1559mhz and 1610-1660mHz)
After lots of complaints, they amended their request to leave a buffer of 20mhz or so between their signals and GPS. However, Ligado wants to transmit at ~10watts, and the GPS signal is in the neighborhood of a femtowatt by the time it hits a receiver. That can apparently still cause interference. For the GPS chip in your phone it may not make a huge difference. However testing has shown degraded performance in aviation GPS receivers more than a mile away from a 10watt transmitter. For even higher precision receivers (think surveyor equipment or maybe an autonomous tractor) the radius of the degradation stretches more than 2 miles from the transmitter. Ligado wants to put their transmitters ¼ of a mile apart.
> the GPS signal is in the neighborhood of a femtowatt by the time it hits a receiver.
This sounds more dramatic than it is - my WiFi signal from less than 10 feet away is approximately 1 nanowatt, or approximately 10^8 times weaker than when it left the AP radio. Thats just how RF works.
It's still pretty dramatic when you compare them directly. A 500watt transmitter that's 30,000km away is going to be many orders of magnitude (11?) weaker than a 10watt transmitter that's only 1km away.
Why can't we just greatly improve the signal strength at source by an order of magnitude? Like I know the new satellites can use beam forming to increase power for some large area for military use but it looks like even so total power is about ~500W right now. What's stopping us from deploying 10KW sats?
> Like I know the new satellites can use beam forming to increase power for some large area for military use
No, what you think you 'know' is plain wrong. Usually when discussing satellites, we're talking about a directional antenna that focuses a spot or wide beam for broadcast. A spot beam allows you to target a particular region, DirecTV uses spot beams to provide local broadcasts to general regions of the US. The military uses M-code shit on GPS with a directional antenna for the same sort of use case.
Beam forming is a different concept where you get creative with multiple antennas broadcasting at once and exploit signal cancellation to improve the data rate by shifting the phase between them. It does increase your received signal but relies on the receiver transmitting information back to the satellite (which is not going to happen for GPS, at least not the vast majority of consumer equip). Beam forming discussed on HN just last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22784132
> What's stopping us from deploying 10KW sats?
Sat power is around and above that already, it doesn't make sense to increase the spot transponder ERP too much or you end up with issues like interference with adjacent bands since RF gets trickier to filter the higher the power it gets. Keep in mind a comm satellite usually has lots of transponders using maybe 100-500W each, so it adds up to some geosynchronous ones being like 20kW total consumption. Smaller LEO ones obviously not going to be close to that.
Communications history is littered with failure stories of people who wanted to throw power at the problem, when they only needed to find ways to listen better.
Thanks that's actually helpful. I did some more reading and it looks like it is as you say, the new military transmitters are directional and steerable, beam forming done on the receiving side.
But still it seems that power is still part of the solution given the increased power density of the new military antennas. I guess what I'm wondering is why they can't just reserve more band, move to regional antennas for whatever other technologies in addition to fighting polluters/jammers/spoofers and noisy neighbors. Or is that the plan?
>Why can't we just greatly improve the signal strength at source by an order of magnitude? Like I know the new satellites can use beam forming to increase power for some large area for military use but it looks like even so total power is about ~500W right now. What's stopping us from deploying 10KW sats?
Even assuming that the very smart and capable people who developed GPS haven't thought about that already, there is zero-point-zero percent chance that the government will (or should) turn 24 satellites that cost 500 million dollars each into very expensive flying paperweights, for the benefit of some tiny 5G startup.
Supplying the power to the satellite, and getting the heat out. The RF amps are at most 50 % efficient, so you are dissipating 1/2 the input power as heat.
When light squared was shut down for messing with gps frequencies in their satellite network, the military did not say that light^2 was actually broadcasting outside of the expected frequency band. The deal is that the military just doesn’t use filters on most of their broadcast and reception equipment so their operating frequency is actually way wider than they say publicly.
This is because filters cost money and reduce the effectiveness of the broadcast system. If you could get away with operating over a much wider spectrum for any service, you probably would.
This is why when the military says “this interferes with gps even though it’s outside of the gps band were supposed to be using” what they mean is that they are using a much wider band of spectrum than what’s in the specs.
Ultimately, the fcc doesn’t have regulatory authority over the dod.
Every GPS receiver in existence uses filtering. The question is, how sharp does that filter have to be? The GPS frequencies were chosen to be away from frequencies used by transmitters that might be near GPS receivers. Lightsquared proposed repurposing satellite downlink frequencies (which they bought at a discount because this restriction limited their use) for the purposes of terrestrial networking, breaking that assumption. In order to maintain similar functionality, GPS receivers would require significantly sharper filters, increasing bulk, cost, and complexity.
> The deal is that the military just doesn’t use filters
Do you have a citation for that?
I would have thought the issue is not that GPS receivers don't use filters, but rather than no filter has a perfectly sharp cut-off and GPS signals are exceptionally faint.
For example, if the GPS signal is 0.1 femtowatts at 1575MHz, even if you've got a filter that can remove 99.99999% of a noise signal at 1600MHz you can still overwhelm the GPS signal with 1 nanowatt of power.
Precisely -- no RF filter has a perfect "brick wall" response, and no transmitter will have a perfectly pure output either. GPS receivers already have to use some pretty crazy tricks to pull a signal out of the noise; it doesn't take a lot of interference to make that impossible.
Oh man, I bet there's a nice market of GPS jammers out there - especially useful for the home team in any action, since they don't need help with directions. I wonder if that counts as a weapon?
Some truckers use them for manipulating the trackers on their vehicles. Some of them are stupid enough to have them active when they are anywhere near an airport, which makes it far more likely they'll get caught.
There exists a fundamental level of electrical noise at all frequencies typically controlled by the background temperature that sets the minimum level of signal you can resolve before it gets washed out in noise. GPS uses multiple coherent (noise being random instead of coherent does not combine at the same rate) copies of the signal that can be recombined to increase their effective signal, so even though they are transmitted below the universal noise floor, they are above it once recombined.
The reply that you already have is pretty good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code is a good jumping off point for further research (as is the wikipedia article on GPS).
Perhaps it's not about the nominal operation as a 5G tower; rather, a bunch of powerful software-defined radios that could interfere upon command is a pretty reasonable attack vector.
Ligado’s biggest investors are JPMorgan, Centerbridge, and Fortress. David Redl, the former head of the NTIA, supported Ligado’s mission while the GPS (part of DoD but also co-run by the DOT) was against it for as long as this issue existed. The FCC pushed this through because Ajit Pai is retiring at the end of the year (regardless if Trump wins) and wants a legacy of approving more commercial uses of spectrum.
The history of lightsquared, the company involved, is horrendous. They bought spectrum with a SPECIFIC restriction on it to avoid GPS interference - then proceeded to get a proposal approved that violates that restriction. The amount of bad faith dealing by this company was eye opening.
I thought Garmin / Trimble and basically every GPS company had sued them because of how terrible their proposals and behavior has been.
This is not traditional 5G, it's basically misusing satellite spectrum.
For those not in all the details - the spectrum was for earth to space communication.
They bought it and said they would use it to do earth based broadcast.
First - if this spectrum was usable for earth broadcast LOTS more people would have bid on it and used it.
Second - almost all their proposals were totally and obviously disastrous for other existing users of the spectrum.
With enough venture funding and sticking around for 10 years until you find a compliant FCC you can be rewarded for your bad behavior (and yes, they did finally change some of their proposals - but why this company gets to repurpose sat freqs at no extra cost for terrestrial use is ridiculous). .
It's more or less the same process where a developer buys land cheap and then with the help of a corrupt government rezones that land to something more valuable.
The FCC can rezone, they generally then run an auction, keep lots of $$ for the govt, and kick some back to others if needed especially if they force folks like TV stations to move their station broadcasts.
Lightsquared 100% lied when they said they would use the spectrum to serve 100% of users with a sat service. That was a necessary process for the original transfer (like for like use).
And the value they are getting is huge. 40MHz of nationwide bandwidth. Easily worth 10Billion plus.
Be totally fine for FCC to rezone using a normal process, auction to normal business at fair market value, protecting or compensating existing users.
An interesting threat vector arises here for Huawei...
Ignore all the stuff about backdoors and such for a minute. I wonder if the administration fears that Huawai could simply attenuate their cell tower signals at a high wattage to disrupt all sorts of things.
I never thought of that before - "5G as a weapon".
Definitely a weird world. I need to start reading Judge Dredd again to start getting caught up on the future.
You might like Ghost Fleet [1] (or [2] for more colorful review). Ghost Fleet is essentially a white paper turned into a Tom Clancy style techno-thriller on what war might look like between China and the United States. Tactics from Ghost Fleet include:
- Infected microchips from Chinese suppliers used to target and destroy the US Pacific fleet.
- Disabling GPS with anti-satellite missiles.
- Cyber attacks to disrupt the DOD communications networks.
IIRC: In the late-2019 BBC Click interview with GCHQ on the subject of Huawei, 5G, and security the spokesperson said information security wasn't an issue as we have end-to-end to handle that, the greatest risk was remote shutdown of the network. I assumed they're alluding to "in a time of war", falling back to non-5G wouldn't seem to be a big problem ... but then lots of our comms send to run on Huawei hardware already.
Personally I don't think that risk is worth avoiding Huawei over. But then I'd be happy to maintain the top level of infrastructure we already have in the UK and work on bringing breadth to the networks using 3G&4G and taking an upgrade-hiatus. I'm not convinced the average person will get much from 5G except more infringement of civil liberties ...?
Colour me skeptical. I've seen enough to know that MITM gives you enough information or threat vectors.
That said, I agree with you about Huawei and non-5G. We shouldn't be talking about banning them on 5G, we should be talking about banning them (and anyone outside of the western alliance, really) from selling gear in our countries period. National security takes precedent. China doesn't even let reporters from the NYT in their country ffs.
But whatever. Politicians are reactive and don't understand cybersecurity and the few that do don't have the sway or incentives to really push for this. Though I will say one thing, in a cyberwar we'd brick China just as badly as they would brick us, so at least we have MAD working for us.
We know the NSA intercepts shipments and tampers with network equipment, on top of everything else they do. We also know a foreign agent (with considerable Chinese debt who was elected with the help of Russian intelligence) is now in the White House.
I know it’s fashionable to shit on China (China China China), but it’s not like they’re doing something new and unique. How can you count on the US, or any other country, to be a reliable partner?
The POTUS is openly inviting Russian interference in US affairs ffs.
That's up to them and their own risk assessment. One thing I know for sure is that if they did, the US would wage an economic war so fiercely on Europe, that Nokia & Ericsson would have a tough time doing anything in the US for years to come.
Further, collateral damage would include all sorts of manufacturing, which would cripple Germany.
Remember the imbalance here: European manufacturing is more dependent upon the US than the US is on Europe. Fully 50% of Germany's GDP is exports, and worse, Germany exported $118bn of goods, while the US exported only $50 to Germany.[1] While that doesn't seem a big difference, once you look at it as a share of each other's economies, it is immense (roughly 3% of German GDP, versus only 0.5% of US GDP).
True, but for a good reason. If you take out the economic engine of Germany, you’re done. They are the banking muscle of the EU, and once that goes, everything goes.
Not exacly. For sure Germany is one of the core players in UE but don't forget about others. About exp/imp data https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany if you have better data about that please propose correction.
Russia could be nothing more than a scapegoat & cooperator in domestic plots. Imagine if the CIA wanted to manipulate domestic politics. They might use foreigners as a proxy to prevent being implicated for something outside their supposed mission.
I'm not saying that I believe that any more than the media narrative, or have any insight into unseen forces at play, but there is also reason for skepticism. Noam Chomsky as one example has said he thinks the hubbub about Russian interference is a farce. Disinformation and influence operations are real and powerful tools.
If European nations were worried about vulnerability to the US military they'd probably start by removing all those air bases and nuclear weapons and leaving NATO.
They aren't worried about the US, because the US isn't expansionist and generally only applies muscular diplomacy to nations that are small and poor. China has used military force to expand much more recently than the US, making it much more of a concern.
FYI, Mark Esper (U.S. secretary of defense) has a commentary piece in today's edition of the WSJ about this, titled: "The FCC’s Decision Puts GPS at Risk"
I'm a little worried that GPS is so vulnerable that these satellites could cause such disruption to be honest. This is satellite based, any country could be approving this plan and the impact on GPS would still be present since orbits go everywhere.
I guess I'd rather they just... not... I don't really even think the trade-off in increased seemingly real health risk is worth making the cell network even faster.
It's going to happen though, if there's no mitigation that makes GPS more invulnerable to interference it will inevitably fail when actually needed.
Let me just point out that satellites don't necessarily orbit around the world. They can be geostationary, and in fact they usually are I think. That is why you will find most US GPS satellites over the US, most Russian satellites over Russia, etc.
Also, signal disruption is already very common as a necessary precaution at sensitive times and places. I think many military bases and other sensitive places, like the Kremlin, have signal interference so they are very imprecise to target with GPS-guided weapons.
GNSS satellites (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, Beidou, etc) are not in geostationary orbits. Being in a geostationary orbit would put them in fixed "locations" in the sky, making them easily blocked by terrain and entirely unusable at high latitudes.
GPS satellites are in MEO, at ~20 km MSL. Other GNSS satellites use similar orbits.
Is this even actually directly related to 5G? I mean a mobile phone can’t connect directly to space satellite right?
The article says “Would allow telecom companies to deploy 5G networks”. Is this satellite network for doing connnections between cell sites maybe?
If that’s the case, it feels like 5G is only tangentially related and only included in story for click bait given that people seem to want to get mad about 5G recently.
Ligado (ex-lightsquare) product is a hybrid satellite terrestrial network. The specific component that people are concerned about is their terrestrial network which is very much a 5G creature (in so much at Ligado is marketing themselves and this approval as a step forward for 5G and IoT).
Fundamentally yes, but look at how both sides are trying to sell the issue. If Ligado and the FCC are both pushing this spectrum allocation issue as a question of helping 5G or not (and therefore hitching onto the we need 5G now or else China will beat us wagon), then I'm completely sympathetic to opposing coverage piling on the counter 5G bandwagon.
The counter 5G bandwagon seems to be largely comprised of conspiracy theories, dubious health claims, and unqualified assertions that people don't want more bandwidth. Why would you poison a legitimately important topic like spectrum allocation with associations like that?
Personally, I dislike how the conspiracy nonsense has kind of covered up the actual criticisms of 5g that existed prior to suddenly everyone thinking it's a great idea and if you don't, you're a conspiracy theorist.
I seem to recall this revolved around, questionable tangible benefits vs cost of deployment, poor penetration of 5g signals through structures, a lack of devices or internet plans to take advantage of 5g, and some other things that just seem to have taken a back seat to all the bullshit.
One has to wonder if some of the nonsense criticisms of 5G (causes disease, government conspiracy, etc) have been deliberately amplified to drown out legitimate technical concerns.
This is a genuine problem: the current polarization means that you are either in favor of 5G or a conspiracy theorist. This is not a healthy atmosphere for a rational discussion about long-term impact of 5G.
I was under the impression that there are serious non-conspiracy concerns about the impact of 5G networking on weather satellits [0]. Something along the lines of "they use a frequency in the range used by 5G in order to see water vapor".
Indeed, the issue here is a company, Ligado, that plans to use the L-band spectrum.
As this is the part of the spectrum that GPS uses, the Pentagon worries about interferences.
This has nothing to do with 5G, the cellular standard, per se, and even even less with Huawei or China.
Edit:
In fact, cellular networks like 4G and 5G ones rely on GPS for correct synchronisation and interfering with GPS could have an impact on them. Just to illustrates that this is a really a spectrum allocation issue regarding potential interferences, this is not a 5G issue.
It has its advantages, but it doesn't do much for consumers, except in some pretty extreme circumstances or dense areas. (Stadiums are a popular example, which, okay. I lived across the water from a stadium and my 3G phone signal sucked when there was something going on there. This got way better as my carrier got less bad and technology improved and the stadium added free wifi, but it's definitely a good problem to solve). It'll help other things more. Someone pointed out 5G could be a big thing for flying drones, in a near-future alternate universe where those are prolific, and there's quite a bit of interest in those. Trouble is a use case like that needs the infrastructure. So, everyone else is going to subsidize it by buying vastly overspecced phones, but that's the mobile industry in a nutshell.
I want 5G. There, you heard it. I’m not a telecom CEO and I’m not a politician.
Edit: I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. I want ultra fast reliable telecom in crowded cities. I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices.
> I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices.
It never will be though. Whatever frequencies you can do wirelessly you can do over a wire without the interference of other users using the same frequency at the same time.
Also a lot of promises 5G offers only sound good on paper. The higher frequencies don't travel well through walls (that's why it uses lower frequencies as well) and the maximum speed being talked can only be obtained during tests, but in the real deployment it has to be shared over all users.
Another problem is that the speeds don't mean sh*t if we have the same data caps, in fact higher speed is worse, because many applications will switch to a higher bitrate and consume more data, even when there's no noticeable difference on a phone.
>> I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices.
> It never will be though. Whatever frequencies you can do wirelessly you can do over a wire without the interference of other users using the same frequency at the same time.
this is true in principle, but not necessarily in practice. I suspect it will hold for the near/medium future, but I can imagine a world where much more money is invested in improving mobile networks than home cable connections, causing the latter to stagnate.
most "normal" people I know don't even own a desktop computer. there are no devices in their homes that connect via ethernet (or even have an ethernet port without a dongle!). at a certain point, it might make sense to ditch the home modem/router altogether and scale up wifi networks to the point where they basically merge with cellular.
> but I can imagine a world where much more money is invested in improving mobile networks than home cable connections, causing the latter to stagnate.
This seems like a misunderstanding of the technologies. Mobile networks modulate RF and emit it via antennas, cable networks modulate RF and carry it via RF cables (aka coaxial cable, or "cable"). Its the same technology from a fundamental standpoint, but the latter has superior propagation characteristics and dramatically reduced noise. Wireless can't be better than wired - if it was, you'd just connect the LTE or whatever transceivers to the cable plant and be done with it.
I agree the internet is increasingly carried over radio these days (e.g. WiFi, LTE, Satellite). Wireless still seems pretty young and crude yet. There seems to be plenty of room to grow with respect to negotiating power levels, frequency use, routing topologies and so on.
I think big fiber backhauls are still going to be a thing though.
> I think big fiber backhauls are still going to be a thing though.
absolutely, I'm just talking about wired vs. wireless as available to the typical consumer. the fiber would be the backhaul for an entire city block or neighborhood. just speculation.
You listed the theoretical advantages of 5G. Whether or not the practice mirrors theory is debatable. But I can't help but noticed you missed listing any disadvantage. Most people are completely unaware of any because they don't make it in the marketing leaflets.
When you say 5G I can just as well read: I want close range, LoS connections, substantially higher power consumption for devices and increased complexity, higher costs, security concerns, and the inability to take advantage of the speed not only because it's purely theoretical but because data plans did not keep up in 99.9% of the world.
Listing only benefits can make even an amputation sound like a great way to keep weight off. I'm all for new tech and advancements but if it feels like 1 step forward, 1 step back then it's not much of an advancement. It's half baked and pushed just to sell "the new stuff".
We don’t know about data plans because 5G hasn’t been widely deployed yet. The same could be said for 3G->4G transition, but then we started seeing caps move from 500MB to 10+GB.
Line of sight connections are great in crowded cities. Large venues can install cells locally for even better performance, and wide deployment of these cells is an accepted part of the deployment.
Power consumption is an issue, but that’s an issue that will improve over time and also applies to any technology upgrade in modern devices.
I don’t list the downsides because each one is either so minor as to be a non-issue, is totally hypothetical and didn’t apply to previous generational upgrades, or a downside that applies to literally any new mobile technology and therefore doesn’t need to be said.
We also don't know how fast and reliable 5G will be (beyond the severely limited range) but it was at the top of your list of advantages. Some of the disadvantages of current Gees you mentioned seem to be exacerbated by your mobile carrier and they may very well apply to 5G.
> each one is either so minor as to be a non-issue
For the purpose of making your argument you were willing to just downplay every disadvantage, ignore it, or just glance over it, and pump up every advantage. Many others aren't. The reason 5G is going ahead as such (half baked and expensive, more so than 4G was in its time) is that most people don't know what they want, or what they get. But enough have the money and the promotional material says it's the thing to get. If it weren't for the slowing smartphone market nobody would have considered going ahead with this. But the phone market is catatonic so suddenly here you are convinced that your RPi with sensors can only work over 5G, ignoring that LoRa may be an even better choice for such applications. LoRa doesn't have great marketing though.
WiFi is genuinely better for some of the applications you listed. Voice is still 4G. And the law of diminishing returns strongly suggests that the jump brings less noticeable real world difference than the numbers suggest.
Competitive doesn't have to mean faster. It just needs to be available and passable. 4G is pretty close in some markets, but with wide deployment of 5G mmWave, there might be just enough competition with the local cable monopoly to push better prices or speeds or both.
For context I pay a lot for 150 Mbps and really don't have any choice in the matter.
> I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go.
Don't leave the city then. 5G has very limited range and doesn't work in rural areas where there aren't enough customers to provide needed geographical coverage.
I understand that to do this you would need to blanket an area. I don't have any issue with that, it's the correct thing to do. What I do have issue with are these ISPs and telecoms are going to do a half assed job to maximize profit, just like they've done with every other technology in their possession. They can do this because you are beholden to them with no alternative in the market. Their track record is very poor to build reliable infrastructure, and for 5G to work you need reliable infrastructure. It doesn't matter what the specific technology is if you fail to build it optimally.
The only way this works is if carriers invest in a ton more hardware, which means leasing more tower space, creating new tower space, getting creative with placing radios in areas where you can't really put towers, etc.
That's expensive. What's also expensive -- sometimes even more expensive -- is running wiring to all those places to connect those radios to the backhaul network.
I frankly do not expect US carriers to go to that expense, at least not universally.
These are reasonable, but what are these IoT devices and why can't they connect to your wifi, or to a zigbee network? Why do they need their own IP addresses?
I’d like to be able to put things like raspberry pi weather sensors, etc outside of the range of WiFi. I know in a lot of places especially on larger properties, there is going to be cellular coverage but it is prohibitively expensive to install WiFi.
I’m honestly tired of all of these ‘but why do you need it?’ arguments. The same was said about electricity, long before anyone envisioned dishwashers, game consoles, blenders, etc. But why aren’t gas lamps good enough?
Heck, the same thing could be said about WiFi. 10 years ago no one would think a WiFi network should need to support 100+ devices, but here we are in 2020.
Well, this isn't like having electricity or not. Mobile internet already exists. What would 5G offer you that 4G doesn't? All I've read about its shortcomings in range tell me implementation will be difficult, and reliable 4G is barely implemented where I live in the second largest city in the U.S. Not trying to be critical, just interested in learning a bit more, how will 5G be any different practically speaking?
The shortcomings in range is just the mmWave 5G. Which is the same trade off as 2.4ghz vs 5ghz wifi of higher bandwidth for less range/pentration. You can still run 5G on the same old spectrums as 4G for the same range, and only slight improvements in speed (not the 1 gigabit that you'd get on mmWave).
This has been possible for almost 20 years if you're talking data rates for things like weather sensors. GPRS radios first hit the market in 2003. Many networks are turning off their older GPRS networks leaving 3G as the baseline but buying 3G modems to hook to a Pi or Arduino can be had for pretty cheap. I'm no 5G hater, but why is 5G required for weather sensors?
Also, if you're interested in deploying longer-range wireless around a large property for things like weather sensors and other smaller data rate devices, cut out the cell network and go with LoRa. You'll get a few km of range for a tiny amount of power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
We aren't talking about the difference between electricity and gas. We are talking about the difference between a fast cellular network and slightly faster cellular network.
Then would something like the difference between 1 gbps and 10gbps ethernet apply? In the large majority of American households that have wired computers, 1gbps could handle almost any task including fast file transfers, yet 10gbps is something you can purchase if you think you need it and using it will result in even faster speeds.
Do you think the difference between 1gbps and 10gbps is a similar jump forward, in terms of progress, as the advent of electricity as a replacement for gas?
I understand that the GP's argument is that the effects of a particular technological advancement cannot always be understood at the time of, or before, its introduction. But we aren't talking about gun powder here... We are discussing an incremental change to an already existing technology.
As Asimov explains, the velocity of "progress", specifically in areas we already have come to understand in some way, diminishes with each step forward.
> I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. I want ultra fast reliable telecom in crowded cities. I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices.
We don't have this today mainly because wireless carriers do the minimum required to compete with their minimal competition. It doesn't have that much to do with 4G vs. 5G or whatever. Even living in a city, I don't expect 5G to improve the situation all that much, unless carriers start really spending on their network.
The ubiquity, reliability, and bandwidth will only be there if carriers make huge investments in their networks, which I don't expect will happen.
You can certainly get what you want today, with 4G/LTE. You just have to go to a country with carriers that actually prioritize that, like Taiwan or Japan (and probably several other east/southeast Asian countries).
So I can use my mapping application when I’m in the park. So I can look up an earthquake that just happened when I’m in the lobby of a movie theater (that really happened, and the 4G network really is not capable of handling any sort of crowd at least not in my area).
> the 4G network really is not capable of handling any sort of crowd at least not in my area
As someone living in NYC and using 4G daily with few problems, I suspect this is a problem of your telecom provider not having adequate infrastructure or having a bad configuration for handling many connections to a few nodes.
> ... I suspect this is a problem of your telecom provider not having adequate infrastructure or having a bad configuration for handling many connections to a few nodes.
Which they'll likely do for their 5G network as well because, well, telecoms do the minimum possible.
I live in LA and don't have this issues with crowds disabling me from using 4G.
Regarding the earthquake, yes it is common that you can't access SCEC website right after an earthquake, but this is not a problem with 4G. You can have 10 gbps over fiber and the site still won't be accessible, because the site itself is bogged down by the traffic.
Also in LA and I find 4G is not very reliable. Who is your carrier? I use verizon. Speeds are bad and my connection drops all the time. I'm by ktown so maybe it's the density at play compared to other areas.
T-Mobile. Was a Verizon user until 2011 or 12. Actually when I switched T-Mobile felt like an upgrade in LA (especially it worked inside buildings that Verizon didn't), it was not great in rural areas but never had problems in LA.
Second this. Verizon was basically unusable in wide swaths of the LA metro area but TMobile is unusable in wide swaths of rural areas. In mountainous areas like San Diego east county it becomes even more annoying: the I8 has decent coverage until like El Centro, CA (enough to stream HD video) but even a km from the freeway the signal completely disappears. Often times the only real option is AT&T.
So in that case I don't know what problems you have. I did not had these kind of issues. The only issues I had was that there was no cell phone signal in certain buildings, and 5G won't solve that.
5G is better. When the vision is finally realized. In the meantime you get a brand new washing machine that costs double, only works when you're next to it, and the spin cycle must be done in the old one. And by the time it's actually better you have to buy a new one anyway.
5G was rushed in a way 3/4G weren't because smartphone sales are slowing down. This is not the usual "there are some hiccups at the beginning" type of thing. As it is today it's rushed and half-baked.
> costs double, only works when you're next to it, and the spin cycle must be done in the old one. And by the time it's actually better you have to buy a new one anyway.
Which says a lot. Having a first generation that comes with compromises and caveats is understandable and unavoidable. It still solves a problem where there's nothing else to even attempt it. In this light the current 5G deployment is indeed just a severely compromised one meant to oversell advantages that are nonexistent today and handwave the disadvantages. You'd have seen a more mature 5G deployment in a few years if the smartphone market didn't need a nudge.
I mean, I'm sure a lot of people want it if it improves their mobile experience. It isn't really something that the average person is going to celebrate on Facebook.
- It's shorter-range, so coverage will be spotty for a long time
- It doesn't go through buildings, so even the urban centers most likely to get the first towers will have spotty coverage
- It will require buying a new device, which OEMs love but the average person won't
- That device will take a hit in battery life
And all of this for ludicrously-fast new speeds on mobile devices that we'll use for... what exactly? We can already stream HD video over 4G. What experience is 5G, assuming you actually have access to it, going to improve?
I'm sure we can contrive some use-cases like streaming VR video or whatever (even though all current phone-based VR platforms have been sunsetted), but I'm extremely skeptical that it will do anything to make the average user's mobile experience better in any meaningful way.
Your first 3 points are all based on a complete misconception of what 5G NR is. You are talking about mmWave which is an accessory component of the 5G NR standard. Low and mid-band 5G use ~ the same bands (or n71 which is the old TV band in the case of T-mobile) as LTE. Some Network Providers have been doing mmWave first because it is easier to deploy but their networks will also be mid and low band when they finish build-out.
Maybe don't make blanket statements about a standard you clearly aren't familiar with.
There are 2 kinds of 5G, millimeter wave and non millimeter wave.
The one you are talking about is millimeter wave 5G.
The other one has pretty long range, goes through building, doesn't use up that much more battery and is overall a better technology (higher bandwidth, better congestion control and overall capacity for more connections in a crowded area, lower latency, etc.).
The 5G is pitched because greater speeds, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the millimeter waves are the reason for higher bandwidth otherwise it is similar to 4G that can peak to 1Gbps.
FR1 (the low band 5G) is capable of greater carrier aggregation and denser QAM modulation than LTE-A so it can achieve higher bandwidths than LTE-A under good conditions. It also has better latency and congestion controls which should provide a better general use experience as well as reduce degradation in heavy traffic. It also pushes more open hardware/software standards for base stations to reduce vendor lock-in.
Regarding your first point, I'm not sure if that's true, I think they use low frequency spectrum around 900MHz (just like LTE) as well, not just the 2000MHz+ to GHz spectrum in densely populated or visited places.
Also, as far as I'm concerned, the latency gains are much more interesting as the ludicrous speed, and then not even exclusively for phones and new types of apps, but for IoT as well
> What experience is 5G, assuming you actually have access to it, going to improve?
Remotely operated robotics due to the much lower latency.
Think near instant reaction times while operating a drone with VR goggles, and all the implication this could have.
Also many other use cases become more feasible:
- Self driving cars with human fallbacks
- Safer car racing
- Actually smart delivery, where a single person can manage a fleet of vehicles
Yeah what @Talanes said in a sibling thread.
If drivers are not physically present in the racing car then not only they're safer physically but cars could be designed without a human driver in mind (lighter, higher acceleration etc)
Only Samsung's very latest flagship release has a 5G antenna, and Apple hasn't even announced a 5G phone yet. Even if it had, the average person keeps their phone for several years, so almost nobody has a 5G device in their pocket right now.
I've heard that top brass at the DoD is fixated on 5G being critical to military superiority in the near future, without really having any practical understanding of its strengths and weaknesses or real world applications. But it's become a hot buzzword and an easy way to drum up money and attention. The fact that China is a major player is also helping funnel funding into many money-torching projects.
All of the statements I've seen from pentagon brass are extremely critical of the FCC's decisions to let 5G operate close to bands used for GPS and weather forecasting.
Telecoms want to take the place of WiFi. If you follow the non-technical 5G articles, there is a lot of promotion of how 5G _will_ replace WiFi.
Within the last year, we denied Verizon's 5G proposal. They want to run fiber and wireless backhaul to provide indoor access for some buildings. It's also important to watch which door these proposals come through. It's a tell as to what their actual agenda is.
I think they're hoping it will inspire (strongarm?) people into buying new phones, which will juice a slowing smartphone market for both OEMs and the carriers that take a cut of sales.
I'd like to have an alternative to the ISP monopoly that exists at my address (technically I have 2 options, but one of them is about 30x faster than the other for the same price)
I don't understand this. Is the DoD not subject to FCC regulation? Are there multiple bands that different types of GPS signals use (civilian vs military)?
My understanding of GPS was that it is used in _civilization critical_ applications like satellite synchronization and plane/ship navigation. How could any sane human approve an interference with this traffic?
That is complex, but most likely no. Like the FAA they largely respect the civilian agencies but ultimately they exist outside of that civilian regulation
>>Are there multiple bands that different types of GPS signals use (civilian vs military)?
Yes the military GPS is different from the Civilian GPS, the US DOD has the ability in a time of war to cut off Civilian access to the GPS Network where only US military (and approved Allies) receivers will work. This is one (of many) reasons the EU, Russia and China all have their own GPS systems
>>How could any sane human approve an interference with this traffic?
While I do not know if I agree (have not read enough on the interference to form a definitive opinion) the supporters of the new network claim there will not be any meaningful interference, that the DoD is over reacting and if there is Interference they will be required to replace the equipment..
> That is complex, but most likely no. Like the FAA they largely respect the civilian agencies but ultimately they exist outside of that civilian regulation
Indeed, the DOD can do pretty much what they like regardless of what the FCC says. Of course, it all works better if everybody stays in their own sandbox, so the DOD does, by-and-large.
In general, government frequency allocations and usage are coordinated by the NTIA Office of Spectrum Management. But here again, the NTIA OSM negotiates with the DOD, they can't enforce anything on the DOD.
> the military GPS is different from the Civilian GPS
I remember reading at some point that the civilian GPS was randomly offset so as not to give extremely accurate coordinates like the military GPS does. I thought that was interesting, if true.
The US used to intentionally degrade GPS signals available to civilian receivers as compared with those available to military ones, but it stopped doing that in the 1990s.
The biggest difference now between military and civilian GPS is that military receivers use two frequencies, whereas most civilian ones only use one (since using two costs more).
For many years the government intentionally degraded the quality of GPS signals available to civilians. Look up "Selective Availability" - it was stopped in 2000, at which point consumer GPS became viable.
>How could any sane human approve an interference with this traffic?
If there is a business application with a powerful enough lobbyist and/or large enough political contribution chest, then of course they should be given approval.
The new standard supports more concurrent users by using the available spectrum more efficiently. There are new modulation and timing "modes" that enable better coverage at cell edges and in dense urban environments. There is better support for multi-antenna systems which means better coverage and more efficient spectrum usage. End-to-end latency has been dramtically reduced and the next 5G NR iteration (rel 17) will add a super low-latency mode. There is now a mode for IoT that enbales low-power communication. Most of these changes aren't going to give you 1Gbps downlink speeds but they represent huge improvements over even LTE-A.
Is it correct to say that this impacts GPS not only for the American civilian and military but also the rest of the world?
What are other country’s thoughts? It would be interesting to learn what led the FCC to make the decision they did... how did they deem the safety or consequences of this decision, etc. hopefully it’s not driven purely by profit incentives that put lives at stake.
Disclaimer: I have no background on GPS, whichever wave “band” the issue impacts, or much of any technical understanding of the topic at all. Casual observer.
The company wants to build a 5G network in the US, so it would affect GPS in the US. It's interference at the receiver, not at the GPS satellites themselves.
My understanding of this is that the company wants to use L band, which is the designation for the range of frequencies in the radio spectrum from 1 to 2 gigahertz (GHz)
Doesn't 5G use higher frequency than that?
Is the company, a satellite company, trying to use their satellites to provide 5G or something? So if the interference starts at the satellites, it could affect other parts of the world?
>“We have presented to the FCC a proposal to utilize our terrestrial midband spectrum as a greenfield opportunity that is aligned with the commission’s stated goals of providing the foundation of the 5G future,” explained Doug Smith, Ligado president and CEO. “By deploying 40 megahertz of smart capacity on midband spectrum, we can create a model of at least a partial 5G network — a next-generation, hybrid satellite-terrestrial network — that will enable 5G use cases and mobile applications that require ultra-reliable, highly secure and pervasive connectivity.”
5G is a very broad term, which is supposed to offer 10x performance in all metrics over 4G.
This seems to be the same issue when they were called Light Squared. The L-band was to be used for terrestrial base stations with very high power transmitters. The issue is that, even though several MHz away, from the GPS carrier, the transmissions will compress the LNA on GPS receivers with poor or little filtering, desensitizing the GPS receiver.
Most civilian stuff now has decent filtering prior to the LNA so it can co-exist with all the other wireless crap crammed in your phone.
See document FCC-20-48 [1] for full text. Some quotes:
"Our decision authorizes Ligado to deploy a low-power terrestrial nationwide network in the 1526-1536 MHz, 1627.5-1637.5 MHz, and 1646.5-1656.5 MHz band (...)"
"Our action provides regulatory certainty to Ligado, ensures adjacent band operations, including Global Positioning System (GPS), are sufficiently protected from harmful interference (...)"
"Ligado's amended license modification applications significantly reduce the power levels of its operations from its earlier proposals and commit Ligado to providing a significant guard-band in the MSS spectrum to further separate its terrestrial transmissions from neighboring operations in the Radionavigation-Satellite Service (RNSS) allocation. Based on the extensive record, we conclude that Ligado's latest proposal—combined with the stringent conditions we adopt today—addresses harmful interference concerns with respect to GPS operating in the adjacent RNSS allocation, as well as concerns with respect to MSS licensees' operations in the L-band."
Read section "II. Background" for more technical info and changes since the LightSquared proposals.
While sometimes considered controversial for decisions made on intangible things like net neutrality, I expect the FCC would have a much better understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum than the military, and having all of them approve this tells me they see no threat to GPS from Ligado's spectrum use. Makes me wonder what the politics are behind this, especially when I see someone like Jim Inhofe involved.
>I expect the FCC would have a much better understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum than the military
Why? The FCC is concerned with coordinating peaceful use of commercial RF products (and experimentation that could lead to new commercial products). The military operates in hostile RF environments, conducts Signals Intelligence, and has to mitigate signal intelligence conducted against them. The demand for the absolute cutting edge of RF expertise is all on the military side.
I have not read up on it - I am no expert. However, this is the second technology (first being weather radar) that 5G is reported to have significant, negative effects on.
As a layman, I do wish we banned 5G entirely, assuming these assertions are correct. There is a greater public interest than even faster cell connectivity.
The wiki on 5G isn't bad - I now get that it is a tri-band negotiation, and I assume it is the "high" band that causes the issues.[1]
How does Wifi 6 use the same spectrum as 5G mid, but get such higher throughput?
And if the point of 5G is also to give higher speeds and capacity in dense urban environments, with denser antenna coverage, why couldn't they adapt the existing 2-6 GHz range instead of going up toward millimeter?
meta-edit: So, I put forward assertions, admitted humility and lack of expert knowledge, asked questions and linked to a wiki that I found to talk about the subject. If the person/people who downvoted me for the original content sees this, please note that the downvote button is not a disagree button. If you have substantive issue with the post, rebut it.
The problem has nothing to do with 5G inherently, and the vast majority of the bands it is approved to operate on will have no interference issues. The problem is that the current FCC has been very bullish on opening up more bands for mobile use even if there are legitimate interference concerns.
> And if the point of 5G is also to give higher speeds and capacity in dense urban environments, with denser antenna coverage, why couldn't they adapt the existing 2-6 GHz range instead of going up toward millimeter?
They are. Eventually all the bands currently used for 4G will be migrated to 5G. If you see T-mobiles ads about the largest 5G network in the country, that is all deployed on existing bands that were also approved for 4G. On these bands 5G will be a minor upgrade.
The millimeter bands are intended to significantly increase the number of concurrent users, but the places where it can be effectively deployed are very limited. It won't pass through buildings, and has short range. As an example, Verizon couldn't even cover a full sports stadium with a single tower, and that's a prototypical case of where millimeter is supposed to be valuable.
This latest issue is completely separate. It is entirely about a single company, Ligado, that bought spectrum adjacent to GPS at a discount deal because it came with strict restrictions on how that spectrum could be used to avoid interference with GPS. For years they have been trying to get the FCC to relax those restrictions for various different purposes, and this FCC finally approved. For previous requests there was tons of hard data filed showing that the proposed use would absolutely cause interference, and the requests were rejected. The latest approval does stipulate much wider guard bands and other measures to decrease interference. I don't know whether these measures are sufficient. The FCC commissioners unanimously think they are, while the DoD brass is insistent that they aren't.
It's in the military's interest to limit the freedom and empowerment of the public as much as possible. I would take their opinions with a grain of salt.
With that said, this seems like something that can be easily solved with technology improvements.
How many lives has GPS saved? Even if all it did was prevent one KAL007 type event a decade, that's already thousands
edit: Korean Air 007 was an airliner that was shot down by the USSR after straying into their airspace. It had a huge influence on the decision to make GPS available for civilian use.
Usually I'd agree with you, but this is a case of DoD wanting to preserve infrastructure for targeting drones vs corporations seeing $$$ in robotic deployment and automation so they can eliminate jobs. Who knows who will win.
The drones thing is hyperbole because (so far) they drop the bombs overseas, but my point is that they have an interest in preserving GPS domestically.
Maybe so, but the evidence is weak at best. Some wars (like Iraq, Korea, Vietnam) were a sham. I'd feel more comfortable knowing nobody had nuclear weapons.
> It's in the military's interest to limit the freedom and empowerment of the public as much as possible.
This is an unfair view. The National Defense Strategy states:
> Without sustained
and predictable investment to restore readiness and modernize our military to make it fit for our time,
we will rapidly lose our military advantage, resulting in a Joint Force that has legacy systems irrelevant
to the defense of our people.
And
> Another change to the strategic environment is a resilient, but weakening, post-WWII international order. In
the decades after fascism’s defeat in World War II, the United States and its allies and partners
constructed a free and open international order to better safeguard their liberty and people from
aggression and coercion.
> the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party (NSDAP) controlled the country which they transformed into a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany became a totalitarian state where nearly all aspects of life were controlled by the government
In this context, the "government" means the military. Hitler used military force to enforce their rein. There's no way Nazi Germany could have done what they did without absolute control exerted by the military.
Maybe you could say the nazis took over the military and be more accurate. Most oppression came from the SA which was a military like organization that the nazis had built up. This wasn’t a military coup like in other countries.
You could think about it that way, but you should also know that Himmler created the SS which swore allegiance to Hitler. The SS also existed before Hitler became the chancellor of Germany.
> you should also know that Himmler created the SS
I don't understand what point you are trying to make. The SS was an organization within the nazi party, not Germany's armed forces. Your example refutes your previous assertion that "having a military take over like Nazi Germany" because your quote clearly points out that nothing of the sort happened ever.
I am not sure what point you are trying to prove. All this stuff came from outside the regular military. So in the present you should be more worried about militias taking over than the regular military.
Not that it matters to your argument but as a point of trivia, Himmler did not create the SS. While SS member #1 was Adolf Hitler, SS member #2 was Emil Maurice, Hitler's Jewish friend and driver since the early days of the party.
You're making a joke, but I find it strange that people in the US aren't more skeptical of the government, especially the military and militarized police forces. To think the US is somehow unable to become a totalitarian state is naive. In Germany people didn't think it was going to happen either, many Germans didn't believe the atrocities were even happening and some remain in denial about them today.
> To think the US is somehow unable to become a totalitarian state is naive.
As is thinking that "it is unlikely" is somehow the same as "unable". There's broad-brush painting going on here, but I don't think it's necessarily only where you think it is.
Part of the issue here is that the military establishment and its peripheral industries in the US are so enormous, that most people who aren’t in the military are close to someone who is, or who does business with it. We’re all already in the Army, basically.
> I find it strange that people in the US aren't more skeptical of the government....military and militarized police forces. To think the US is somehow unable to become a totalitarian state is naive.
2nd amendment supporters and small government libertarians are both examples of groups who are suspicious of large governments.
One time when we were working on testing Wifi interference, we tried to buy every possible 2.4GHz device to see what they did to our routers. We found these TV extenders (connect camera to one end, connect TV to the other) that claimed to be 2.4GHz but didn't interfere at all. We looked more closely with a spectrum analyzer and they were actually 1.3GHz and completely stepped all over the GPS frequencies. Did the FCC stop Amazon from importing these things? Nope. I guess my point is... the threat is real, but someone going out of their way to request permission from the government (as is legally required) is probably not going to cause many problems.