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Will there be a 7G?
- jruohonen 4d agoWell, 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.
- VorpalWay 4d ago5G seems pretty widly available here in Sweden in my experience, even in the countryside. Not that the speeds are actually better than 4G, but the indicator say 5G as I'm writing this in a tent in the middle of nowhere. :) I guess other countries are further behind?
- jruohonen 4d ago> I guess other countries are further behind? Yes, and even in Europe. The demand-led need was badly misunderstood or anticipated in my opinion as operators were hesitant to invest (and some big ones still are). In this sense, 7G is a pipe dream (but of course worth researching as such).
- tvink 4d agoOn raw coverage of 5g, only a few much denser countries are better. You live in basically the best 4g and 5g covered, sparsely populated country on earth :) most countries are not just further behind.
- vlovich123 4d agoAmerican cities also generally seem to have good 5G coverage with 4G frequencies being repurposed for 5G and 4G overall being put on life support as it’s phased out
- hn_throwaway_99 4d agoWith 5G in particular I think it's important that people talk about which specific technologies they're referring to. In the US at least, low-band or extended range 5G is widely available and has been for some time (and I'm talking about the "real" 5G low-band, not the BS marketing speak AT&T used for a while). Mid and high band 5G, or 5G ultra capacity, is much less available but if course it only really makes sense in dense cities. I'm surprised that low band 5G isn't widely available in most 1st world countries, as again it's been here in the US for many years now.
- kergonath 4d agoLucky you. On some parts of my commute, in an urban area of 10M people, I am happy if I get some 3G.
- wolvoleo 4d agoDon't just look at the indicator on your phone though. Providers are free to scheme with those. Some honestly show the icon when you are on 5G. Others use the option of showing it when you are on 4G (not even 5G NSA) but the network offers 5G on the cell. The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.
- VorpalWay 4d agoIt has been going between 4G and 5G today while hiking, so if they lie it isn't all the time at least. But what do you suggest instead (on Android, a Pixel specifically)?
- wolvoleo 4d agoIt depends on the provider. They can choose what the logo means. Ps I looked it up, it can show it if the cell has 5G even if you're not connected to that at the moment, not if the network has it somewhere. But each provider makes different choices. They have like 4 options to choose from. You can use a network monitor app (or the built in one but it's a bit technical) to see what you're really connected to.
- numpad0 4d agoI've been away from Twitter phone nerds scene for quite a while, what do they use now for those details? Is it still ##service## or something else entirely?
- wolvoleo 4d agoThere's apps for that but yes the built in one is also still there. I think it's not so much a nerd thing rather than a false advertising one though.
- prmoustache 4d agoIsn't the icon decided by the operating system?
- dorianmariecom 4d agoyes
- BlackRabbit1 4d ago5G 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.
- esperent 4d agoI'm not sure what the "SA" part means but my phone says it's on 5g right now and has done most of the time for a couple of years now.
- deleted 4d ago[deleted]
- BlackRabbit1 4d agoJust because your phone shows 5G doesn't mean it's connected to a 5G station. It also can only be a signaled flag from a 4G station.
- wolvoleo 4d agoSA means standalone meaning real 5G. NSA is non stand alone meaning basically 4G with some 5G backwards compatible improvements.
- eightysixfour 4d agoThe 5G standard is a bit of a mess. In the US we heavily rolled out 5G NSA, which means you still have a 4G network core with both 4G and 5G radios at the edge. You get a chunk of the performance benefits without having to replace the network core first. This usually has similar (in practice) performance characteristics to LTE Advanced. 5G SA is an actual, end to end 5G network. The two biggest wins here for an end user are reduced latency (a big focus in 5G) and reduced power usage (the phone doesn’t need a simultaneous 4G connection).
- respectattentio 4d agoThe right question: Will 7G be needed? I say no for the next 15 years. Because there are 1425235 other things that are way much important than this.
- someguynamedq 4d agoRight and society only works on one thing at a time
- respectattentio 4d agoYes, why working on something that "may" be beneficial in the far future? This is like inventing a 128-bit CPU architecture. Nobody would be able to utilize like even 1% of that, even with AI.
- Dylan16807 4d agoI'm not sure what performance improvements you're expecting with cell phone generations but most of it's pretty incremental. I don't think 7G is going to be even twice as fast as 5G on the same frequencies. It should be more stable, maybe millimeter wave will get deployed more, but it won't be wasted at all, lots of towers are going to be running at 100% utilization.
- JW_00000 4d agoResearch on 5G started ~2012 to be deployed since 2019 (7 years), research on 4G started maybe around 2000 for rollout in 2009 (9 years later). For 6G, research started around 2018 for an expected rollout around 2030 (12 years). These timelines are pretty typical in the telecom field.
- alt227 4d agoIt may not be needed, but it will certainly be rolled out.
- JW_00000 4d agoThe paper lists the "earliest plausible" deployment of 7G as 2039-40, so only 1-2 years off your estimate...
- tolugenius 4d agoCould there come a limit to the G-cycle? Like either a) marginal gains slow/stall progress or b) more connectivity simply not being better? Curious to hear from folks in this field if this question has been raised.
- londons_explore 4d agoNot soon there won't be. There is no reason you can't have phased array antennas of tens of elements on the handset and thousands on the masts, to give a massive bandwidth increase. It will take a lot of generations to get to the limit physics sets.
- ck2 4d agoeven the moon only has 4G well if they ever get the lander upright, you'd think they'd learn to put crashbags that self-inflate to upright landers by now * https://www.wired.com/story/nokia-4g-network-on-the-moon/ https://www.wired.com/story/nokia-4g-network-on-the-moon/
- Havoc 4d agoThere 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
- wolvoleo 4d agoThat's more of a physics thing. For building penetration you need low frequencies but those low frequencies have less bandwidth available because the bands are smaller. At the same time bandwidth needs rapidly go up, making those low bands fuller. Because there's a limit to how many bits per second you can get out of a Hz of spectrum. What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters. A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally. This could be incorporated into the standard. Then establishments could easily include a booster just like many of them offer free WiFi now.
- Havoc 4d ago>A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally. They're still readily available. But yeah think this would need a legislative push to solve. Force high rises to host multi provider relays as you say and hook it into their fiber links.
- tliltocatl 4d ago> What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters. But that's also a physics thing. Plain same-frequency boosters hamper frequency reuse on neighbor cells, so less bandwidth for you. And if boosters run on a separate band, you'd need to do frequency planning for them just like it's done for cells now. Wireless is finicky, we should really avoid using it everywhere wired can be used instead.
- wolvoleo 4d agoWell yes but once you transmit from inside the building you can use the higher frequencies which are much more plentiful. And use many low power nodes similar to the way we deploy WiFi in offices, with one every 15 metres or so. The bandwidth available at 26Ghz is huge and the low penetration means you dont need to have as much distance before you can reuse them again. A simple wall is already enough. But no I didn't mean those old style signal boosters that basically just retransmit the analog signal.
- walrus01 4d agoNote that "G" generally is a marketing term for consumers, the actual tech is 3GPP rev-whatever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP 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.
- quietsignal 4d agoExactly. This is far outside my professional field, but lately I've found that one of the better ways to read the tea leaves of the next decade is to look at the boring 3GPP/ETSI material rather than the consumer-facing "6G/7G" discussion. The interesting part of 6G doesn't seem to be faster downloads so much as sensing. ISAC is basically about making the network capable of sensing the physical environment as well as communicating. Some of the current work is already discussing the "six sensing modes", involving different combinations of the network and UEs transmitting and receiving signals reflected from objects, and even how users might be incentivized to let their devices participate That feels potentially much more consequential than another speed bump. 3G/4G didn't just make phones faster; they enabled an entire ecosystem that was hard to predict beforehand. My guess is that sensing could be a similar pivot for 6G.
- walrus01 4d agoAlso if I had a dollar for every end user residential consumer (as a person who runs ISPs) that confuses "5G" with "5 GHz wifi". Like, when your install techs have to explain to a customer why they're getting shit performance in the default 20MHz wide 2.4 GHz channel, and to reconfigure all their devices in a house to talk to a 802.11ax/802.11be 3x3 or 4x4 80 MHz channel AP in the 5.x GHz band. Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now.
- zahlman 4d ago> Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now. Why would they know the difference? They don't have any technical appreciation of what either term means or its implication for what the hardware actually does; the terms sound similar; and they've been trained by decades of marketing to choose bigger numbers[1]. [1]: And many of them apparently didn't even know that "one third" is bigger than "one quarter", as A&W found out the hard way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger
- zkms 4d agoRun the abstract through pangram.com; this is AI slop: https://www.pangram.com/history/49f81c92-a2f4-46f6-91b3-e18558f518ce?ucc=hlODoNFUC3k https://www.pangram.com/history/49f81c92-a2f4-46f6-91b3-e185...
- 0utcast 4d agoIronically for mobile data, I've liked and found 4G to be more consistent. Not always as fast, but it never drops for me or fails to load.
- prism56 4d agoCan't answer this question as I know basically nothing. I'd be perfectly happy with less headline speed increases and just a real world busy tower speed improvement. That or efficiency gains.
- general1465 4d agoUnlikely. 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.
- porridgeraisin 4d agoThere was full team that found out that did the test that 26ghz doesn't work IRL. It didn't even work across a street corner. But they were ignored in favour of some well, career pushers. In india, jio is using 26ghz for wifi now instead. It's a service called airfiber. This don't even use any 5G. It's a weird custom hybrid solution where all the frames are wifi. Density here means that it's feasible to put the receiver on the rooftop of apartment buildings wherever you can get LoS. So in some sense it's been salvaged and those bands are actually being used. It's a fairly popular service. URLL failed because it's main immediate usecase was supposed to be vehicle to vehicle comms. And auto didn't want telcos middlemanning there. But there is still hope here.
- wolvoleo 4d agoWell mmWave was never for large areas. It's for ultra high density like in stadiums with 100k people. You know those cases where current networks are completely unusable because they saturate. Its extremely limited range and penetration is a benefit there because you can put up thousands of cells without them interfering with each other. It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it. The speeds thing was just marketing BS as usual but mmWave did have benefits in niche scenarios.
- karim79 4d agoI'm still waiting for faster SMS. SMPP needs a performance update. This is important everyone.
- wartywhoa23 4d agoYes, there will be, to deliver two minute hates to the telescreens.
- ortusdux 4d agoI'm surprised that Starlink didn't try and steal the branding. If anything would count as a new Generation in radio communication...
- j45 4d agoThere will always be a faster technology, regardless of what it's called.
- ksec 4d agoIt 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.
- jayd16 4d agoSomething I've noticed is that a phone is actually usable at a stadium or concert when 3g or 4g felt essentially useless at that density.
- LeoPanthera 4d agoAT&T has figured out a way to monetize that. If you have a "Turbo" plan or add-on, your phone will work in crowded cells. If you don't, good luck with that.
- Atotalnoob 4d agoNet neutrality would have prevented this kind of pay to win
- cortesoft 4d agoHow would it have helped? Net neutrality doesn’t mean you can’t sell your customers different bandwidth guarantees. Net neutrality is only about the connections between a provider and external networks, not about how a company handles bandwidth contention amongst its customers. Net neutrality would fix a problem like “only Facebook is accessible inside crowded stadiums” not “AT&T customers who pay more get better connections in crowded stadiums”
- loeg 4d agoWe've already got the G7.
- lukeschlather 4d agoWe really need a hybrid short-haul standard designed for short-range transmission. Something that uses low-frequency spectrum currently allocated to 5G but isn't locked to a single carrier and the protocol can be shared between WiFi and Cellular. Staking out some new frequencies would be great too.
- miovoid 4d agoWiFi Passpoint (Hotspot 2.0)
- ande-mnoc 4d agoBoth the abstract and the introduction score a 100% on Pangram. What’s going on there?
- linolevan 4d agoLooks like 100% AI (https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2609.01877 https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2609.01877) except for citations?
- shawn_w 4d ago7G? 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_the_End_of_the_World
- zahlman 4d agoThis is the first I've heard of any plan for 6G….
- krackers 4d agoI sure hope not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_the_End_of_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_the_End_of_the_World
- lern_too_spel 4d agoOn the plus side, we won't have to worry about COVID-19 anymore /s. https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2020/opinion/5g-and-covid-19-conspiracy-theories https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2020/opinion/5g-and...
- drob518 4d agoDo we even need 6G?
- stuaxo 4d agoWhat would RF native computing involve ?
- Freedom2 4d agoI'm concerned because my 5G microchip is still going strong. Will the next advances be compatible?
- JW_00000 4d agoAccording to the paper, 6G deployment is planned for 2030 and the "earliest plausible" deployment of 7G is listed as 2039-40. You'll have plenty of time to upgrade.
- initramfs 4d agoOnly if enough people don't get cancer from 6G.
- suncore 4d agoWorking on everything from 1G to 6G, I can tell you for sure there will be a 7G whether we need it or not...
- superloika 4d ago4G just works.
- Founderarcstone 4d agoI sure hope we see 7G one day soon!
- npilk 4d agoThis reminds me of a sign I saw advertising "GLP-2s". Twice as good as GLP-1s!
- socalgal2 4d agoWhen has technology ever stopped? I remember being told copper wires would never go above 2400 bps. I see people here saying 4G is all they need, sounds an awful lot like "640k is all you need". You have no idea what the future holds and how much bandwidth it will need but there's still tons of ideas what could happen with faster connections.
- anon7000 4d agoOn 5g, I’ll say this. I’m on a Verizon MVNO with a fairly recent iPhone Pro model in a major metro area. I frequently have to disable 5g and switch data to LTE to get any actual service, even when I have full bars of service. It’s highly annoying phones don’t do this by default
- x0x7 4d agoPrepare conspiracy theories that the government just wants to image our bones. For traceable biomarkers and other reasons.
- hulitu 4d agoYes, unless a major economic crysis comes, which disrupts this cycle, we will see a lot of this 7G, 8G, 9G, Wifi7, Wifi8, Wifi9 and so on and so forth. It seems the virus of "evergreen automatic update" has encompased everything.
- fedpost 3d agoThe headline is somewhat detached from the article BUT Of course there will fucking be a 7G. Capitalism doesn't just demand it, capitalism literally needs it to continue working.
- daft_pink 3d agothere will obviously be a 7g, the real question is whether carriers would adopt it.