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Now that 5G is about to be deployed, what considerations are there for developersother than scalability?
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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B
TW these folks say there will never be a need for 6G.5G: What it means and Why there will never be 6G[^]
Brings to mind the prediction that we will never need more than 640k of RAM.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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6G! Pah!
This thing is slow and barely handles out of orbit networks!
We need 7G to game on the moon! 
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One of my T-shirts (own design) has a picture of a cellular phone and the text:
The space station -
They call it rocket science,
but haven't even got 1G up there!
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Hahah, cheeky design here mate!
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Quote: and if done right there will never be a need for a 6G.
So ... it's doomed then? 
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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The phrase 'done right' augurs in the Singularity.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Here in Norway, 99% of those who say "Claude Shannon who? (and that is at least 95% of the public) actually believe in the 5G hype that it will give almost infinte over-the-air capacity. Sustained download speeds in the multi-Gbps range will be the rule, regardless of location. ... This is not particular to Norway; people everywhere seem to think that 5G will do lots of theoretically impossible wonders.
Reality: 4G gets up to 60-70% of the maximum theoretical speed / capacity that Shannon allows. 5G can at the very most utlize a given band 50% better than 4G at the physical level. More efficient protocols reduce bits "wasted" for framing etc, and response times ("ping", for you youngsters) are drastically reduced, thanks to protocol changes. But ten times improved ping does not mean ten times improved sustained throughput.
To increase capacity, we must either reduce cell size, so that each cell has fewer users sharing its capacity, or employ even higher frequencies: The 2 GHz bands are more or less in use now; the next option is in the 5 GHz band. That implicitly gives us smaller cells: 5 GHz signals won't go far. But even with new bands, Shannon limits the maximum throughput for a given channel width and noise level. Believing in Gbps rates is like believing in Santa.
I got my first cellular 20+ years ago when my town (Trondheim, roughly 200,000 inhabitants) had two base stations. Last time I counted, the downtown area, approx 2 by 3 km, had 187 base stations, before 5G and 5 GHz bands. Today, Norway has roughly one base station per 100 inhabitants. With 5G / 5 GHz we might have to double or triple the count, so that each base has 30-50 inhabitants to pay for its installation, maintenance and running. Most areas have double coverage, from both major network vendors, but customers are spread on both. If there was a single network vendor, the required base station count could not be significantly reduced: During peak hours, both networks are close to full utilization.
Is the 5G hype a big lie? In theory: no. In practice: depends on defintion. In a lab setting, totally isolated from all external electromagnetic noise, transmitting and receiving antenna a meter apart, you can easily obtain 60 dB S/N, for a bandwith of 20 bits/Hz. You can allocate 500 MHz analog channel width, and the demo is the sole user of the entire capacity. You can demonstrate 10 Gbps bandwith in that isolated lab setting.
In real life, with all sorts of noise-generating equipment, damping through concrete walls etc. hoping for more than 30 dB S/N is overly optimstic. 20-30 dB is in the realistic range, reducing bandwith to half or a third of the lab setup. The channel allocated is not 500 MHz analog, but 5, 10 or 20 MHz, reducing maximum bandwith by another factor of 25 to 100.
When texting, the average bandwith load is extremely low. Delays in the multiple seconds range really do not matter. Web browsing, with text and gif/jpg images, raises the average load by a couple orders of magnitude; still a hundred users can be active in the cell. Delays of a second doesn't really matter.
Today, users stream real-time data - sound, video - demanding 100 kbps to 1 Mbps or more continuously, maybe for an hour, for each active user within the cell. The base station that easily handled 2000 texters, or 100 web surfers, is saturated by 5 video streamers. Improving bandwith utilization by 50% doesn't really cut it...
In the early 1990s there were 70-80,000 Trondheim inhabitants per cell. It didn't change by very many percent over the day or week. When cell size is reduced to 1/100, one video streamer moving into a cell could alone take up 20% of the cell's capacity. Imagine the Lerkendal soccer field on a regular weekday: Capacity for five video streaming channels may be enough. On a game night, 10-15,000 spectators wait in the rows for the game to start, each with a cellular. How many of them will shorten the wait by streaming some YouTube video to their phone? How many base stations (and how much total analog channel width) will it take to serve them?
Sometimes I turn cynical, saying: Let's get it over with, as soon as possible! Do all you can to stimulate to excessive over-use of mobile frequencies, so force people to realize reality: Moving absolutely all high-bandwidth-demanding services to cellular technologies simply will not work in the future! The radio spectrum is limited, the noise is there. Shannon hasn't been contradicted.
If we abandon broadcasting completely, turning all media access over to "one man, one multi-Mbps channel", we must create a communication structure for it. And that is not "the 5G cellular network will solve all problems"! E.g. we should define 5G as a no-no indoors: At any fixed location, there should always be a WiFi network; this is the backbone. 5G is only for "emergency use", when no WiFi (or cable) access is available. Even outdoors, e.g. at the sports stadion, provisions should be made for e.g. WiFi, or even cable plugin in every armrest.
We could of course also declare that broadcasting is not dead. With frequencies being a scarce resource, it really is crazy that fifty users watching the same transmission from a streamed radio or TV channel should occupy fifty times the bandwith for transferring fifty identical copies. But I do know that any statement in favor of broadcasting is most non-PC in the year 2018.
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Walt Fair, Jr. wrote: Brings to mind the prediction that we will never need more than 640k of RAM.
Sure, that quote is more fun without the context. Context may ruin any "funny" quote.
In context, it is not as fun, but worth a "professional" afterthought: When a total of 1024 kbyte addressing space is available for sharing between the OS and user applications, and one guy says: 384 k for the OS, 640 k for the user - that should be enough for everybody! - then laughing at it is also laughing at that super-demadning OS asking for 384 k of RAM. That is sort of crazy, isn't it, that there should be an OS having such absurdly high RAM requirements?
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Walt Fair, Jr. wrote: what considerations are there for developers
Migraines.
«Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?» T. S. Elliot
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Underappreciated fact! 
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Look up "Hardware Abstraction Layer".
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Yup. Should score pretty high on the IDGAF scale.
All it will do is allow for more bloat (primarily from advertisers, but also from script kiddies).
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Seeing as young Sander is missing today, (or maybe he just forgot) I thought I'd throw this one out there:
Steven Wilson - Nowhere Now[^]
For my birthday last week, my wife got us tickets to his show in Pensacola, FL. The place was a dive and only about 60 people showed up. Even with such a small audience, they put on a fantastic show. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I was just listening to Refuge from the same album not five minutes ago while driving. 
Scott
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Would love to see them, am only a few hours from Pensacola wish I would have known.
Is he still with Porcupine Tree?
One of my favorites by him: Arriving somewhere but not here[^]
I may not be that good looking, or athletic, or funny, or talented, or smart
I forgot where I was going with this but I do know I love bacon!
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Mike Hankey wrote: Is he still with Porcupine Tree?
I think so. He did a few PT songs at the show. Before this concert, I didn't know who he was, and only had ever downloaded one PT album (can't remember which one) which I have to admit didn't really wow me...a bit too depressing. Thanks to youtube though, I have been exposed to other PT tracks that are a bit more to my liking, such as the one you mentioned.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Is the most popular Christmas carol in the desert "Oh camel ye faithful"?
This is the last TotD before Christmas - though I may post next week, I'm not sure yet - so I'd like to say a big "Thank you!" to everyone who has picked up these puns this year and run with them into pun threads. They wouldn't have worked without you!
And a very merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Winter Holiday, Badtis, (or whatever floats your boat) and happy New Year to you all. For those that only view us at work: see you in the New year!
Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda, boyos!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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At the risk of being too schmaltzy (whatever that means), may I say you have brought a daily dose of laughter to most of us here on CP and I for one, as a Brit stuck in the US with their weird sense of humour (they even spell it wrong, "humor"), really appreciate it!
Merry Thingy and a Happy New Whatever!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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isn't humor a fluid extracted from lymph nodes?
Message Signature
(Click to edit ->)
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Yeah - apparently you have to balance them somehow.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Only in the U.K. where it's spelled humour.
Humor, on the other hand is the optional human sense. Some people have one, some don't.
Software Zen: delete this;
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