The mmWave revolution isn't here yet, but the other parts of 5G are more important.
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5G in rural areas bridges a gap that 4G doesn’t, especially low- and mid-band
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My question is will the carriers care enough to invest?
In the area I live/work, the only change I've seen in the 8 years I've been driving out here is last winter "upgrade" they installed a Cell-On-Pole to better cover a few hundred feet of road that traffic backs up daily entering a nearby military base.
The rest of the area, including the shopping plaza where WalMart is, once you get 50ft off the main highway signal drops from 4 bars to 0-1 bars of 4G and in the store you're lucky to get enough 1X CDMA to make a phone call.
At home, I had to buy a $250 Verizon femtocell to have reliable phone calls during summer with leaves on the trees (WiFi calling seems to be a joke and has frequent one-way audio or drops - I was told to make sure no other devices were on my home network which is not reasonable). AT&T only works in one corner against one window. T-Mobile seems to not work anywhere.
In the area I live/work, the only change I've seen in the 8 years I've been driving out here is last winter "upgrade" they installed a Cell-On-Pole to better cover a few hundred feet of road that traffic backs up daily entering a nearby military base.
The rest of the area, including the shopping plaza where WalMart is, once you get 50ft off the main highway signal drops from 4 bars to 0-1 bars of 4G and in the store you're lucky to get enough 1X CDMA to make a phone call.
At home, I had to buy a $250 Verizon femtocell to have reliable phone calls during summer with leaves on the trees (WiFi calling seems to be a joke and has frequent one-way audio or drops - I was told to make sure no other devices were on my home network which is not reasonable). AT&T only works in one corner against one window. T-Mobile seems to not work anywhere.
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They'll "care" enough by the time they start to sunset 4G in general to update equipment on towers that they're no longer supporting elsewhere, at least. Your guess is as good as mine regarding investment prior to that.
The best hope for nearline, genuine investment in rural communities is a combination of an administration that cares about those communities and political pressure from House representatives, IMO. Otherwise, I suspect massive public companies will likely continue to cast a jaundiced eye at rural communities, declare "not in the best interests of the shareholders we have a fiduciary responsibility to serve," and more of the same.
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I hope I'm wrong, but what I fully expect to happen is they'll eventually sunset 1X CDMA and EVDO networks and claim full 4G coverage everywhere (maps already show it blanketed even where I know it's not any signal...some carriers like AT&T even claim blanketed 5G everywhere we know is a lie)........and then when the 4G towers die they might put in 5G, but I expect no difference in actual coverage unless some mega-developments go in that adds a few thousands of new customers, then they might re-aim an antenna that way.
They'll "care" enough by the time they start to sunset 4G in general to update equipment on towers that they're no longer supporting elsewhere, at least. Your guess is as good as mine regarding investment prior to that.
The best hope for nearline, genuine investment in rural communities is a combination of an administration that cares about those communities and political pressure from House representatives, IMO. Otherwise, I suspect massive public companies will likely continue to cast a jaundiced eye at rural communities, declare "not in the best interests of the shareholders we have a fiduciary responsibility to serve," and more of the same.
I suppose I should be glad we are lucky enough to have a cable ISP that provides very high speeds, even if the reliability could use some work...
I'm actually not being sarcastic on the cable speeds fwiw...but I gotta drive 5 miles to call support if it goes out...
I replaced my modem and got a bit of a speed-bump over the weekend - up from ~850-900 to just over 1000 total thru my pfSense router. Still would prefer 100x100 symmetrical.
https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/fbe4 ... 6d508038e9
https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/fbe4 ... 6d508038e9
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I don't know how many of us are interested in speed, and how many in simple availability (ie range and non-saturation). In my case, I'm not interested about speed at all, I'm actually fine with 3G speeds. What I'm not fine with is when there's no signal at all, whether indoors, on the train/metro/car even bus at times, or in the back country.
Also, I really hope 5G will avoid the mess of supported frequencies we're still having with 4G. My operator uses the... B27 (?) 700MHz band, and that's not supported by all devices, even those that do support 800 and 900MHz. I understand mmWave is a completely different beast and requires specific hardware inside each phone, but hopefully at least the maintream non-mm bands will all be supported on all devices ? AFAIK, this is not a technical issue, but a licensing one ?
Also, I really hope 5G will avoid the mess of supported frequencies we're still having with 4G. My operator uses the... B27 (?) 700MHz band, and that's not supported by all devices, even those that do support 800 and 900MHz. I understand mmWave is a completely different beast and requires specific hardware inside each phone, but hopefully at least the maintream non-mm bands will all be supported on all devices ? AFAIK, this is not a technical issue, but a licensing one ?
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The answer is: no.
5G can squeeze some more capacity from the same spectrum compared to 4G.
So if you live in an area where you get a decent 4G signal but bandwidth is crappy due to congestion you have a reasonable expectation that things will improve though 5G deployments.
If you live in an areas where, like yours, you barely get a signal... don't hold your breath.
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It's not a matter of licensing issues but a matter that some bands are only used in by some countries/operators and thus chip/device manufacturers don't have interest in the costs (hardware, testing, certification) that each band carries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequ ... _by_region
Unfortunately 5G isn't an automatic improvement.
Again there frequency allocations around the world are not uniform.
But I hope that due to harvesting of 2G/3G and DSS with 4G the business case for making devices which wider band support will be better than in 4G.
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They'll "care" enough by the time they start to sunset 4G in general to update equipment on towers that they're no longer supporting elsewhere, at least. Your guess is as good as mine regarding investment prior to that.
The best hope for nearline, genuine investment in rural communities is a combination of an administration that cares about those communities and political pressure from House representatives, IMO. Otherwise, I suspect massive public companies will likely continue to cast a jaundiced eye at rural communities, declare "not in the best interests of the shareholders we have a fiduciary responsibility to serve," and more of the same.
I think this is why Starlink is destined to be a success. Even if it only delivered half of what is promised at twice the price, it would still be better than any alternative.
I'm not saying this as a Musk fanboy; I'd rather see a nationwide fiber build-out in the rural electrification model, or at least strong legal protection for municipal Internet, but we're not going to see either anytime soon. Given that reality and the limitations of terrestrial wireless, low-latency satellite is going to be the best solution to close the rural last-mile gap. It's ridiculous until someone, like SpaceX, makes the up-front investment at which point it becomes obvious.
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I mean, Canada seems to have made it work for going on a decade now, I remember when they were first laying the infra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibe_(Bell_Aliant)
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The company I work for has multiple sites that are only covered by 3G, and many with no coverage at all. Hell, our main campus only gets 4G when you're outside standing on the hillside. I don't expect to see 5G there anytime soon.
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Thanks for the info. But is it a whole new process when supporting 700 MHz on top of 800 MHz ? I'd guess both the HW and the SW are the same, and certification a very small extra effoirt/cost ?
Also what's weird is that we do get a few versions of phones with that 700MHz band, mostly of Xiaomi phones... One would think as long as they're putting in the effort to get certified, they'd just activate 700MHz on all SKUs.
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Did you forget about the spectrum between 1.7 and 2.3ghz that currently has a variety of (mostly) LTE bands scattered across it (AWS, PCS, WCS)?
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It's not a whole different process.
But every band they turn on for a given model in a given market adds a bit of an extra cost at least in terms of running the certification tests.
And sometimes they may also incur in some extra (band, device, market) tuning effort.
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I'm disappointed that the bar graphs up there aren't indicative of actual, real world, rural cell data throughput! How hard can it be to make a chart that's all zeroes?
In all seriousness though, is there any hope of improvement in rural areas with 5G? In the middle of nowhere, your limiting factor is likely the range of the nearest tower, not the throughput. Are there any expected improvements with 5G tech on the old, long range, frequencies?
In all seriousness though, is there any hope of improvement in rural areas with 5G? In the middle of nowhere, your limiting factor is likely the range of the nearest tower, not the throughput. Are there any expected improvements with 5G tech on the old, long range, frequencies?
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Maybe massive MIMO and beamforming will help.
But again I would not hold my breath.
5G will be an improvement for those who live in areas constrained by air time, rural urban or otherwise.
But for those who can barely get a signal... your best hope is Starlink or a decent Government.
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If the house allocates more monies to service rural areas, it is taken from the taxpayers, mostly city dwellers and then given through subsidies or payments to providers to increase services in those areas that are not as profitable to private companies. I honestly don't know if subsidizing rural access is in the best interest of the broader population or is it better to encourage those people to re-locate to more populated more efficient areas. Subsidizing those use cases probably keeps some level of further market innovation from being accepted.
I hope to see services like starlink to come in and add further options in these areas.
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I was referring to 5G bands specifically in that graf. 5G midband doesn't currently begin until you hit 2.5GHz; though it will probably eventually include the 4G midband once DSS becomes mainstream.
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Rollout also has to contend with NIMBYs.
We have a rural area just outside of the town I work in that gets great signal and no throughput. The last 2 miles of my commute see the internet drop almost completely, even though the my phone reports full bars.
The area is largely full of rich 'farms'. Generally multi millionaires with 200 acres and 10 horses or vineyards. They do not want more towers, so it is an airtime issue. The existing towers/antennas cannot handle the traffic. So, commuters on the interstate suffer, as do poorer areas just outside the farms. Most of the farms themselves either do not care about internet and get 3/.5 DSL or pay to get fiber buried to the residence.
I have had to service many of these farms, and no matter how much you tell them other people rely on the service, they will fight any new tower getting put up.
We have a rural area just outside of the town I work in that gets great signal and no throughput. The last 2 miles of my commute see the internet drop almost completely, even though the my phone reports full bars.
The area is largely full of rich 'farms'. Generally multi millionaires with 200 acres and 10 horses or vineyards. They do not want more towers, so it is an airtime issue. The existing towers/antennas cannot handle the traffic. So, commuters on the interstate suffer, as do poorer areas just outside the farms. Most of the farms themselves either do not care about internet and get 3/.5 DSL or pay to get fiber buried to the residence.
I have had to service many of these farms, and no matter how much you tell them other people rely on the service, they will fight any new tower getting put up.
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Broadly it is.
On one hand those people and their jobs can't just move for free, there will be disruption to their lives and to the economy.
But more fundamentally we have sectors (eg, farming) that can't be moved. At the limit we need people living in rural areas producing our food or else we'd starve.
That said... from an European point of view the US is a bit unsusual in that the housing is very disperse.
In Europe we tend to cluster more into villages which surely makes it more cost effective to provide infrastructure.
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Throughput increases substantially on the low band, so you can expect better edge connections (meaning better quality connections from the outer edge of the covered area). I don't think you can expect that actual *area* to expand, though, absent building more actual towers.
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The big problem I've seen in rural areas is that cell carriers basically care about two things:
1) Filling the coverage map
2) Providing service along highways for pass-through customers
So to the extent that the carrier maps are as optimistic as possible, you end up filling the map with fewer sites than are necessary to provide actual service, and a decent number of those sites are along highways where perhaps towns are and people might live there, but that does little for the rural area or even the town away from the highway. Capacity is rarely the limiting factor in those areas; it's lack of signal.
Ultimately, the solution in rural areas (if you're skeptical about satellite service, like I am) is to build towers and for wireless companies to co-locate on them, and not skip deploying on them because the map looks okay regardless of the experience on the ground. Once you do that, service exists, and it doesn't matter whether it's LTE or NR.
1) Filling the coverage map
2) Providing service along highways for pass-through customers
So to the extent that the carrier maps are as optimistic as possible, you end up filling the map with fewer sites than are necessary to provide actual service, and a decent number of those sites are along highways where perhaps towns are and people might live there, but that does little for the rural area or even the town away from the highway. Capacity is rarely the limiting factor in those areas; it's lack of signal.
Ultimately, the solution in rural areas (if you're skeptical about satellite service, like I am) is to build towers and for wireless companies to co-locate on them, and not skip deploying on them because the map looks okay regardless of the experience on the ground. Once you do that, service exists, and it doesn't matter whether it's LTE or NR.
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
The low bands should help if actually deployed. So the question is do you have ANY connectivity at a particular rural spot (even 3G)? If the answer is no then there is no tower within range. Nothing is going to help that other than a carrier deploying a new tower. If they haven't done it yet the issue is profits not technology so I don't think 5G will change anything in that respect. 5G running on 850 MHz doesn't have any more range than 3G on 850 MHz so carriers upgrading others towers too distant from your location isn't going to help.
If you currently have connectivity at a spot but it is limited to 3G* then at least in the case of AT&T and T-Mobile they are rolling out 5G on low band frequencies right now so likely you will have 5G at that same spot someday. AT&T 5G on low band is likely going to be very limited until they can shutdown 3G completely (2021) and refarm that spectrum.
* Also included in this scenario would be you have low band 3G connectivity but your cellphone keeps trying to switch to a horribly weak mid band LTE signal from a tower too far away.
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Those living along freeway corridors will breathe a sigh of relief when carriers get around to adding 5G. Drive time network satuaration literally negates “ Unlimited” cellular plans as carriers deprecate QoS to kill off calls to allow for new callers.
Saturation kills via QoS was the second biggest frustration when I had an ATT cellular plan.
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Ehh... Maybe. We're in this odd pocket in Plymouth, MN in the middle of a suburban neighborhood where our internet options are CenturyLink 3 mbps or... That's it. So we have been using gotw3, which sells home internet through a T-Mobile account. Started at $79 a month for ~14 mbps on average, but things have gone very quickly south recently. First we lost our truly unlimited data usage: it's now a 250 MB cap. Now they've announced a $10 price increase for existing customers and a $30 increase for new ones. We might just be going through a one-off company that is not doing a good job licensing carriers' services, but at any rate our experience with cellular home internet is making us switch to the paltry CL offering.
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The lower bands are best chance and Tmobile's 600Mhz can do 100-200Mbps but not at greater distances from site (and may have interference issues if they try to infill/overlap 600Mhz). However they'll have the *capacity* to serve 50Mbps to many rural customers, which will be good enough for many. Better reach than mmWave and higher bands with decent enough performance.
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Well there's your problem. They don't want to hear about how something they already don't want to do is going to help other people. The trade-off needs to be a benefit to them personally or to their "business".
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"Since 5G low and mid bands occupy the same area of the RF spectrum as the existing 4G low and high bands, they're simple, immediately useful drop-in replacements"
As a drop-in replacement, 5G in immediately useful only in areas where there is already coverage. In hilly rural areas like mine, upgrading the local towers to use 5G is of no benefit to the people who can't get a signal from those towers. The local towns and along the highway will probably see an improvement, but travel one hill away from those areas and the signal weakens and disappears.
Anecdotally, TMobile recently "upgraded" the towers in my area to 5G, and their coverage map now shows "fair" 5G and 4G at my location. Based on this info, I signed up for the TMo Test Drive program so that I can find out what speeds TMo can offer in my area. Unfortunately, yet not the least bit surprisingly, it was not possible for the supplied TMobile hardware to detect a TMobile signal at my address; not inside, not outside at the "sweet spot", and not even while standing on the roof of my home.
As a drop-in replacement, 5G in immediately useful only in areas where there is already coverage. In hilly rural areas like mine, upgrading the local towers to use 5G is of no benefit to the people who can't get a signal from those towers. The local towns and along the highway will probably see an improvement, but travel one hill away from those areas and the signal weakens and disappears.
Anecdotally, TMobile recently "upgraded" the towers in my area to 5G, and their coverage map now shows "fair" 5G and 4G at my location. Based on this info, I signed up for the TMo Test Drive program so that I can find out what speeds TMo can offer in my area. Unfortunately, yet not the least bit surprisingly, it was not possible for the supplied TMobile hardware to detect a TMobile signal at my address; not inside, not outside at the "sweet spot", and not even while standing on the roof of my home.
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A few notes.
I've been told that current cellular radios cannot aggregate multiple channels below 1GHz because of problems with intermodulation interference. High quality RF filters are large and expensive. That's why hams usually recycle filters from commercial repeaters when they build repeaters (buying new is out of the question), and why even $3000+ HF radios don't come with a complete set of filters out of the box.
So long as chip vendors are in Girard's cell phone hell (e.g. "a $700 phone produces $700 of snob value"), you are only going to see leftover chips going into fixed wireless radios that won't take advantage of the fixed wireless situation. (e.g. halfway decent antenna, directional antenna(s), unlimited energy, ...)
Another unheard theme is regional inequalities in radio spectrum.
If you go to L.A. with a VHF/UHF radio you would think the default state is that spectrum is used. At 2am you hear a ham talking on a repeater to another ham who is getting pulled over by the LAPD because he ran a red light. At 7pm you hear a daily net where the people stomp on each other's lines like actor trainees at a Meisner studio. You hear people talking up a storm in spanish. Start scanning and you find all kinds of commercial services such as 'private' audio for stores, taxi dispatch with old school modems, ...
Get on a plane, go to NYC. In your hotel you might think: "damn this building is full of ferroconcrete" and go outside. If you were in Manhattan you'd then think "it's all those tall buildings", but no you are in Queens so you think "Is my radio broken?"
But no, NYC is dead air compared to LA. LA has 100+ channels of OTA TV. The "ring of fire" topography of the west coast makes it easy to serve a highly concentrated population on the coast (California has a higher population density than Germany despite being mostly uninhabitable!)
In the Northeast communities have been poorly served by OTA TV since the beginning; a city like Utica NY might be poorly served by the big three TV networks because the franchise holders in Syracuse and Albany can't decide whose turf it is and won't let new network stations start up in Utica because they could be received by some viewers in the established territories.
South of NY towards PA and the inland "South" people live in a network of valleys that dissect a 'peneplain' such that it is rare for a high spot to have a line of sight to more than one valley. Sub 1-GHz signals can give a "DSL competitive" service in the next valley past the line of site, but the economics of cellular will never be great.
I've been told that current cellular radios cannot aggregate multiple channels below 1GHz because of problems with intermodulation interference. High quality RF filters are large and expensive. That's why hams usually recycle filters from commercial repeaters when they build repeaters (buying new is out of the question), and why even $3000+ HF radios don't come with a complete set of filters out of the box.
So long as chip vendors are in Girard's cell phone hell (e.g. "a $700 phone produces $700 of snob value"), you are only going to see leftover chips going into fixed wireless radios that won't take advantage of the fixed wireless situation. (e.g. halfway decent antenna, directional antenna(s), unlimited energy, ...)
Another unheard theme is regional inequalities in radio spectrum.
If you go to L.A. with a VHF/UHF radio you would think the default state is that spectrum is used. At 2am you hear a ham talking on a repeater to another ham who is getting pulled over by the LAPD because he ran a red light. At 7pm you hear a daily net where the people stomp on each other's lines like actor trainees at a Meisner studio. You hear people talking up a storm in spanish. Start scanning and you find all kinds of commercial services such as 'private' audio for stores, taxi dispatch with old school modems, ...
Get on a plane, go to NYC. In your hotel you might think: "damn this building is full of ferroconcrete" and go outside. If you were in Manhattan you'd then think "it's all those tall buildings", but no you are in Queens so you think "Is my radio broken?"
But no, NYC is dead air compared to LA. LA has 100+ channels of OTA TV. The "ring of fire" topography of the west coast makes it easy to serve a highly concentrated population on the coast (California has a higher population density than Germany despite being mostly uninhabitable!)
In the Northeast communities have been poorly served by OTA TV since the beginning; a city like Utica NY might be poorly served by the big three TV networks because the franchise holders in Syracuse and Albany can't decide whose turf it is and won't let new network stations start up in Utica because they could be received by some viewers in the established territories.
South of NY towards PA and the inland "South" people live in a network of valleys that dissect a 'peneplain' such that it is rare for a high spot to have a line of sight to more than one valley. Sub 1-GHz signals can give a "DSL competitive" service in the next valley past the line of site, but the economics of cellular will never be great.
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Do those people ever like to leave the city, say on a weekend outing?
Do they like eating food or purchasing products that are produced in rural areas?
The roads we have (and the ambulance and rescue services we support) are not solely used by local residents.
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The problem is money buys them access to things others cannot afford. Things that are often necessities, especially now during a pandemic. It seems that empathy is not a common quality in the landed gentry, and unless you can game the system to make something worth their notice - good luck.
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They'll "care" enough by the time they start to sunset 4G in general to update equipment on towers that they're no longer supporting elsewhere, at least. Your guess is as good as mine regarding investment prior to that.
The best hope for nearline, genuine investment in rural communities is a combination of an administration that cares about those communities and political pressure from House representatives, IMO. Otherwise, I suspect massive public companies will likely continue to cast a jaundiced eye at rural communities, declare "not in the best interests of the shareholders we have a fiduciary responsibility to serve," and more of the same.
They can't get rid of 4G in the short and medium term because 5G won't cover the whole country any time soon and they want to mothball 3G. 2G is more complicated as not only is the frequency your phone defaults when the signal is terrible, getting rid of it means not even getting SMS warnings or emergency calls if again, the signal gets too bad.
Then again in the USA both the Internet companies and the cellphone companies do whatever the fudge they want so who freaking knows.
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The writer of this article clearly doesn't understand the meaning of the word "rural". Rural is when your nearest neighbor lives more than a half mile away.
I just finished installing a Wilson Log Periodic antenna about 40 foot off the ground (above the trees) and a rotator at my house where the nearest cell tower is about 3.5 miles away in the middle of a 5500 pop. town.
I did it because my medical providers in the age of COVID-19 want me to do video medicine.
While the antenna did seem to improve my speed, it did nothing for my latency and as a result, video medicine still isn't possible.
I am on the AT&T system and the latency problem is a direct result of AT&T refusing to build the needed infrastructure to support the number of people trying to use the tower.
I actually get better speed with my modem locked to existing band 17 from a tower about 6 miles away that is out in a true rural area, but I still have latency in excess of 200ms and telemed doesn't work.
I just finished installing a Wilson Log Periodic antenna about 40 foot off the ground (above the trees) and a rotator at my house where the nearest cell tower is about 3.5 miles away in the middle of a 5500 pop. town.
I did it because my medical providers in the age of COVID-19 want me to do video medicine.
While the antenna did seem to improve my speed, it did nothing for my latency and as a result, video medicine still isn't possible.
I am on the AT&T system and the latency problem is a direct result of AT&T refusing to build the needed infrastructure to support the number of people trying to use the tower.
I actually get better speed with my modem locked to existing band 17 from a tower about 6 miles away that is out in a true rural area, but I still have latency in excess of 200ms and telemed doesn't work.
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The traditional solution to this is, after suffering for some indeterminate length of time, the poors (not meant perjoratively) turn up with pitchforks and torches to express their displeasure with the foot dragging.
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Well, sure they do get out of town. But The Hamptons has good coverage already.
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My daughter lives in a rural area an hour out from a small city. Cell coverage sucks and cell data rates are exorbitant. They pray for StarLink.
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The roads are publicly funded and publicly owned; subsidized rural access is publicly funded and privately owned. Giving public funds to private Telcos and ISPs, in a sense, rewards those telcos and ISPs for refusing to provide service in rural areas in the first place. Why bother investing in an area if the government is going to give a massive hand-out with no strings attached?
The public funds earmarked for rural access, should be spent building a publicly owned network.
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