There is a famous quote, attributed to Mark Twain but more likely said by his friend Charles Dudley Warner:

Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.

I think that 5G in 2020 is going to be like that. You will hear lots of talk about 5G, but you probably won't buy a 5G phone, and if you do, you are most likely to make a 5G call if you are in Asia or Europe.

I am not a believer that 5G is going to be very disruptive, especially in the next year or two. The reality of every generation of cellular technology is that it trades off increased complexity of signal processing and antenna design for better use of the bandwidth, which is the real limited resource in mobile. So higher performance and more capacity. Of course, the industry, both operators and equipment suppliers, tend to oversell the capabilities. This started last year when, during CES, AT&T upgraded its software to show "5G" on the screen for what is actually LTE-A, part of 4G until the day before. I wrote about this in my review of last year's CES in my post CES: 5G, All Hat and No Cattle. It reminds me of when GSM was introduced as "digital sound". This was the era when compact disks were in their heyday, and the implication was you were going to get CD quality. But in fact, GSM compressed your voice to 16 kilobits per second, so while it was technically digital sound, it was nothing like the quality of a CD (44,000 16-bit samples per second, times two since it's stereo).

In the introduction to CES this year, Steve Koenig, the VP of research for the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) that runs CES, pointed out that the 5G rollout was going to be a lot slower than many people were expecting. He showed this slide showing the transition from 4G. (Note that this is US only.) This year (2020), the number is only expected to be 20M, compared to nearly 150M 4G handsets. It is not until 2022 that the number of 5G handsets is expected to pass the number of 4G handsets. Another interesting thing to note is that over the whole period of the graph, the market is between 160M and 170M handsets. To a first approximation, everyone has a phone and they replace it every two years.

This July and August will see the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. I expect we will see some 5G demonstrations, such as the stadiums all being equipped with lots of 5G capacity, and probably 5G drones flying over events and beaming 5G live. The mobile industry likes to use events like this to showcase its next-generation technology.

I'm not sure that the experience that you will get with 5G will be much different from what you get with 4G. It is faster, so you can download a video, or any big file, faster. But who downloads videos rather than just watching them? Everything is in the cloud now, and 4G is already fast enough for that. There was a similar dynamic at CES in the TV market, where it is next to impossible to tell the difference between 4K and 8K video, and certainly it is not big enough to justify paying a lot of money for. The technology in both cases can deliver more than human perception can discern.

But one of the things that everyone says about 5G is that it is more about "things" communicating. Steve emphasized this, too.

There is a huge range of devices that might want to use 5G, with different requirements. At one end are small IoT devices in huge numbers, that have small data volumes (and can usually live with a very low data rate). At the other end are things like autonomous vehicles and industrial robots that require very high reliability, low latency, and perhaps high bandwidth.

Spectrum

5G runs in three main frequency bands, known as low, medium, and mmWave. Low is where 4G currently runs, and as the transition takes place, the 4G basestations will be replaced with 5G (which, I assume, can fall back to 4G if necessary). In most of the world, the medium band is mostly new spectrum and will go some way to solving the biggest problem with 4G, which is that it is out of capacity. Did you ever try and make a call from a major exhibition (like CES!) or sporting event? A couple of years ago at CES, the only way I could make a call was to turn 4G off so that it had to fall back to 3G, which nobody was using. This year I don't think I tried...but then who makes phone calls anymore anyway.

mmWave is a very high frequency. But it has a lot of challenges. Firstly, it is absorbed by almost everything so it won't go through walls, or your hand holding the phone. It will only go a few hundred feet in the air. So there needs to be an enormous number of basestations, such as on every single lamp-post. In most of the world, mmWave is expected to be built out later except in places like exhibition halls.

When I said "in most of the world" that pretty much means everywhere except the US. In the US, the medium band is occupied, mainly by the federal government, particularly the military. Ajit Pai, the Chairman of the FCC, was also at CES and was interviewed about 5G, and especially the spectrum issue.

Pai said that it is crucial to get incumbent users, including the government itself, to share the spectrum. He was asked what Congress could do and suggested "more clarity about spectrum policy". He has got pushback on proposals to free up spectrum in the C-band, the 5.9GHz band, and the 6GHz band. It is not just the government, in some of these bands there are broadcasters, utility companies, car companies, and more.

Pai said that the US is"a leader in 5G, in deployment and innovation". I am dubious. The US has no basestation equipment vendors. Its flagship handset, the iPhone, doesn't have a 5G handset yet. And even if Congress did provide "more clarity about spectrum policy" (I don't think you should hold your breath), it is probably years before the sub-6GHz and 6GHz bands can be cleared.

If you want to read more about the spectrum issue, see my post about the plenary session at GOMAC, GOMAC: A Conference that Starts with the National Anthem. The depressing thing about this post is that it was two years ago that the government was already talking about this as an issue. And just to give you an idea of how complex the spectrum allocation is, here is the current map (you can click on it for a version you can read and zoom around in):

Cadence and 5G

While this post is about what was being said about 5G at CES, Cadence also has various tools and IP for 5G. See 5G Systems and Subsystems on the Cadence website. The rollout of 5G may take place over a period of years, but now is the time that the chips and systems have to be designed.

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