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The Killer App For 5G Will Be 6G.

Much of 5G’s buzz centers on the potential it offers society: Lightning-fast downloads, barely-there latencies, and new and improved technologies like virtual reality and self-driving cars. Behind the buzz, however, one amazing fact is all but disregarded—the fundamental technological breakthroughs of 5G. Millimeter wave technology, small cell densification, and massive multiple-input multiple-output (massive-MIMO) antenna systems are paving the way for the next several decades of the wireless industry. Together, these technologies will futureproof wireless networks as we enter an era of wireless cognition and human-style computing. In fewer than 20 years, wireless networks will carry information at the speed of the human brain.

To fully appreciate just how revolutionary the 5G era will be, and the impact it will have on the wireless industry going forward, let’s first consider the past 10 years. Over that period of time, the growth in data capacity and data consumption over the global cellular network has far outstripped Cooper’s law. Coined by engineer Martin Cooper, the ‘law’ originally suggested that cellular telephone links would double in capacity about every 30 months (a factor of 16 each decade).

It’s true that average download speeds have increased in obedience with Cooper’s law from a few megabits per second in 2010 to about 50 Mbps in 2020. However, peak throughput data rates over the same time frame have scaled by more than a factor of 1000, from megabits per second to gigabits per second. In fact, the wireless industry trade association CTIA has shown that the total capacity carried over the US cellular network increased a staggering 96 times from 2010 to 2019, with the average smartphone user consuming 9.2 gigabytes of data per month in 2019.

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What is astounding is that this nearly hundredfold increase in carried capacity happened, in the United States at least, with only 40 percent more available spectrum in the past 10 years as consumers embraced smart phones. What’s more, it happened before the industry’s adoption of the key 5G enablers: small cells, millimeter wave spectrum, and M-MIMO antenna technology. The vast spectrum resources available at frequencies above 100 GHz promise many orders of magnitude of additional spectrum in the U.S. alone in the decades to come.

Just like how Moore’s law brought millions of times more processing power over four decades, the three technological pillars of 5G will unleash an exponential expansion that will bring vast new capacity and use cases in the coming decades. 5G will support average and peak data rate increases for each user, as well as carried traffic across the network, such that in ten years from now, industry metrics will surely be one hundred times today’s levels—and truthfully, most likely closer to two or three hundred times. This means that the average smart phone user in 2031 is likely to consume more than a terabyte per month, and the typical 2 to 3 Gbps peak wireless download speeds in today’s nascent 5G networks will in 2031 approach peak data rates of 1 terabit per second.

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) saw the clear need for legislation that would enable wireless carriers to rapidly densify the network throughout the United States. The agency’s 2018 Small Cells Order made small cells one of the three key technical pillars that will eventually support future terabit per second wireless communications.

The FCC also saw the need and potential of spectrum above 95 GHz when it opened that spectrum up through its Spectrum Horizons order in 2019. In England, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) followed the FCC’s lead in opening up spectrum above 100 GHz for the first time in 2020, as well as pursuing more available spectrum in this sub-terahertz region.

Lastly, the third technology pillar for 5G, massive-MIMO, will shift base station antennas from having 2-by-2 antenna elements to 16-by-16 arrays and eventually 64-by-64 arrays and beyond, greatly multiplying a single base station’s capacity. Carriers around the world are already deploying massive-MIMO in mid-band spectrum using time-division duplexing (which simply means that the signals between a base station and user share the exact same frequency but are spaced out in time so as to not collide with one another). The technology will find its way into millimeter wave and sub-terahertz wireless systems in the coming years.

Source: Spectrum

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