Replying to Dave Taht, There's a few considerations here:
- What is "5G"? Strictly speaking, 5G is ITU-T's IMT-2020 standard(s). So far, there is only one system under this standard, 3GPP's New Radio (NR). NR is what is meant as 5G in layspeak. The NR air interface is defined in 3GPP TS 38.xxx series documents. Against point 2, about operators simply wanting more active SIMs to charge for, it's worth noting that NR can be deployed for private operation; the company that's using the service could itself own the entire network it's using. There are companies using private LTE networks for V2x and remote sensing, see for example: https://steelguru.com/mining/l/532247, or contract a third party to build a dedicated network: https://www.zdnet.com/article/telstra-deploys-private-lte-network-in-png-volcanic-crater-gold-mine/ NR operates over commercial and unlicensed frequency bands. The specific frequency bands defined for the system are listed in 3GPP TS 38.104 (Rel. 15) section 5.2 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ad use CSMA/CA - Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collison Avoidance - as their multiple access scheme, same as 802.3. Each transmitter completely owns the medium when transmitting. 802.11ax, LTE, and NR use OFDMA - Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access - as their multiple access scheme. Instead of the transmitter having the full channel for the duration it is transmitting, OFDMA takes OFDM modulation and divides not only across timeslots/timed transmission frames, but also by subdividing the full channel into simpler "resource blocks" with a fixed number of OFDM tones. LTE and NR have many features that Wi-Fi lacks which results in a far superior user experience. OFDMA, only recently adopted for 802.11ax ("Wi-Fi 6"), generally results in far superior throughput rates than CSMA/CA when many users are involved. In LTE and NR, this is also optimized further with centralized (at the eNB/gNB) MAC scheduling for all traffic on both uplink and downlink. Inter-cell handover in all cellular systems is much better than in Wi-Fi; Wi-Fi is a mobile-only system where the mobile station is in full control of the process, and it's a "break before make", that is, the mobile station fully disassociates from the first access point before associating with the next access point, even in the case of a shared BSSID and background Ethernet network. It's like unplugging from one Ethernet port and plugging into another one rather quickly, complete with the brief hiccup in network applications. Cellular is a lot better; the mobile station scans for neighboring cells to the one it's connected to in it's spare time, and sends this list to the network, so that the base station can "see" the different signal strength's from the mobile station's perspective. The network then instructs the mobile station to make a blind jump to whichever cell it feels will best serve the mobile station and reduce power consumption on that end. "Association" is with the network itself, not with individual base stations, so there's no need to do the "break before make" dance of Wi-Fi. -- Kirn Gill II Mobile (SMS only): +1 813-300-2330 VoIP: +1 813-704-0420 Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kirn-gill/32/49a/9a6 _______________________________________________ Bloat mailing list [email protected] https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat
