Is 5G ready for prime time in self service?
James Weaver of Cradlepoint described the science and current state of 5G, from rapidly growing mid-band networks to powerful benefits like edge computing and IoT capacity at the Self-Service Innovation Summit.
James Weaver of Cradlepoint unpacks the intricacies of 5G at the Self-Service Innovation Summit. Photo by Willie Lawless.
（ | by Daniel Brown — Editor, Networld Media Group）
From viral marketing to Internet conspiracy theories, just about everyone has heard about the rollout of 5G, the next generation of cellular connectivity that has promised everything from nearly-instant movie downloads to limitless networking power. But the claims remain controversial, with many consumers and businesses impatiently waiting for the service networks to become robust enough for them to use even a portion of this prophesied manna from digital network heaven.
So, is it all hype, or is 5G the wave of the future? The answer is the latter, according to James Weaver, senior director at Cradlepoint, a provider of 4G and 5G enterprise solutions.
During a "Lunch & Learn" presentation at the Self-Service Innovation Summit in Hollywood, Florida, Weaver made a case for businesses to invest in 5G technology, explaining that 5G will enable ultra-high bandwidth, wireless connectivity for almost everything — but continuing network development means it will still be at least a couple of years before 5G becomes virtually universal for business uses.
(The Summit is one of several industry events organized by Networld Media Group, the parent company of Kiosk Marketplace, Vending Times and Digital Signage Today. The media company's next event is the Restaurant Franchising & Innovation Summit being held March 20-23, 2023, in Coral Gables, Florida.)
Confusion, demystified
One major point of 5G confusion involves messaging from telecom companies. While they have marketed 5G as one monolithic entity, it turns out that not all 5G is created equal, and this relates to how far ultra-fast signals can go.
The slower flavor, with speeds under 2 gigahertz, is what most people are familiar with, providing long-distance transmission (up to 50 miles, maximum). This is what people knew from 4G and some of the low-speed 5G, Weaver said, and consumers often note that their "5G" devices aren't offering the lightning-fast, 1 gigabyte-per-second speeds that they have heard about.
This is because the faster the signal (the more data is packed into it), the less far it can go. While the fastest tier, "High-Band 5G," also known as the "high capacity layer," is capable of 24 Ghz or more, the problem is that towers have to be built quite close together to support these speeds, so they are less commonly available currently.
Sandwiched between these extremes, the mid-grade tier sits between 2-7 Ghz, and represents medium distance and speed, known as "mid-band 5G". Towers have to be closer to each other for this transmission layer, and this is the overwhelming focus of network expansion by most major telecom providers.
"What is happening in the U.S., and across the world, is this mid spectrum — called mid band — is being built out much, much faster," Weaver said. "So, that's a little bit of a sweet spot and a kind of a trade-off between the propagation and the performance. And we're seeing speeds today in those mid band areas of about 300-400 megabits-per-second — cellular."
Real world benefits, limitless potential
"So why would you buy 5G today?" Weaver asked. "Well, you buy 5G today because, in a very short time, that mid-band spectrum is going to be filled out throughout the world. It will take a couple of years, but the lifecycle a lot of things you're buying will be within that span."
Weaver related how an IT manager named Christian Neil, working for Taylor Construction in Australia, figured out a way to convert computer-assisted-design drawings to the Microsoft HoloLens 2 format to be viewed in augmented reality with the HoloLens goggles. However, users had to be in the office to enjoy this view. Neil had wanted customers to be able to take the goggles out to actual construction sites and preview their buildings using the 3D designs, from foundation to completion through the various stages of construction.
When Neil's team found a way to do it, 4G couldn't handle the sheer load. But when Weaver's team supplied the construction company with 5G routers at about 20 times the previous transmission speed, the system worked perfectly.
"That's the kind of innovation I think that's going to be fun," Weaver said. "I think that's the kind of innovation that you may be looking at that 5G can bring."
The science of signals
The beauty of 5G involves its low latency and speed, Weaver explained. With 10 to 100 times the download speed of 4G and an 80% latency decrease, the time it takes to send and retrieve a data packet is estimated at about eight milliseconds. "When you blink an eye, it takes the human brain about 20 milliseconds to register that," he said. "So in eight or so milliseconds, that's the latency we're talking about with 5G."
5G also introduces a huge increase in capacity for the Internet of Things, including the geometrically growing global network of sensors. Many businesses, such as agricultural and retail operations, rely on these sensor networks for their business model, but cable-based transmission means that operations can grind to a halt with a single snapped cable. Even with redundant cable networks, signals all must be routed through network nodes — "and nodes go down for various reasons," Weaver said.
Since 5G is a completely wireless solution, 5G connections are safe from the kind of physical accidents that can bring down cable networks, and the sheer speed of 5G means it can provide fast, efficient backup transmission for these networks, allowing operations to continue seamlessly in case of such cable network failures.
Another example Weaver shared involved Dallas Area Rapid Transit, a railway network that installed 500 interactive touchscreen kiosks with cameras and police connection for security, multilingual options and local information including promotions, wayfinding and social media elements. The cameras are AI-capable to detect anomalies or security threats.
Decentralized nodes and edge computing
The reason 5G is so good at handling massive amounts of data involves edge computing, in which a portion of data processing happens at decentralized nodes on a network, greatly lightening the load for the main processing system; think of it like digestion, where the desired data is the sandwich. You have to bite off and chew pieces of the sandwich before swallowing, making it easier for your digestive system to process; the chewing of bite-sized pieces is like edge computing.
"You can also use containers on the routers to do some of the edge compute," Weaver elaborated. "So you can say, 'Hey, I've got data in here that I want to register and understand. And based on that data, I want to trigger some other actions, or I want to filter data going up to the cloud.' That all can happen in what's called a container in a router."
The second factor making 5G crunch massive amounts of throughput involves the 5G towers.
"At the cell tower, Amazon Web Services are putting servers sitting at the base of those towers that are also doing edge compute," Weaver said. "And this is how autonomous driving is going to work in the future, they're not going to send it all the way to a data center in some location; they're going to send it to the tower and back. Now you think of your real time applications, the technology is now here, where you can get this really, really low latency to do the kind of applications that you'd like."
The Article was reprinted from the Internet.