I’ve been reading some about the upcoming 5G rollout, and there’s one facet that caught my attention. Some articles describe a significant shift in the infrastructure needed to support 5G, in that the range of 5G cell towers is significantly less than that of 4G etc. So to support a network, there’s going to be smaller nodes placed closer together, as compared to previous technologies. I think I read that the area covered by a 5G cell tower in cities may be like a quarter mile or so.
Am I understanding this correctly? If so, what does this generally mean for coverage, whether in cities or out in the boonies? I live in an urban area, but for whatever reason my block has sorta meh coverage by LTE, I’m curious as to whether there may be even more dead spots with 5G.
I would assume that the initial coverage would be spotty but also that devices will be backwards compatible (like they are now with LTE and 4G) so you would be getting the best signal you can at a particular location.
Presumably - at least for the next 5 or so years - 5G will coexist with 4G and LTE; at this time, IIRC, almost nobody supplies 5G equipment. Your 4G current phone will continue to work for the foreseeable future. It will be years before they turn off anything worse than 5G.
What I read of 5G was that it can go either way - it runs on various frequencies, some longer wave (so longer distance) than others, including unregulated WiFi frequencies. The technology is flexible enough that they can have towers with longer range like 4G or else more dense smaller cells; however the upper limits of data speed are more achievable with the smaller, densely packed cell towers.
I have read in the past that the visionaries of 5G are not expecting 5G to replace 4G, but to supplement it. The 4G service will stay around until they have something to replace it.
That being said, there is more activity nowadays (the last several months) for 5G radios below 6 GHz in frequency, which should give you a longer range. The plan before that was for 5G to be at 28 and 39 GHz, and those really high frequencies have propagation issues that prevent longer ranges.
But the issue with sub-6 GHz is the lack of spectrum. A 5G carrier is 100 MHz wide, and almost no one has licensed spectrum that would accommodate that below 6 GHz. They could use it in the unlicensed bands (the same as WiFi), but then with that there are probably power restrictions that would again limit the range.