Category: 5G

Verizon is continuing with their 5G development by deploying infrastructure in Denver, but some locals are not happy. Some have health concerns (although the FCC has recently confirmed again that 5G is safe), but others are concerned about the towers being an eyesore or other infrastructure-related issues.

A spokeswoman for Denver Public Works confirmed that Verizon and other carriers have built out 122 new poles, each about thirty feet tall, in the city to accommodate the 5G small cells. Other small cells have also been deployed on light poles and other existing towers. Many residents have mixed feelings about the development.

“I think everybody wants faster connection and Internet,” one local said. “I think people will really question the costs of it, whether that’s health costs, the aesthetic costs… . There are costs to things that aren’t always monetary.”

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Everyone is awaiting 5g to be available where they live, but do they want the actual antenna in their front yard? According to a new law, Florida doesn’t have a say. Local governments have almost no say in where the new antenna will be placed. The telecommunication companies are looking for the best sites to install the new antennas. The antennas are quite small, its a little larger then a mini refrigerator and they will be mounted on top of a utility pole. 5g uses a much higher frequency, which means it doesn’t travel as far. Signals are blocked by buildings and trees, which means they will need to mount more antennas then they normally do for the other technologies in the past.

Sadly, under a new Florida law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis this year, cities can’t require telecommunication companies to notify residents or require much of anything from the companies.

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In a survey carried out earlier 2019 by Heavy Reading, 57% of communications service providers (CSPs) said that entering new markets to spawn additional revenue is one of their top three encouragements for deploying 5G.

But what will CSPs offer that customers can’t already get elsewhere? There’s no point in deploying new 5G networks if CSPs offer only faster 4G-like services. Public cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure already offer all the bandwidth, storage and compute needed for the most common enterprise applications. Competing on connectivity and bandwidth alone will not be enough.

The real opportunity to alter in 5G comes from CSPs’ ability to take control of the customer experience. Properly addressing a wide range of vertical industry customers requires a degree of understanding fo their specific needs. Depending on the use cases, services and applications they want to run, many verticals require highly assorted and deterministic guarantees on availability and throughout. All these add up to the very specific quality of experience (QoE) demands, on a per-customer basis

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Michael Griffin, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, confirmed to reporters that his office is making 5G development a priority.

“We’re looking at 5G, which is a Department of Defense initiative that was given to R&E to supervise. We’re evermore convinced, given especially all the news centering around Huawei — who will and won’t buy their hardware, whether we will or won’t — [that] microelectronics [and] assured microelectronics is a key priority,” Griffin said.

The Pentagon sees 5G as an important technology for IoT and defense, and Griffin said that he expects new funds to be allocated to 5G in the fiscal 2021 budget. “You’ll see that we’ve requested significant money, we’re actually requesting extra money in [FY20] for that and in the [Future Years Defense Program]. When those budgets are released, you’ll see all that,” he said. “This is a major initiative for us.”

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The Verizon M1000 Hotspot is a well-built brick that Measures 3.48 by 4.85 by 1.20inches thick and weighs 5.7 ounces. On the front of the hotspot, it has a larger 2.4-inch Color touch screen that allows you to manage your wifi networks and connected devices. Vents on the front face betray the presence of two actual fans inside. These are very quiet when running. The M1000 has a USB-C port for charging and connectivity on the front face, also included for the first time on a HotSpot a Full sized ethernet port on the rear.

The M1000 hotspot can only support 16 devices, that would be 1 hardwired and 15 on the Wifi. The unit is Dual-band wifi 802.11AC, with Primary and guest networks. You can filter or blacklist devices, use VPNs services, firewall filters, and port forward. The wifi claims to broadcast 200feet from the hotspot. The 5G hotspot is using a 4,400MAH battery that should last 16 to 20 hours.

The Mifi M1000 hotspot lets you tether to your laptop via USB-C or, excitingly, Ethernet. Using the Ethernet port is a trip: You have to plug the hotspot into a wall and toggle a special setting to turn Ethernet on. Inseego said we’d get better speeds with Ethernet than with any other connection, but we got around 300Mbps using USB-C, and around 300Mbps using Ethernet.

Downloading files from large cloud service providers could be even slower. From OneDrive, we got 250-300Mbps with multiple transfers on multiple devices. Google Drive and Dropbox were both in the 100-150Mbps range. Once again, that’s faster than my home internet connection. But somewhere, the device was losing most of its speed on the way to running actual applications.

Like with any new technology, some people have raised concerns about the potential safety hazards of 5G wireless. The FCC has previously said that it was safe, and officials confirmed again this week that there is no indication that 5G is any less safe than 3G or 4G.

5G transmits over higher frequencies than the radio waves used for 4G, but 5G waves are part of the radio spectrum known as non-ionizing radiation and are even less energetic than visible light. The FCC stated that their regulations are “among the most stringent in the world” and that there is no need for any changes to be made to regulations to address 5G.

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OnePlus and Sprint are working together to bring a 5g phone to the US. They both said, that more details will be announced soon!

Currently OnePlus sells a 5g version overseas, but only sells a 4g version in the US unlocked. It will work on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile networks. 

Sprint currently has 5g in five cities and will be adding four more cities in the “coming weeks.”

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During his keynote address at the Oppenheimer technology, internet, and communications conference, Verizon consumer EVP Ronan Dunne spoke out on T-Mobile’s recent accusation that Verizon lacks strategy for their 5G development. “The first thing to understand is not all 5G is created equal,” he said, explaining “the broader the bandwidth you have, the available spectrum bandwidth you have, the more of the features and capabilities of 5G that you can enable.” 

Dunne further explained that because carriers like T-Mobile are utilizing mid-band spectrum (which is better for penetration and provides good coverage but doesn’t offer the speeds that millimeter wave can provide), in many places 5G will be more like “good 4G service.” Verizon is using millimeter wave in urban areas but will use mid-band spectrum in outlying areas.

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Existing 5G networks are based on the Nonstandalone version of 5G New Radio, which utilize carriers’ LTE networks as their backbone. T-Mobile plans to introduce Standalone 5G, which, as its name implies, will operate completely independently of existing 4G technology, in 2020. This week they announced that they successfully tested SA 5G in their Bellevue, Washington lab, the first test of its kind in the US.

“This major 5G breakthrough is another example of how the T-Mobile engineering team continues to innovate and drive the entire industry forward,” said Neville Ray, T-Mobile US CTO, in a statement. Ray added that the test “marks a giant leap forward in realizing the true potential of 5G with new services, ultra-low latency, and even greater coverage and capacity than existing networks.”

5G SA network launches are expected to start in China in the second half of this year, but at the moment testing is confined primarily to labs in the US.

The 5G service will be coming to your town. Starting this spring, first Verizon and then AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile began the rollout of the 5G networks. The 5G networks are starting to cover the US from Minneapolis to Dallas and New York to Los Angeles with 5G speeds and faster wireless connections.

Depending on where you live, you may not see a 5G network for a while, especially if you are more rural than Urban. When 5G does come to your area coverage zones may be small and the reception may be spotty. With all the cellular providers, you will need to know what provider will offer the most for your money.

Cost of 5G plans and phones are not cheap, major carriers are starting to release plans and phones over the next year, we will see more 5G phones, and the carriers will adjust their plans. But right now, here’s what we have.

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