Tag: mid-band

Halo and T-Mobile Showcase Autonomous Cars Running off 5G

At the CES event this month, Halo’s autonomous cars along with help through their partnership with T-Mobile 5G, seriously burned rubber with their racecar showdown. Halo got its start early on in the driverless and autonomous car field and has quickly become a leader. This was partly with the help of T-Mobile as they are a graduate of the 5G Open Innovation Lab, which was co-founded by T-Mobile. 

The Halo car wasn’t exactly racing itself, but it instead acted as a pace car for drivers in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC). It ran fully off of T-Mobile’s Ultra Capacity 5G network. The car drove multiple laps, reaching speeds up to 95 mph. 

This 5G network runs on the mid-band 5G frequency, 2.5GHz – not to be confused with the mid-band, or C-Band that AT&T and Verizon have opted for. This has put them way behind T-mobile in terms of 5G coverage. Currently, T-Mobile’s mid-band frequency covers 200 million users, but they are now aiming for 300 million. In comparison, Verizon just reached 100 million users, while AT&T is only sitting with around 70 million. 

The IAC was held at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. This is where Halo is already operating its service on the 5G network. T-Mobile’s 5G network supported real-time commands and a live video stream. This video stream connected the pilot, who remotely navigated the vehicle around the track from a nearby building, to the Halo car. You can see a video clip of the event here.

Over this past summer, tests were conducted for consumer riders much like Uber or Lyft, but driverless. Of course there is a big difference! Once the customer orders the vehicle, it will drive itself to the rider. When the car arrives, the rider will have to manually drive the vehicle where needed. After their ride is complete, the vehicle then drives itself back to the Halo garage. 

In order for this to work the car is installed with multiple 5G modems that communicate with the 5G network, as well as several in-car cameras. Halo uses a proprietary RemotePilot technology, which they train drivers on in-house. They’ve also developed an Advanced Safe Stop mechanism. This enables its cars to immediately come to a full stop if a potential safety hazard or system anomaly is detected. 

Halo cars even use an advanced Artificial Intelligence algorithm, so they’re always learning in the background. It does this when the human is manually driving the car, as well as on its own. This builds a unique feedback loop to assist them in achieving Level 3 capabilities, over time. What this refers to are the 6 levels of Artificial Intelligence. 

“Full autonomy is a massive challenge from both a technical and social trust perspective that won’t be solved for years to come,” said Anand Nandakumar, the founder and CEO of Halo. “But Halo has been designed to address these challenges by building automation over time starting with a solution that consumers will feel comfortable using today.”

You can imagine how much work went into the project so it’s no surprise that T-Mobile is not the only partner behind Halo. Per the T-Mobile announcement, Halo was founded by executives from Uber, Cruise Robotics, Proterra, Amazon, and more. “Halo is poised to serve a global $2.5 trillion-dollar transportation market creating local jobs with an innovative, on-demand car-sharing model.” 

These are exciting times for T-Mobile 5G and 5G in general, not to mention the car world and the possibilities with Artificial Intelligence. 

“Driverless cars! Fueling this kind of startup innovation is part of why we’ve built the biggest, fastest and most reliable 5G network in the country,” said Mike Sievert, CEO of T-Mobile. “Innovation and driving change for the better is our DNA at the Un-carrier, and we’ve unleashed a 5G network that will transform industries and change our world for the better. I can’t wait to see what comes next as we work with startups, developers and entrepreneurs like Halo building the next big thing in 5G!”

For more information on autonomous race cars, be sure to check out the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), at their website here. This was first ever race between 5 autonomous race car teams. The winner was team PoliMOVE from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and the University of Alabama. The rules of the IAC competition required each team to qualify in a high-speed autonomous racecar time trial competition determining their seed in the head-to-head passing competition. The winning team also reached a record breaking top speed of 173 mph.

“Today was the real birth of autonomous racing,” said Prof. Sergio Savaresi, team lead of Politecnico di Milano. “The real high-speed multi-agent racing was pushed to its very limits. The research on autonomous cars will certainly benefit from this historic milestone.”

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To Be, or Not to Be 5G…

That is the question indeed, on many of our minds! Much like the confusion around AT&T and T-Mobile’s 4G HSPA+ – an update to 3G, but not quite comparable to LTE performance – carriers are leading customers to believe they’ll be getting all that 5G service has been promising – faster speeds and lower latency. However, that’s not quite the case. 5G operates on many different bands, some of which are simply repurposed from LTE. This makes it typically better than LTE, but not quite at the level of 5G (or at least our perceptions of what it should be). 

So what about the coverage maps showing 5G service? And your phone says 5G sometimes, right? Here’s what that can mean…

  • 5G running on Low Band spectrum is the slowest, but it has the advantage of considerable range
  • Mid-band can’t travel as far, but is faster
  • High Band spectrum, which is sparsely available, may travel only a mile but is by far the fastest.

An analysis done by OpenSignal released last week found that their testers connected with T-Mobile 5G just 34.7% of the time, AT&T 16.4% of the time and Verizon just 9.7%. And that’s generally not for the fastest 5G service.

In comparison, the numbers shown have quite a significant difference to what the carriers promise about 5G in their advertisements. This just goes to show you that not everything advertised is in fact true. Carriers admit they are still working on their 5G networks and that there is quite a bit of “dishonesty in advertising.” Still, we can see in the fine print how they manage to get away with it. Though, you wonder for how long? 

National Advertising Division – a division of the independent non-profit organization BBB National Program – has criticized claims made about 5G by all three of the companies. “5G right now is (in) the fake it until you make it stage,” said Harold Feld, of advocacy group Public Knowledge which promotes affordable communication, adding that when new technology is developed, advertising often gets ahead of actual deployment.

For more on this story, head to the Washington Post.

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How Does 5G Work?

5G is the fifth generation in cellular networks, but there are many layers to consider as we start to become immersed in this new technology. Using a different type of encoding than 4G LTE service, 5G is designed for much lower latency and greater flexibility. Its method for dispersing signals is almost spider web like in the way the infrastructure is set up. A system of cell sites are divided amongst different territories and send encoded data through radio waves. These cells are connected to the network backbone and can change size and shape as network capacity requires. This only adds to the complexity of maintaining LTE. 

As you may have seen just about anywhere, 5G coverage is not very expansive at this time. The industry is fixated on that, as well as increasing capacity (ideally by 4x over current networks). Accomplishing this will require leveraging new frequencies and antenna technologies. Believe it or not, but in addition to more coverage and capacity, there’s buzz about speeds up to 20Gbps and latency as low as 1ms! We’ll just wait and see.

Now with all the different names 5G has picked up over the last year, it’s important to know that not all 5G is created equal! There’s low band, middle band, and high band. If you’ve noticed different “Cat” versions of LTE modems, you’ve seen some support more frequencies than others (i.e. Cat 12 supports more than 6 and Cat 18 supports more than 12). 5G works similarly, and can run on the same bands as LTE, but as it is set on a range of airwaves – low, middle, and high. It’s also much like LTE band aggregation, which allows the cellular modem to connect to the cellular network using multiple frequency bands. The wider channels and range of frequencies 5G can operate over gives it the advantage. 

When it comes to low, middle, and high, it’s all about how many channels you can use when connecting, and the frequency at which they’re operating on. More channels won’t always mean more bandwidth in this case. Since 5G has the flexibility to work on any band, carriers can share those from 4G – this is known as dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS). This is how Verizon is able to say they have “nationwide” 5G. It’s just reusing some old LTE spectrum.

Low-band 5G operates in frequencies below 2GHz. While the coverage is great, the channels aren’t very wide and some are primarily for 4G, which makes this type slow.

Mid-band 5G is in the 2–10GHz range. These networks have decent range and because of that, it will likely be the one to carry the most traffic. T-Mobile’s “ultra capacity” 5G network runs on this mid-band, as well as low band at this time. AT&T and Verizon just bought into some spectrum here also, which they’ll likely start rolling out in late 2022.

High-band 5G, or millimeter-wave, is the newest and quite a bit faster than LTE. This is a range of spectrum that has never been used in the consumer market before. It’s very short range, but it can get to speeds over 3Gbps. This is what Verizon uses for their “ultra wideband” 5G network. AT&T and T-Mobile also have some high-band, but there hasn’t been much information about this.

For even more technical details about the differences in 5G, as well as application examples, check out the source article from PC Magazine.

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