Recently major Canadian telecom provider TELUS announced it was beginning its rollout of so-called 5G mobile phone service. All the major telcos have 5G plans nearing the ready-to-go stage but Vancouver-based TELUS grabbed the initial headlines for a relatively small-scale deployment in Victoria.
Rogers followed shortly after with its first activation, and Bell indicated it was ready to go but gave no specifics. Two of the big three, TELUS and Bell, have been somewhat hamstrung as the federal government stretched out its review of Huawei’s involvement in Canada’s telecom sector. Canada was the last of the Five Eyes nations (along with the UK, the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia) to ban Huawei technology, along with that from ZTE, from communications infrastructure, on national security grounds and the understanding that the company was essentially an extension of the Communist Party of China.
What wasn’t part of the TELUS news release is that this first iteration of 5G, or fifth generation technology, is really nothing of the sort. It’s essentially a rebranding, an interim step if you will, and nothing at all like what was promised several years back when the 5G labelling first surfaced. Coincident with that of course came much of the hysteria about “radiation” penetrating our homes and, presumably, our bodies, at the high frequencies envisaged for 5G at that time. But that’s fodder for another column.
For most of us, typical 4G mobile internet connections are more than up to the task when it comes to streaming music or watching HD video content, but that hasn’t stopped telcos and handset manufacturers from rolling out what they are billing as 5G technologies that will eventually see a multitude of household devices connecting directly to telco antennas.
As engineer Wolfgang Rupprecht of Fremont, Calif., notes, the deployments of 3500 MHz spectrum, which is what TELUS announced, are nowhere near to the much higher frequency of up to 24 GHz that was supposed to be the range for 5G.
Rupprecht observes that when 5G was announced, with that 24 Ghz spectrum, it promised huge amounts of bandwidth, and would allow the user immensely fast downloads. Then, he notes, the companies decided it was perhaps cheaper to just rename all the low frequency, limited bandwidth transmitters, as 5G. These 3500 MHz or 3.5 Ghz frequencies, referred to by some providers as mid-band 5G, are part of that great renaming.
Don’t be fooled, he says. It is not quite the 5G we were promised. It’s essentially a cosmetic makeover. Real 5G according to the original specs is in the millimetre wavelength range, colloquially known as mmWave in the industry, around that 24 Ghz portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Rupprecht goes on to add that he thinks consumer confusion over 5G will eventually be rampant and he believes there will be a backlash when customers realize that their new $1,000 “5G” phone can’t use the new millimetre wavelength transmitter that was put up in front of their house. He says that he for one can’t figure out if his brand-new Google Pixel 6 Pro handset can receive “real” 5G. It appears that there are several versions of the Pixel 6 Pro for different cellular carriers and some of these versions can receive millimetre wavelengths, and others can’t.
In Fremont, Rupprecht notes, telcos recently put up lots of antennas and transmitters on light poles, presumably of the millimetre wavelength variety, although it is not clear if any are active yet.
We have yet to see any such neighbourhood deployment here in Metro Vancouver. I for one would be happy if my handset, on the TELUS network, could actually make phone calls from my home. Generally I have to walk up the street to get a stable signal. In other words, rebranding my service to 5G is not going to help my unusable 4G service!
5G technologies certainly have lots of promise, but it will be years before we see anything approaching the original hype from the telecom industry. Yes, eventually, perhaps only in city cores at first, we will see mobiles with speeds that can see an HD movie downloaded to the device in say a minute or so.
As full 5G spectrum, low, mid, and high band varieties, rolls out, consumers will want to know what their expensive handsets can handle. If it’s only low and mid, there will surely be upset customers when they discover the one-minute movie downloads through the new neighborhood antenna are inaccessible to them because their mobile lacks high band 5G.
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