“5G-equipped” phones on display at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this February. (Josep Lago / Getty Images)
I remember a May 1989 outdoor wedding in Los Angeles during which the perspiring officiant held up a copy of Newsweek. “The Race for Fusion,” the cover read. “Why The Stakes are So High.” It was the height of the frenzy about nuclear reactions at room temperatures, and the media was obsessing about how this “cold fusion” might solve all our energy problems. The minister said something about the marriage being a similar kind of miracle, and the crowd chuckled. I think of that wedding every time I hear the two syllables written as “5G.” Because when it comes to hype, “5G” is this year’s “cold fusion.”
The meaning seems obvious — our current communications system is 4G, so of course we must already have the next generation in line. Telecom executives play on this perception. Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, says 5G is “wireless fiber.” (And I thought fiber was fiber.) SK Telecom says it will soon be able to transfer holograms and enable virtual reality over 5G networks that are 100 times faster than current 4G LTE connections. Noise about 5G is incessant and triumphant, a constant drumbeat of predictions crowing about the arrival any day now of seemingly costless, ubiquitous, instantaneous, unlimited connectivity.
The promises are as lofty as those made for cold fusion. But the science behind that “breakthrough” turned out to be a bust. Likewise, the “5G” story is far more complex, calculated, and contingent than anyone in the carriers’ PR departments wants you to know.
Here’s what you need to understand: “5G” is a marketing term. There is no 5G standard — yet. The International Telecommunications Union plans to have standards ready by 2020. So for the moment “5G” refers to a handful of different kinds of technologies that are predicted, but not guaranteed, to emerge at some point in the next 3 to 7 years. (3GPP, a carrier consortium that will be contributing to the ITU process, said last year that until an actual standard exists, “’5G’ will remain a marketing & industry term that companies will use as they see fit.” At least they’re candid.) At the moment, advertising something as “5G” carries no greater significance than saying it’s “blazing fast” or “next generation” — but because “5G” sounds technical, it’s good for sales. We are a long way away from actual deployment.
Now, the lack of a standard won’t stop carriers from marketing “5G” technologies in the meantime. But because we won’t have a standard they won’t be accountable for what they’re offering.
Second, this “wireless fiber” will never happen unless we have… more fiber. Real fiber, in the form of fiber optic cables reaching businesses and homes. (This is the “last mile” problem; fiber already runs between cities.)
It’s just plain physics. In order to work, 99% of any “5G” wireless deployment will have to be fiber running very close to every home and business. The high-frequency spectrum the carriers are planning to use wobbles billions of times a second but travels incredibly short distances and gets interfered with easily. So it’s great at carrying loads of information — every wobble can be imprinted with data — but can’t go very far at all. It might travel 100 meters, but only through clear air; water, foliage, trees, buildings, and people will all get in the way of this spectrum. (You can think of people as big bags of water that block high-frequency signals.) You’ll have to be really, really close to the base station to get the kind of bandwidth the carriers are talking about, and that base station will in turn have to be connected to fiber to carry the tsunami of data that people and sensors will be generating and using.
This is why wireless and fiber are not the same. Even if a wireless connection can carry a boatload of data over a few feet, fiber optic cable can carry virtually unlimited data for tens of kilometers — perfectly, unthreatened by interference — without needing a boost. They’re complementary technologies, not substitutes for one another.
Let’s explore the implications of these two things: the need for a standard and the need for fiber. Forgive me if I get a bit technical, but that’s what happens when you deal with reality.
One way to increase the information-carrying capacity of a wireless network is to encode data on those wobbling frequencies more efficiently. The standards you’ve heard about — CDMA, 3G, LTE — they’re all about jamming more data into each unit (hertz) of spectrum. A new 5G set of standards will do the same thing, in an even fancier way: the antennas for very, very high frequencies can be so tiny that you can put 8 or 16 of them into a handset or base station and then have them all work together in an array to create a beam of data. Tons and tons of data can be carried on those aggregated beams. Transmission beams in an array can be steered in milliseconds to point to an individual user. You couldn’t do this kind of thing at lower frequencies, because many antennas would need, say, three feet of space — and you can’t fit that into a handset.
Until there’s a standard, carriers that want to be able to reach global markets won’t be anxious to make devices that will work in just a few places. They want to be able to use the same frequencies everywhere. Current phones and other widely-used private-sector communications devices have radios that transmit and receive only frequencies below 6 GHz, and the very, very high frequency spectrum that the FCC recently said it would open up for 5G purposes is all above 24 GHz. So we have a huge legacy replacement problem that will take a while to overcome and requires a standard to fix. All of this takes years.
If there’s a standard in 2020, manufacturers will still have to gear up to produce mass-market devices. No standard, no mass deployment. No mass deployment, no cheap devices and ubiquitous adoption. All told, it will take considerable time— one carrier told me 15 years would be required — for 5G communications to reach the average consumer.
Cynics might point out that by waving their hands arounds about the coming miracle of 5G — even though its arrival is really a long way off — carriers are directing attention away from the terrible state of fiber last-mile infrastructure in the US. Call me one of those cynics.
This kind of misleading tactic isn’t difficult to pull off in the U.S. Consumers have this idea that everything they’re doing is somehow, magically, wireless. They think that when they click on their phones and talk to someone in Europe, their wireless bits are flowing across the Atlantic. That’s just not the case. But that myth is deeply ingrained here. A leading tech VC in New York, someone who is viewed as a thought leader, said to me not long ago, “Why do you keep talking about fiber? Everything’s going wireless.”
Again, wireless and fiber are complementary. Carriers know this. People call the cables between cell towers and central network offices “backhaul,” and when Verizon launched its 4G LTE network in the US covering 93% of the population it needed about 30,000 towers, each one of which had to have a fiber connection. But for a high-frequency 5G spectrum to cover that same population, you’d need to reach many millions of towers and base stations with fiber. Remember, you need to be very close to base stations to pick up and transmit these ginormous amounts of data across high-frequency airwaves.
We’re going to have to have fiber interconnection points right next to houses and office buildings, and in many places fiber running inside those buildings. And to reach indoor areas with reliable high capacity, you’ll need multiple antennas inside rooms that can beam signals towards you from multiple angles (to avoid the “people as bags of water” problem).
All of this means that “backhaul” for those crazy promised 5G uses will need to look much more like the Huntsville network I described recently: dark fiber (passive, unlit) all the way to the curb, at least, outside buildings, connected to neutral points spaced at intervals of 50 feet or so that are available for any 5G distributor to use.
Why? Because you wouldn’t want that fiber plus 5G connection to be controlled by any one player; handing one actor that power would enable it to play all kinds of games with data caps and overages that would be bad for innovation, economic growth, and the well-being of citizens. Without dark fiber and neutral interconnection points eliminating their gatekeeper control, single actors will be able to extract rents from everyone around, just because they can connect to backhaul and no one else can. We’ll be replacing our current local wired monopolist markets in the U.S. with local everything monopolies. Not great.
So a competitive, terrific 5G future looks great in places like Tokyo, where you can get dark fiber capacity anywhere in the city for about $50 a month. It looks good in Stockholm, where Stokab rents dark fiber at similarly low prices to anyone, and where Ericsson is teaming up with SK Telecom to test 5G applications. Once a standard is set, those companies will be off and running. (In fact, they’re probably hoping to force the adoption of a global standard that matches their own commercial plans so that they can get a head start.)
But unless local — very local — Internet infrastructure is upgraded to fiber-to-the-home, and that fiber is available on a wholesale basis with frequent neutral interconnection points so that any 5G operator can use it, the U.S. is going to be fundamentally behind in 5G. When it happens. Which is not soon.
The wireless revolution isn’t happening right away. And it depends on much more fiber getting much closer to users. Otherwise, the science doesn’t work — just as it didn’t for cold fusion.
Oh, and, sadly, that 1989 marriage didn’t last, either. Miracles are a poor basis for both matrimony and telecommunications.
