Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and a love all things tech. So in March I
Speaker 1: published an episode titled what is five G? Meaning the
Speaker 1: generation of wireless technologies that have a slow, arguably a
Speaker 1: painstakingly slow rollout. But since then there's been a lot
Speaker 1: of weird misinformation related to what five G is and
Speaker 1: what it does and what it can do, and so
Speaker 1: I figured it would be good to revisit the topic
Speaker 1: and try to clear some stuff up. There are some
Speaker 1: myths and misconceptions that we need to address, and some
Speaker 1: of this is due to questionable marketing decisions from various companies.
Speaker 1: Some of it has to do with magical thinking, and
Speaker 1: some of it I can't explain from a psychological standpoint.
Speaker 1: So let's begin with a rundown of what the G
Speaker 1: means here. As I mentioned it, it means generation, as
Speaker 1: in the fifth generation of mobile network technologies that allow
Speaker 1: for the wireless transmission of information, including voice communications and
Speaker 1: these days stuff like Internet surfing and all the data
Speaker 1: you need for all those apps that are on your phone.
Speaker 1: But it's good to remember that we're talking about families
Speaker 1: of technologies. Five G isn't like a single unified technological implementation,
Speaker 1: which kind of already makes it confusing. So the first
Speaker 1: generation of mobile network technologies was analog, not digital, and
Speaker 1: it allowed for voice calls, but you couldn't even send
Speaker 1: text over this network. The technology also had some pretty
Speaker 1: big limitations to it, including a lack of a liable
Speaker 1: form of security, so it was possible to snoop on
Speaker 1: calls if you knew what you were doing. There was
Speaker 1: also a problem with stuff like interference from other radio signals,
Speaker 1: which ties into another topic, that of setting aside certain
Speaker 1: bands of radio frequencies for specific uses. Well, touch on
Speaker 1: that again later. Uh, if you don't do that, if
Speaker 1: you don't set aside specific bands for specific purposes, then
Speaker 1: any company could make any device that transmits and receives
Speaker 1: on any given radio frequency, and then you would quickly
Speaker 1: enter into a situation where interference would be a big problem,
Speaker 1: like if your emergency services radio signals are on the
Speaker 1: same channel frequencies as television, that would be terrible. The
Speaker 1: original cellular technologies were emerging in the late nineties seventies,
Speaker 1: but they stuck around until the early nine nineties. Really
Speaker 1: we wouldn't refer to them as one G technologies except
Speaker 1: in reet respect. In around ninety one, we saw digital
Speaker 1: technologies take over for analog and thus we saw the
Speaker 1: introduction of two G mobile networks, which allowed for texting. Technically,
Speaker 1: you could also do stuff like send pictures, you know,
Speaker 1: multi media messaging, but it was a pretty low data throughput,
Speaker 1: so doing that would take a while. It took a
Speaker 1: while to upload and then download over these uh these specifications.
Speaker 1: There were some incremental improvements of the underlying technologies in
Speaker 1: the second generations. So sometimes you'll hear about specific implementations
Speaker 1: being referred to as two point five G or two
Speaker 1: point seven five G really meaning a more advanced version
Speaker 1: of two G technology, but not transformational enough to necessitate
Speaker 1: a brand new number. And we saw a couple of
Speaker 1: different versions of two G and they were not compatible
Speaker 1: with each other. There was more than a couple, but
Speaker 1: two of them would end up really taking hold, and
Speaker 1: those were G S M and C d M A.
Speaker 1: So we kind of had a forking path of mobile
Speaker 1: networking technologies for a while. Both implementations met the standards
Speaker 1: for two G service. In other words, they both were
Speaker 1: able to do what two G was specified as doing.
Speaker 1: Most of the specifications were largely defined with data throughput
Speaker 1: speeds and the supported services that the technology should be
Speaker 1: able to handle. But it also illustrated that when we
Speaker 1: talk in g S, we don't necessarily mean a unified,
Speaker 1: you know, monolithic approach. If you had a C d
Speaker 1: M A phone and you traveled to a place that
Speaker 1: only had G S M service like a GSM network,
Speaker 1: you would discover that your phone just didn't work on
Speaker 1: those networks, and vice versa. If you had a G
Speaker 1: S M phone and you went to a place that
Speaker 1: only had C d M A service, you'd be out
Speaker 1: of lock. Now you could find phones that had chips
Speaker 1: in them, uh SIM chips that would make them compatible
Speaker 1: with both, but they were the exception, not the rule,
Speaker 1: and they tended to be very expensive. The subsequent generations
Speaker 1: saw new transmission standards that would allow for larger data
Speaker 1: transfers per unit of time. Now we typically refer to
Speaker 1: that as speed, but the speed is kind of like
Speaker 1: speed is tricky. You're really talking about the data moving
Speaker 1: at the same speed as just that you could transport
Speaker 1: larger chunks at a time. So instead of it thinking
Speaker 1: of it as um faster, think of it as just
Speaker 1: more more through put. Uh So we often refer to
Speaker 1: it just as you know, each generation is faster than
Speaker 1: previous generations. What we really mean is we don't have
Speaker 1: to wait as long for stuff to happen, And in
Speaker 1: four G we would see some additional services introduced on
Speaker 1: top of the ones that were already supported by the
Speaker 1: earlier generations. Also, the move to the LTE standard in
Speaker 1: four G brought those forking paths of d M A
Speaker 1: and g s M kind of back together. It was
Speaker 1: a globally agreed upon standard, although not everyone was using
Speaker 1: the same radio frequency bands. So while technically the standard
Speaker 1: would be the same from country to country, you could
Speaker 1: still have a phone not work if you were to
Speaker 1: travel to a different country just because if your phone
Speaker 1: antenna did not support the radio frequencies that were being
Speaker 1: used by the country's network, you still wouldn't have service.
Speaker 1: For a while, phones were still you know, needing the
Speaker 1: older C d M A and GSM networks for the
Speaker 1: purposes of voice calls because originally four G mobile carriers
Speaker 1: didn't have four J support voice over for G it's
Speaker 1: kind of crazy, but it did come around, so that
Speaker 1: would ultimately lead to the the potential to phase out
Speaker 1: G S M and C D M A. And I
Speaker 1: think there's a general tendency one that I I myself
Speaker 1: had found myself falling into to go a spinal tap
Speaker 1: on these kind of things. By that, I mean the
Speaker 1: movie Spinal Tap. For those who don't know what I
Speaker 1: mean by this, there's a scene in a mockumentary comedy
Speaker 1: film called This Is Spinal Tap. It follows a fictional
Speaker 1: heavy metal band, and in one iconic scene in particular,
Speaker 1: there's a character named Nigel who is showing off his
Speaker 1: beloved amplifier, which, as he points out, has dials that
Speaker 1: go up to eleven rather than the standard ten. And
Speaker 1: Nigel's point is that these go to eleven. It seems
Speaker 1: to indicate that because the number on the dial is
Speaker 1: larger than ten, it must therefore be louder than amplifiers
Speaker 1: that go up to ten. But obviously you really can
Speaker 1: just make ten louder. You can make a louder amplifier
Speaker 1: and still have ten b the top number, and you
Speaker 1: just change the scale because there's no meaningful advantage to
Speaker 1: having an eleven on a dial because there's no universal
Speaker 1: standard for what each increment of amplifier means. From a
Speaker 1: louder perspective, there's no universal approach to this. You know,
Speaker 1: you can just put a sticker on an amplifier and
Speaker 1: change a dial that went from one to tend to
Speaker 1: one to eleven. You've just changed the scale a little bit. Well,
Speaker 1: with tech in general, we tend to have these expectations
Speaker 1: that with each subsequent generation, with each number of a technology,
Speaker 1: the most recent number will be more powerful than the
Speaker 1: previous ones. And it's like engineers have taken the old
Speaker 1: way of doing things and just made it, you know,
Speaker 1: more better, or something like it's the same technology as before,
Speaker 1: only now it can do what the old technology did,
Speaker 1: but faster and with more power. But that is not
Speaker 1: always the way things work, and particularly with wireless data transmissions,
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily true. Complicating this is that there are
Speaker 1: other factors that can affect your data throughput no matter
Speaker 1: what g you happen to be using. Stuff like the
Speaker 1: number of people who are using that particular network spot,
Speaker 1: or how far away you are from the transmission antenna,
Speaker 1: or what the signal to noise ratio is for that
Speaker 1: particular network. You know, if there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people watching I don't know, four K streams of the
Speaker 1: Mandalorian on their phones, which would be weird because I mean,
Speaker 1: who needs the four K resolution of that screen size?
Speaker 1: But anyway, well, that much traffic is going to be
Speaker 1: a factor. It's going to start overwhelming the network. Or
Speaker 1: if you're at the very edge of a service area,
Speaker 1: that could affect you too. And if both factors are
Speaker 1: in play, you know you're at the very edge of
Speaker 1: a service area and everybody else is watching the Mandalorian
Speaker 1: in four K, you might feel like your technology is
Speaker 1: actually taken a step backward. You might feel like, wow,
Speaker 1: this is slower than my old phone. Now. Don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, the differences between one generation of wireless tech
Speaker 1: and the next can be significant. They can involve new
Speaker 1: ways to encode and transmit information, but sometimes that means that,
Speaker 1: at least initially, you might not actually see an improvement
Speaker 1: when it comes to data throughput. Further, depending on the standard,
Speaker 1: the number of people on a network can really make
Speaker 1: a big difference to the quality of service that each
Speaker 1: person receives. And it also helps to remember that generations
Speaker 1: are not bordered by hard and fast beginning and ending points.
Speaker 1: They bleed into each other. Typically there's a lot of
Speaker 1: overlap between one generation and the next. I mean major
Speaker 1: operators in the United States kept that old two G
Speaker 1: network active up until twenty so there can even be
Speaker 1: overlap between a current generation and two or three generations
Speaker 1: of technology that came earlier. And we can have situations
Speaker 1: where say a three G transmission is you know, faster
Speaker 1: and more reliable than a four G you know, or
Speaker 1: an LTE transmission. And just as I mentioned before, a
Speaker 1: network congestion can do that. Right as someone who used
Speaker 1: to go to really big tech conferences, like when those
Speaker 1: were still a thing, you know, like C E S,
Speaker 1: I would off make it a habit to switch my
Speaker 1: phone manually over to three G service because the four
Speaker 1: G networks would just be overwhelmed by traffic. Implementations of
Speaker 1: these technologies can improve over time. So if you have
Speaker 1: a late generation three G system and hand set and
Speaker 1: you were to compare that against an early generation four
Speaker 1: G LTE system and phone, the three G setup might
Speaker 1: actually have better performance than the LT version. So the
Speaker 1: three G phone on the three G network might have
Speaker 1: better performance than the four G phone on the four
Speaker 1: G network, you know, only because the three G one
Speaker 1: occurred late in the life cycle when a lot of
Speaker 1: advances had been made, and the four G came early
Speaker 1: in that generation cycle before those improvements were made, and
Speaker 1: on the surface, again seem counterintuitive. Again, four is bigger
Speaker 1: than three, so it should be faster, and ultimately it
Speaker 1: got there, but doesn't mean that it's like that round
Speaker 1: the gate. We're seeing some of that with five G
Speaker 1: rollout as well, which I'm sure it comes as a
Speaker 1: frustration for some customers, and it doesn't help that there's
Speaker 1: been some confusion, some of it purposefully promoted about what
Speaker 1: does and doesn't qualify as actual five G. The organization
Speaker 1: that determines what is five G is the International Telecommunication
Speaker 1: Union or i TU. In the i TU announced its
Speaker 1: specs for the technical requirements for five G radio interfaces.
Speaker 1: Those specifications were more focused on what the five G
Speaker 1: should be able to do, which included stuff like the
Speaker 1: five G cell itself that is the network connection point
Speaker 1: for devices like a cell tower kind of thing, and
Speaker 1: that these should have at least twenty gigabits per second
Speaker 1: download capacity at minimum, so it should be able to
Speaker 1: support twenty billion bits per second of downloading at minimum,
Speaker 1: and it also should be able to support again at
Speaker 1: minimum ten gigabits per second of upload speed to the
Speaker 1: network at large from each five G connection tower. Now
Speaker 1: that does not mean that if your cellular service provider
Speaker 1: rolls out a robust five G network, you would be
Speaker 1: able to pull down twenty gigabits per second and download
Speaker 1: speed on your phone. If you could, that would be
Speaker 1: I mean, that would be amazing. But no, this spec
Speaker 1: calls for a user download speed of at least one
Speaker 1: hundred megabits per second and an upload of fifty megabits
Speaker 1: per second, which is pretty darn close to what you
Speaker 1: can get with four G LTE on a good day.
Speaker 1: And it's also good to remember that, depending on conditions,
Speaker 1: you might not get peak speeds. In fact, it would
Speaker 1: be pretty rare when you did get the peak performance
Speaker 1: out of this technology. Anyone who has tested their home
Speaker 1: internet connection is probably familiar with this, because speeds are
Speaker 1: usually below, and sometimes well below the advertised peak performance
Speaker 1: that you'll see from providers. That's why those little asterisks
Speaker 1: after a claim in an advertisement are so important. Now,
Speaker 1: the one D megabits down and fifty megabits up is
Speaker 1: supposed to be the minimum data throughput for users, so
Speaker 1: it's not like that that's the peak of five G service. Either.
Speaker 1: A good five G network and compatible devices could mean
Speaker 1: faster filed downloads, lower latency, better streaming services, all due
Speaker 1: to this increase throughput. But the five G technologies can
Speaker 1: make use of different bands of wireless frequencies, and that's
Speaker 1: also going to change things up and make stuff more complicated.
Speaker 1: In other words, not all five G is equal. There's
Speaker 1: five G and then there's five G if you get
Speaker 1: what I mean, and I'll explain more in a minute.
Speaker 1: The standard also called for the support of up to
Speaker 1: one million connected devices per square kilometer of space, So
Speaker 1: a big part that is due to the proliferation of
Speaker 1: the Internet of things devices that are putting an increasing
Speaker 1: strain on networks, and arguably that one million per square
Speaker 1: kilometer is actually falling behind as far as the Internet
Speaker 1: of things trend is going, but that's another topic. There
Speaker 1: are a few other specifications for five G that are important.
Speaker 1: One is that latency, that is the delay introduced when
Speaker 1: transmitting and receiving data, should be at four milliseconds. Maximum
Speaker 1: LT part of the four G family has a latency
Speaker 1: of twenty milliseconds or so, and that's important because generally speaking,
Speaker 1: humans aren't really able to detect a delay less than
Speaker 1: twenty milliseconds. And you can see how this would be
Speaker 1: important for certain applications like augmented reality, where you've got
Speaker 1: some sort of display that might be mounted in a
Speaker 1: headset or glasses, or might just be through your phone
Speaker 1: or whatever, but you need to have digital information overlaying
Speaker 1: a view of the physical world around you. For your
Speaker 1: average application, a short delay might not be much of
Speaker 1: a problem, but we're starting to see some pretty audacious
Speaker 1: uses of a R including in amusement park attractions, so
Speaker 1: reducing latency is an important part of providing a good
Speaker 1: immersive experience. It doesn't do you any good on a ride,
Speaker 1: for example, if the information you see in your in
Speaker 1: your headset is relating back to something that you've already passed, right,
Speaker 1: it's not relevant anymore. In addition, for ultra reliable low
Speaker 1: latency communications otherwise known as you are l l C,
Speaker 1: the latency should be just one millisecond, which is pretty
Speaker 1: darn responsive. There are other components to the five G
Speaker 1: specifications from I TU, but for most of us, they're
Speaker 1: just the technical bits and bobs that makes our stuff go.
Speaker 1: And I think the average consumer just wants that sweet
Speaker 1: fast connection and they don't really care about things like
Speaker 1: spectral efficiency, even though it's actually really important for how
Speaker 1: data will travel on five G frequencies. And we will
Speaker 1: come back to it, all right, So I mentioned frequency
Speaker 1: bands earlier, but what does that mean. Well, we got
Speaker 1: to do a quick rundown on radio waves, which we
Speaker 1: will do right after this quick break. So we tend
Speaker 1: to talk about radio waves in terms of frequency, which
Speaker 1: is how many radio wave lengths will pass a given
Speaker 1: point within a second. And this also links back to
Speaker 1: the actual wave length of the radio wave. All radio
Speaker 1: waves travel at the same speed. They are electromagnetic information
Speaker 1: or electromagnetic signals, I should say, so in this case,
Speaker 1: it's the length of the wave that determines how many
Speaker 1: of that particular radio wave will pass a given point
Speaker 1: in the second. If they're all moving at the same speed,
Speaker 1: the the length is the only real differentiator that tells
Speaker 1: us this. So the radio spectrum is a really big one.
Speaker 1: And as I mentioned earlier, countries set aside specific bands
Speaker 1: for specific purposes. Generally speaking, the full radio spectrum that
Speaker 1: we could use for wireless communication spans from three hurts
Speaker 1: to three hundred giga hurts, and it hurts is one
Speaker 1: cycle per second, like one vibration per second, but in
Speaker 1: the case of radio waves, we think of it as
Speaker 1: one wavelength per second. So you've got a physical spot
Speaker 1: like a start line, and it takes one full second
Speaker 1: for a single wavelength to pass that point. That would
Speaker 1: be a one hurts radio wave would also be incredibly
Speaker 1: long because these things are moving wicked fast. So on
Speaker 1: the low end of the spectrum that we tend to
Speaker 1: use for a communication, we have three to thirty hurts.
Speaker 1: That means you would have three to thirty wavelengths of
Speaker 1: a radio signal passing a given point in a second,
Speaker 1: which at three hurts would mean that the wavelength would
Speaker 1: be about one hundred thousand kilometers long. This is not
Speaker 1: easy for us to generate because there's actually a relationship
Speaker 1: between the length of our radio wave and the length
Speaker 1: of an antenna that you need to generate it to
Speaker 1: transmit that kind of wave. But these extremely low frequencies
Speaker 1: have a benefit of being able to penetrate water so
Speaker 1: it makes them useful for stuff like communicating with submarines
Speaker 1: on the far end of the spectrum, on the opposite side,
Speaker 1: we have three hundred giga hurts, meaning three hundred billion
Speaker 1: wavelengths of a radio signal will pass a given point
Speaker 1: in a second, which means each individual radio wave measures
Speaker 1: one millimeter long. So what happens if you were to
Speaker 1: keep going down the spectrum? What happens if you kept
Speaker 1: on making the wavelengths shorter and making the frequencies higher, Well,
Speaker 1: eventually you cross over into other types of electro magnetic energy,
Speaker 1: including stuff like visible light. When you go far enough,
Speaker 1: if you keep going, then you hit stuff like X
Speaker 1: rays and gamma rays. Alright, so the five G wireless
Speaker 1: frequencies fall into a couple of broad groups, and one
Speaker 1: of those two we can even split into two subgroups.
Speaker 1: So on the low end of the scale, which is
Speaker 1: often called the sub six giga hurts, we've got the
Speaker 1: low end at six hundred mega hurts. That means six
Speaker 1: hundred million wavelengths would pass a given point per second,
Speaker 1: and all the way up to six giga hurts or
Speaker 1: six billion wavelengths past a point in a second. Now,
Speaker 1: keep in mind that the whole range is not exclusive
Speaker 1: to five G, just chunks of that range are in
Speaker 1: five G. For example, there's actually a pretty big gap
Speaker 1: between twenty six hundred mega hurts and thirty five hundred
Speaker 1: mega hurts. These frequencies represent the low band and mid
Speaker 1: band ranges of five G frequencies. Those would be those
Speaker 1: two subgroups I mentioned earlier, low band being the lower
Speaker 1: group of frequencies in that chunk, and mid band being
Speaker 1: in the higher band of frequencies in that chunk. But
Speaker 1: we've got a second chunk which consists of much higher frequencies,
Speaker 1: starting at twenty six giga hurts and ending in the
Speaker 1: fifty giga hurts range. And again five G does not
Speaker 1: take up all the frequencies within this range, but chunks
Speaker 1: of them or sub sections of them. And this is
Speaker 1: the high band range of frequencies. So we've got the
Speaker 1: low band, the mid band, and the high band range
Speaker 1: of five G. Now it's that high band frequency range
Speaker 1: that the marketing divisions of various carrier companies have really
Speaker 1: focused on because it represents the biggest potential impact on consumers.
Speaker 1: Assuming a robust rollout of five G infrastructure and some
Speaker 1: special situations. It's in that high band frequent sees where
Speaker 1: we see incredible data throughput. One of a T and
Speaker 1: T S tests of its five G high band technology
Speaker 1: showed a bandwidth of one point two gigabits per second.
Speaker 1: That's a similar speed to what you would find with
Speaker 1: a fiber optic connection. So wicked fast data transfer speeds.
Speaker 1: That's incredible, right. You would be able to download videos
Speaker 1: to your phone in a blink of an eye. If
Speaker 1: you had a five G antenna connected to your home router,
Speaker 1: then you can use five G to be a substitute
Speaker 1: for a fiber optic line direct to your home. You
Speaker 1: could even download those massive PS five and Xbox Series
Speaker 1: X games in just a minute or two. But at
Speaker 1: the lower range of frequencies, you know, the stuff that's
Speaker 1: in the low to mid band ranges of five G,
Speaker 1: those are not as impressive when it comes to data throughput.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't be able to hit that kind of bandwidth.
Speaker 1: The speeds you would get at those ranges would be
Speaker 1: closer to what you see with lt E a K
Speaker 1: four G speeds. Uh, the low band would be a
Speaker 1: little faster than four G. The mid band can be
Speaker 1: significantly faster, just not nearly as fast as the high
Speaker 1: band stuff. And let's think about how we use radio
Speaker 1: waves to send information to kind of understand what's going
Speaker 1: on here. A radio wave on its own that is
Speaker 1: a just a steady radio frequency, that's not terribly useful
Speaker 1: if we want to convey any information, right, Like, imagine
Speaker 1: you're seeing down to have a conversation with someone like me,
Speaker 1: and let's just say that I just make a noise
Speaker 1: like this. Uh, that's not really helpful, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: some of my critics would say they could barely tell
Speaker 1: the difference between that and one of my episodes. Words
Speaker 1: can hurt, But anyway, without me modulating that sound, without
Speaker 1: making the phonemes associated with the language, all I'm really
Speaker 1: able to do with a simple tone like that is
Speaker 1: to indicate that you know, I'm here, I'm around. So
Speaker 1: I'm able to make that tone, but that's really it.
Speaker 1: So to communicate, I have to take that tone, that signal,
Speaker 1: and I need to alter it in some way. I
Speaker 1: could increase the pitch or the frequency. I might change
Speaker 1: the volume of it or the amplitude in order to
Speaker 1: distress something. And I can chop up that sound in
Speaker 1: lots of ways encoding information that you decode. You hear
Speaker 1: the sound, your brain interprets the sound, and you make
Speaker 1: meaning from it, which is really cool. Well, radio waves
Speaker 1: are kind of similar. We take a radio signal of
Speaker 1: a particular frequency, that is our carrier signal, and then
Speaker 1: we have a channel of signals, and we change that
Speaker 1: channel of signals in little ways to have that carry information.
Speaker 1: So we can change the amplitude that's what AM radio does.
Speaker 1: AM stands for amplitude modulation, Or we could change the
Speaker 1: frequency a little bit, that's what FM radio does. That's
Speaker 1: frequency modulation, and we could encode information onto the radio
Speaker 1: waves themselves that way. Then an antenna of an appropriately
Speaker 1: tuned receiver can pick up that radio signal and with
Speaker 1: a decoder, it can change the information back into a
Speaker 1: form that's useful to us, which is pretty nifty. Now,
Speaker 1: when we get to wireless communications beyond basic radio signals,
Speaker 1: we are talking about channels. Here. That carrier signal is
Speaker 1: really the foundation to transmit information. But with a channel,
Speaker 1: we're actually talking about a band of frequencies that are
Speaker 1: in some way around this carrier signal, and the size
Speaker 1: of that channel would be the bandwidth that determines how
Speaker 1: much information that signal can carry, though the encoding process
Speaker 1: also plays a big part in this, but we don't
Speaker 1: want to get too deep into encoding. That gets really complicated.
Speaker 1: So let's use a very simple example. Let's say you've
Speaker 1: got a carrier signal at six hundred mega hurts and
Speaker 1: the channel frequency is too mega hurts. What that means
Speaker 1: is that you actually have a two mega hurts space
Speaker 1: around six hundred. So a simple way of doing this
Speaker 1: would be to say that from five to six hundred
Speaker 1: and one mega hurts, that's where the channel sits, and
Speaker 1: six hundred is right smack dab in the middle, and
Speaker 1: it's that that channel with that gives you your data
Speaker 1: carrying capacity. Now let's get into that spectral efficiency thing
Speaker 1: that I mentioned earlier in this episode. It's a good
Speaker 1: time to sort of explain what that actually means. And first,
Speaker 1: here's what it doesn't mean. I was very sad to
Speaker 1: discover that spectral efficiency has nothing to do with how
Speaker 1: effective ghosts are at haunting someplace. I mean, come on,
Speaker 1: that's where my mind went. But ghosts aren't real, So
Speaker 1: I guess that's a strike against that idea. In the
Speaker 1: first place. So spectral efficiency has to do with how
Speaker 1: much information can fit into a given channel bandwidth, how
Speaker 1: well can that part of the radio spectrum that that
Speaker 1: channel transmit information? How effective is it and carrying info well.
Speaker 1: Spectral efficiency tells us more about how much information we
Speaker 1: can encode onto a given frequency channel. We typically talk
Speaker 1: about in terms of the number of bits per second
Speaker 1: per hurts. So it's a net data rate per second
Speaker 1: or bits per second divided by the channel bandwidth and hurts.
Speaker 1: And again we're not talking about the specific radio frequency here,
Speaker 1: so we wouldn't be saying six hundred mega hurts. We're
Speaker 1: talking about how wide is that channel? How wide does
Speaker 1: that bandwidth? And that can be anywhere on the radio frequency,
Speaker 1: So how big is the range of frequencies within that channel.
Speaker 1: Wider channels can carry more information, kind of like if
Speaker 1: you have a highway that has more lanes, more cars
Speaker 1: can fit on that span of highway at a single time.
Speaker 1: So while the base frequency for a five G connection
Speaker 1: might be six center mega hurts, the channel with could
Speaker 1: be anything. Let's say that it could be like thirty
Speaker 1: mega hurts. Well, that's what we're concerned with the channel
Speaker 1: with the thirty mega hurts, not what frequency it's actually
Speaker 1: transmitted on. That doesn't really matter. Let's take an example
Speaker 1: to really understand this. I pulled this example, by the way,
Speaker 1: from tech play on dot com. They actually have a
Speaker 1: really useful rundown on what spectral efficiency is, and in
Speaker 1: their example, we have the following. We've got a fifteen
Speaker 1: megabits per second raw data rate on a channel bandwidth,
Speaker 1: and the channel bandwidth is two mega hurts. Now, that
Speaker 1: raw data rate is not what a user would actually
Speaker 1: get to take advantage of for the purposes of doing
Speaker 1: something like download a file, because you have to have
Speaker 1: a certain amount of the bandwidth reserved for what's called overhead,
Speaker 1: just you know, have things work. So in this case,
Speaker 1: this particular approach reserves two megabits per second as overhead,
Speaker 1: so really you only have access to thirteen megabits per second.
Speaker 1: If this sounds familiar to you, you're probably thinking about
Speaker 1: things like storage space. You'll be told like a hard
Speaker 1: drive can hold a terabyte of information, but it turns
Speaker 1: out it's more like eight hundred gigabytes of information. Same
Speaker 1: sort of thing. So in this particular example, using the
Speaker 1: bits per second per hurts, we would say we've got
Speaker 1: thirteen megabits per second, which would be thirteen million bits
Speaker 1: per second, and then we would have to divide that
Speaker 1: by two mega hurts or two million hurts. That would
Speaker 1: give us six point five bits per second per hurts,
Speaker 1: which describes the spectral efficiency of this hypothetical signal. Now,
Speaker 1: remember we were talking about a channel with a width
Speaker 1: of two mega hurts, and I didn't talk about the
Speaker 1: actual frequency of the signal because that's not important. If
Speaker 1: the if the frequency was twenty six hundred mega hurts
Speaker 1: and not six center mega hurts, it would still be
Speaker 1: the same amount of information being carried on this signal,
Speaker 1: because again it's the channel width that range of frequencies
Speaker 1: that's what's important. How why does that channel how much
Speaker 1: capacity are we talking about here to hold data, not
Speaker 1: the frequency of the carrier signal. So in the lower
Speaker 1: group of frequencies for five G, the channel width is narrower,
Speaker 1: with most of them being around forty mega hurts wide
Speaker 1: or or smaller. Uh, there's lots of other stuff that's
Speaker 1: taking up bands of frequencies around this range. So in
Speaker 1: other words, you need to have enough channels so that
Speaker 1: all the different carriers can operate without them interfering with
Speaker 1: each other. But they can't be too wide because you
Speaker 1: you've got to reserve some of that radio frequency space
Speaker 1: for other stuff. So by necessity, there's a limit to
Speaker 1: how wide those channels can get, which means there's a
Speaker 1: limit to how much information they can carry. Uh. When
Speaker 1: you start getting further up in the frequencies, there's a
Speaker 1: little more room to work with, so the channels can
Speaker 1: be more wide or wider at those higher frequencies, with
Speaker 1: channels that are a hundred mega hurts wide, so they
Speaker 1: can actually carry more information per second. There's a lot
Speaker 1: more to it than all of this, but it if
Speaker 1: you think it's complicated now, it gets really Matthew after that,
Speaker 1: and I'm worried that I would not explain it properly.
Speaker 1: So rather than make things more confusing, let's leave off
Speaker 1: with the understanding that the low and mid band five
Speaker 1: gen networks will offer modest, too good improvements in wireless
Speaker 1: data speeds, but nothing approaching fiber optics speeds. The high
Speaker 1: band can hit fiber optics speeds, So that leads you
Speaker 1: to a question, why wouldn't you just go all in
Speaker 1: with the high band? Why would you even bother with
Speaker 1: low band or mid band. Well, there are a couple
Speaker 1: of answers that question. One of them is that the
Speaker 1: transmission range for those higher frequencies is much shorter than
Speaker 1: for the low and midband frequencies. And we're talking about
Speaker 1: like a thousand feet or less from the transmission tower,
Speaker 1: which means you would need high band five G antennas
Speaker 1: everywhere to provide comprehensive coverage. If you didn't, well, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to take advantage of those super fast
Speaker 1: speeds at any place within a given region. Like you
Speaker 1: might only be able to hit it at a specific
Speaker 1: street corner, but if you go a block in any direction,
Speaker 1: suddenly that connection just drops on top of the limited range.
Speaker 1: The higher frequencies have really poor penetration, so it's hard
Speaker 1: for them to get to pass through stuff like walls
Speaker 1: or you know, foliage. So if you've got a wall
Speaker 1: between you and a transmitter, or you know you're just
Speaker 1: in a you know, wooded area inside a park, let's
Speaker 1: say at a city, you might not be able to
Speaker 1: get a very good, saynal from those high band transmitters,
Speaker 1: so you wouldn't be able to take advantage of those
Speaker 1: those speeds, the low and midband frequencies at five G,
Speaker 1: they have better range and they have better penetration, so
Speaker 1: you don't need as many antennas for low range or
Speaker 1: low band and mid band frequencies. Uh. And when you
Speaker 1: have them, you can actually have people still get a
Speaker 1: signal if they were to be inside, assuming you're not
Speaker 1: too far away from whatever the closest transmitters are. So
Speaker 1: the high band five G transmitters will provide the most
Speaker 1: incredible jumps and performance, but the availability of the signal
Speaker 1: will be relatively low. The low band stuff will provide
Speaker 1: a you know, a modest improvement over four G speeds,
Speaker 1: but it could be available pretty much everywhere with just
Speaker 1: a relatively few number of cell towers. Compared to the
Speaker 1: high band stuff, that mid band is kind of in
Speaker 1: the sweet spot. Uh. Your typical data speed would be
Speaker 1: greater than what we see with four G by you know,
Speaker 1: a decent amount, but it wouldn't be as impressive as
Speaker 1: that high band range where you're getting the gigabit per
Speaker 1: second speeds. Anyway, based on a lot of the marketing
Speaker 1: for five G, you would never know that the speeds
Speaker 1: they talk about are something you would only experience if
Speaker 1: you happen to be in a transmitter dense environment and
Speaker 1: outdoors to boot. It's the sort of thing you might
Speaker 1: experience if you are in a dense urban setting, you know,
Speaker 1: a city that has enough people in it to justify
Speaker 1: the expense of rolling out a high band five G
Speaker 1: infrastructure all over the ding dang during place. And if
Speaker 1: you have a building between you and the closest transmitter,
Speaker 1: you're not likely to get a good signal. So the
Speaker 1: reality of five G is a little less exciting than
Speaker 1: the marketing materials would necessarily have us believe. Though, if
Speaker 1: you do happen to find yourself in the situation where
Speaker 1: you've got a clear line of sight on a high
Speaker 1: band five G transmitter, like let's say that for some
Speaker 1: reason they build one that happens to be like a
Speaker 1: bee line right into your living room, Well you've got
Speaker 1: you're gonna have blazing fast wireless communication connections in that case,
Speaker 1: if you've got compatible technologies to use with it. That's
Speaker 1: also why, again five companies are talking about using five
Speaker 1: G as a replacement for stuff like fiber connections to homes,
Speaker 1: because it's way easier to provide that kind of speed
Speaker 1: to a home if the home has an antenna. And
Speaker 1: that's because, with very few exceptions, homes don't move around
Speaker 1: very much. So you can establish a line of sight
Speaker 1: between a home antenna and a transmission antenna and you
Speaker 1: can be fairly sure that's not going to change over time.
Speaker 1: But people with a cell phone, you know, people move
Speaker 1: around a lot the jerks. Alright, So five speeds have
Speaker 1: the potential to give us access to incredible data transfer
Speaker 1: speeds under certain circumstances, but otherwise we'll see a more
Speaker 1: modest improvement over what we have today. When we come back,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about some of the conspiracies and misconceptions around
Speaker 1: five G. But first let's take another quick break. When
Speaker 1: it comes to misinformation, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation, I am not
Speaker 1: sure I have seen another technology as prone to that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Is five G at least not a
Speaker 1: legitimate technology. There are a lot of hoaxes out there.
Speaker 1: They could probably give five G a run for its money,
Speaker 1: but you know, that's a that's a different kettle of fish.
Speaker 1: Some of this comes down to marketing, and as I've
Speaker 1: already mentioned, that is a big issue. Companies pushing five
Speaker 1: G like it's a fiber optic connection wherever you might be.
Speaker 1: That's misleading, it's not really accurate. Given the range and
Speaker 1: penetration limitations of millimeter wave five G transmissions, that high
Speaker 1: band we were talking about, you're just not likely to
Speaker 1: experience those speeds unless you're in a city that you
Speaker 1: happen to be outside, and you are close to one
Speaker 1: of those transmitters, and you've got a compatible device that
Speaker 1: runs on the network that happens to be in that area.
Speaker 1: This is what we would call conditional love. It's really
Speaker 1: really conditional. Now that's not to say that low and
Speaker 1: mid range five G speeds will be bad. They won't
Speaker 1: be bad. They'll be good. They just won't be as
Speaker 1: transformational as the advertising would have you think. But there
Speaker 1: are other complications here. For example, A T and T
Speaker 1: S five G E. Why all right, this one is
Speaker 1: hard for me to cover without getting snarky about it,
Speaker 1: because it's very hard for me to see how this
Speaker 1: is anything other than misinformation. But let's cover what actually happened.
Speaker 1: So back in early twenty nineteen, some A, T and
Speaker 1: D customers saw an interesting icon pop up on their phones,
Speaker 1: and the icon said five G E and These were
Speaker 1: the very same phones that one day earlier were humble
Speaker 1: four G phones LTE phones, and overnight, boom, they go
Speaker 1: to five G, which is incredible. How did that happen? Well,
Speaker 1: it happened by not happening. See, I didn't go five
Speaker 1: gen because five G E or five G evolution is
Speaker 1: what a T and T calls four G L T E.
Speaker 1: Now granted it is four G L T E with
Speaker 1: the late generation advances like the four by four M
Speaker 1: I M O and T five six Q A M
Speaker 1: and No, I'm not going to explain these things because
Speaker 1: it would take another episode to do it. The important
Speaker 1: thing to know is that these were advanced as were made,
Speaker 1: and how we take advantage of four G networks, how
Speaker 1: we encode information to transmit across four G technology, which
Speaker 1: allowed for better connectivity and faster data transfer rates. So
Speaker 1: this is that late stage generational stuff that I alluded
Speaker 1: to at the beginning of this episode. It's what we
Speaker 1: were seeing with the four G networks. And in fact,
Speaker 1: T Mobile had rolled out the same sort of technology
Speaker 1: and its networks three years earlier, and T Mobile was
Speaker 1: still calling it four G because you know, it was
Speaker 1: it was good for G but it was still four G,
Speaker 1: but A T and T was marketing it as five
Speaker 1: G E, and the company understandably became the target of criticism,
Speaker 1: largely from other carriers, and T Mobile was chief among them.
Speaker 1: It took more than a year of pressure, but T
Speaker 1: Mobile had turned to the National Advertising Division to protest
Speaker 1: that A T. T was using five G as a
Speaker 1: marketing tool when it wasn't actually using five G technologies,
Speaker 1: and T Mobile's claim was that this amounts to false advertising.
Speaker 1: So the National Advertising Division told A T and T
Speaker 1: to knock that stuff off, and after appealing this decision
Speaker 1: and then being shot down, A T and T agreed
Speaker 1: to no longer use five G E and its advertising
Speaker 1: and marketing in twenty twenty, though the five G E
Speaker 1: icon still appears on customers phones using four G LTE networks.
Speaker 1: Uh that being said, A T and T also has
Speaker 1: legit five G handsets and five G infrastructure in some places,
Speaker 1: So if you have a phone on A T and
Speaker 1: T S low or mid band five G network and
Speaker 1: you connect to one of those, it will say five G,
Speaker 1: not five G E five G. If you connect to
Speaker 1: a high band network, then you get the five G
Speaker 1: plus icon. But even in the old LTE network you'll
Speaker 1: c five G E even though it's four G technology.
Speaker 1: Other companies didn't come out spotless in this whole endeavor either.
Speaker 1: Verizon caught some major criticism after airing ads that said
Speaker 1: five G technology would enable other big breakthroughs, such as
Speaker 1: in medical treatments for cancer. Now that is just difficult
Speaker 1: to back up. The low latency and the high data
Speaker 1: throughput are helpful in a lot of applications, assuming you
Speaker 1: can take advantage of mid band or preferably high band
Speaker 1: five G frequencies. But faster transmission speeds and lower latency
Speaker 1: don't magically make new technologies just appear. They can facilitate implementations,
Speaker 1: but they don't make them just happen. So as a comparison,
Speaker 1: faster computers doesn't immediately mean you're going to get better software. Right.
Speaker 1: You can make a more sophisticated software of possibility by
Speaker 1: creating faster computers, but it doesn't make it a certainty. Moreover,
Speaker 1: for facilities like hospitals, in hospital networks are likely to
Speaker 1: be robust enough without five G to give the speeds
Speaker 1: and low latency that you need for stuff like telesurgery,
Speaker 1: For example, Now you could argue that five G could
Speaker 1: extend that capability beyond well funded hospitals, But then you're
Speaker 1: left with the question of how likely is it that
Speaker 1: a mobile carrier is going to build out its network
Speaker 1: into regions that are either outside of dense urban centers
Speaker 1: or outside of more privileged areas. In general, I mean,
Speaker 1: the networks are going to be built to where the
Speaker 1: customers are at a density that's high enough to justify
Speaker 1: the expense. So I don't think it's really likely that
Speaker 1: we're gonna see carriers building out five G network infrastructure
Speaker 1: surrounding hospitals to give that, you know, one thousand feet
Speaker 1: of coverage in every direction now, so you'd have to
Speaker 1: build multiple and tan is around your typical hospital to
Speaker 1: really cover it. And even then, the high band stuff
Speaker 1: is not gonna penetrate the walls of the hospital, so
Speaker 1: there's some limited use here. Then we have the political angle.
Speaker 1: The tech powering five G comes from all over the place,
Speaker 1: including China, and one of the big companies that is
Speaker 1: involved with five G technology is Whawei. But there are
Speaker 1: some concerns among some governments in the world that a
Speaker 1: communications network built atop a Chinese companies technology would be
Speaker 1: vulnerable to backdoor snooping from Chinese government officials. There's a
Speaker 1: concern that could be genuine or it could be manufactured,
Speaker 1: depending upon the case that a technology is critical as
Speaker 1: a communications infrastructure, could be made vulnerable to bad actors
Speaker 1: from official Chinese sources. And since China has a reputation
Speaker 1: for doing stuff like encouraging hackers to infiltrate systems and
Speaker 1: other nations, that could concern is understandable. On top of that, however,
Speaker 1: do you also have complicating matters like the trade disputes
Speaker 1: between China and the United States, You know, and in
Speaker 1: recent years, President Trump has taken a pretty hard stance
Speaker 1: against China and any chance of China playing a part
Speaker 1: in building out five G networks within the United States. Now,
Speaker 1: whether that is from a genuine concern about national security,
Speaker 1: or it's more of a part of a bargaining strategy
Speaker 1: in a trade war, or maybe it's a bit of both,
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to say. Honestly, I think that
Speaker 1: caution is warranted, largely because I think the Chinese government
Speaker 1: would be really tempted to persuade Huahwei to incorporate backdoors
Speaker 1: in their systems to allow for data collection and surveillance. Now,
Speaker 1: I probably would have shrugged that off a few years ago,
Speaker 1: just because the amount of useless information you would be
Speaker 1: pulling in would be enormous, so the signal to noise
Speaker 1: ratio would be all out of whack. You would have
Speaker 1: way too much no ways and too little signal. But
Speaker 1: now we're in the era of big data analysis, and
Speaker 1: I think it's harder to dismiss those concerns out of hand,
Speaker 1: because we're getting better at finding the signal even in
Speaker 1: massive amounts of noise, thanks to stuff like machine learning
Speaker 1: and artificial intelligence. So I'm a little more cautious now.
Speaker 1: And then we get to the conspiracy theories. Now, I
Speaker 1: am not certain how these things get started. For some people,
Speaker 1: it may just be a joke, uh, this idea that
Speaker 1: you know, the wireless technology was creating health issues. With
Speaker 1: more recent incidents, specifically attempting to link five G technology
Speaker 1: with the spread of coronavirus. There's long been a belief
Speaker 1: among some people that radio waves are somehow affecting them adversely,
Speaker 1: even though there's not really any real scientific evidence to
Speaker 1: show a means for how that would happen. Radio transmissions
Speaker 1: don't have the same sort of of impact on us
Speaker 1: that high energy electromagnetic radiation can have. You know, stuff
Speaker 1: like in the X ray and gamma ray range. That
Speaker 1: stuff can have a real effect on us. Radio waves
Speaker 1: have not really been shown to do that. Um, if
Speaker 1: you were to do double blind tests with these people,
Speaker 1: at least the ones I've seen, the one the studies
Speaker 1: I've read, they've used double blind tests don't really show
Speaker 1: any proof that anything is really happening. A double blind,
Speaker 1: by the way, is a test in which neither the
Speaker 1: subject of the test or the person administering the test
Speaker 1: knows if that subject is in a control group or not,
Speaker 1: or under control conditions or not. Uh that way, the
Speaker 1: person who's administering the test can't give any hints or
Speaker 1: clues or indications to the subject about whether or not
Speaker 1: the actual thing that's being tested is happening. So, in
Speaker 1: the case of someone who's concerned about electromagnetic radiation, you
Speaker 1: could design a test where an administrator takes the subject
Speaker 1: to a room that may or may not have an
Speaker 1: active radio transmitter of some sort inside that room, and
Speaker 1: the person who's administering the test would also not know
Speaker 1: if the antenna were active or if anything was happening
Speaker 1: in that room, So they wouldn't be able to indicate
Speaker 1: to the subject, Hey, you're going into a control room
Speaker 1: where nothing's happening, or you're going into an actual test
Speaker 1: room you're gonna get bombarded by radio waves. Neither party
Speaker 1: would know, and it would only be after the test
Speaker 1: was fully run and the results were looked at that
Speaker 1: you would be able to see was there any connection
Speaker 1: between when we were running a control and when we
Speaker 1: were running an actual test and the supposed reactions from
Speaker 1: the subject. As far as I've seen, none of that
Speaker 1: is really paid off, Like it just doesn't show that
Speaker 1: there's any actual causal link between radio waves and a
Speaker 1: person's alleged symptoms or or actions to it. Getting back
Speaker 1: to the conspiracies, it's possible that some people conflated five
Speaker 1: G as being related to coronavirus because the reports were
Speaker 1: that the earliest cases of coronavirus originated out of China,
Speaker 1: and thus those people made some big leaps beyond logic
Speaker 1: that coronavirus emerged from China. Chinese companies are involved with
Speaker 1: creating five G technology. Therefore five G technologies somehow has
Speaker 1: something to do with transmitting of virus. But I don't
Speaker 1: think I need to spend any real time at all
Speaker 1: pointing out how none of that really makes any sense.
Speaker 1: There's no linking there. We've seen this escalate in some places,
Speaker 1: including incidents of people setting fire to masks, that is,
Speaker 1: the polls that hold up network equipment. We saw that
Speaker 1: happen several times in the UK. Whether those fires were
Speaker 1: started by people who genuinely believe that five G is
Speaker 1: somehow transmitting a virus, which again is not possible, or
Speaker 1: that the five G antenna's posed some other sort of
Speaker 1: health hazard, or maybe they're just trying to stir up trouble,
Speaker 1: I can't say, but I can say that physical damage
Speaker 1: isn't something easy to defend when it comes to this
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Maybe some of this links back to
Speaker 1: technologies that are just so complex and so sophisticated that
Speaker 1: they are beyond the understanding of the average person. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a famous saying I believe it is Arthur C.
Speaker 1: Clarke who said that any technology that's sufficiently sophisticate enough
Speaker 1: will be indistinguishable from magic. The idea being that if
Speaker 1: it's so complicated that you cannot understand how it works.
Speaker 1: You might as well be told it's magic. It will
Speaker 1: make no difference to you because you won't be able
Speaker 1: to understand it either way. And the fact is that
Speaker 1: people want explanations. They want to be able to understand
Speaker 1: why things are happening, and in the the lack of
Speaker 1: an explanation, they might to conclusions that are not really supportable,
Speaker 1: but they might be comforting because they offer up an
Speaker 1: explanation for the thing that is happening in the world
Speaker 1: around them. Um, it's a lot easier to take a
Speaker 1: fake explanation and and accept that than to try and
Speaker 1: understand the real explanations. In some cases you have to
Speaker 1: do fewer Furrier transforms if you're talking about fake science,
Speaker 1: for example, So that kind of wraps up what five
Speaker 1: G is and what it isn't, and it is really confusing.
Speaker 1: It's a It's easy to understand why people would get
Speaker 1: kind of hung up on all this part of it,
Speaker 1: because the marketing messages have been really pushing hard on
Speaker 1: a narrative that I don't think is really going to
Speaker 1: play out in the real world, at least not the
Speaker 1: way the marketing makes it seem. Um. On the flip side.
Speaker 1: We have people who are either just desperately looking for
Speaker 1: answers or are looking to stir up trouble and thus
Speaker 1: are spreading fake stories. So I get it, but I
Speaker 1: wanted to try and clear things up as best I could.
Speaker 1: I hope this was helpful. If you have suggestions for
Speaker 1: future topics on tech stuff, whether it's a specific technology,
Speaker 1: a company, a trend in tech, let me know, Send
Speaker 1: me a message on Twitter handle this text stuff hs W,
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
Speaker 1: is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
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