A future with 5g

As mobile researchers and networking companies kick around potential 5G technologies in their labs, the Federal Communications Commission is taking its own regulatory whack at the ball.

These frequencies, often referred to as millimeter waves, reside high above the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum used for mobile communications (which today stretches from 700 MHz to 2.7 GHz). There’s a lot of spectrum up there for the taking, but the problem is range. At the lower power levels needed for mobile communications, those waves just don’t propagate that far.

Typically millimeter waves are used for backhaul, connecting towers and buildings with high-powered point-to-point links. There’s a lot of discussion today about using those frequencies in both today’s 4G and future 5G networks to link to together vast networks of small cells. Those tiny cells will layer enormous amounts of capacity into dense high-traffic zones of the network, and millimeter waves would act as the glue connecting them together and back to the network core.

But 5G researchers believe that these millimeter waves could be the final access link between tower and device, delivering wireless speeds unheard of today; in the 1 Gbps range or higher. The idea is to use massive antenna arrays and beam shaping techniques to send a boatload of parallel low-power signals to a receiver. Those low-power signals would reinforce one another, greatly increasing the distance they could travel while preserving their data fidelity.