Will There Be a 7G?

jruohonen

Well, I suppose the rolling out of 5G must happen at some point, but otherwise his/her take in Section III.A is spot on and the most important takeaway.

BlackRabbit1

5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G? I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM. Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are famous for suffering this much.

respectattentio

The right question: Will 7G be needed? I say no for the next 15 years. Because there are 1425235 other things that are way much important than this.

tolugenius

Could there come a limit to the G-cycle? Like either a) marginal gains slow/stall progress or b) more connectivity simply not being better? Curious to hear from folks in this field if this question has been raised.

ck2

even the moon only has 4G well if they ever get the lander upright, you'd think they'd learn to put crashbags that self-inflate to upright landers by now * https://www.wired.com/story/nokia-4g-network-on-the-moon/

Havoc

There will always be new Gs...marketing teams require it. I hope they go into the direction wifi is taking though - stability rather than speed. I never think about cell speeds being slow anymore but irritation at lack of coverage is still frequent. Esp in urban jungles where buildings block it

walrus01

Note that "G" generally is a marketing term for consumers, the actual tech is 3GPP rev-whatever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP Like 3GPP release 15 or 16 is what we currently know as a lot of in production LTE/LTE-Advanced stuff.

zkms

Run the abstract through pangram.com; this is AI slop: https://www.pangram.com/history/49f81c92-a2f4-46f6-91b3-e185...

0utcast

Ironically for mobile data, I've liked and found 4G to be more consistent. Not always as fast, but it never drops for me or fails to load.

prism56

Can't answer this question as I know basically nothing. I'd be perfectly happy with less headline speed increases and just a real world busy tower speed improvement. That or efficiency gains.

general1465

Unlikely. 5G hit the wall on UWB (Ultra Wide Band; 10-100GHz) because geniuses who were doing marketing for its transfer speeds did not realized that such high frequencies are disrupted with minimal amount conductive material in the air - so surprise surprise, 5G UWB does not work when you are behind a wall, it does not work when your big head full of water is in the way of BTS and most perplexing for common folk, it does not work behind a glass because regular glass is full of iron - so forget on 5G UWB on a train, tram or bus, unless somebody put mini BTS inside the vehicle. So 5G for most folks is just marginally better LTE and that's about it. Any higher frequencies like 6G (30GHZ~3THz) or 7G (???) won't achieve much of anything outside of laboratory, because they will hit exactly same walls like 5G UWB.

karim79

I'm still waiting for faster SMS. SMPP needs a performance update. This is important everyone.

wartywhoa23

Yes, there will be, to deliver two minute hates to the telescreens.

ortusdux

I'm surprised that Starlink didn't try and steal the branding. If anything would count as a new Generation in radio communication...

j45

There will always be a faster technology, regardless of what it's called.

ksec

It needs to work backwards, much like Video Codec and ask what do the stakeholders really want or need? We are closing in to rolling out the last / final phase of 5G. And yet none of the Massive MIMO on FDD is happening. We are still stuck on 32T32R, hardly that impressive considering we have that in LTE already. Not to mention the insane complexity increase from 4G to 5G. And judging from the previews of 6G that seems to be event worst. If you ask an average user, they will tell you they don't feel much different between 4G and 5G. Yes there are capacity increase and other things. But at this stage I don't think the benefits outweigh the cost of switching. That is both from MNOs and End user perspective.

loeg

We've already got the G7.

lukeschlather

We really need a hybrid short-haul standard designed for short-range transmission. Something that uses low-frequency spectrum currently allocated to 5G but isn't locked to a single carrier and the protocol can be shared between WiFi and Cellular. Staking out some new frequencies would be great too.

ande-mnoc

Both the abstract and the introduction score a 100% on Pangram. What’s going on there?