Tag Archives: 5G

Wearables have been around for over a decade, in the consumer market as smart watches and fitness sensors and in industrial setting as tools for specific needs in the production/operation processes. Due to the need of keeping consumption down (particularly in the consumer market) wearables are seen as adds on …

OK, it is now time to consider a “real” wireless network! Smartphones, complex IoTs or aggregates of IoTs (like vehicles), have been addressed to as “terminals”. In fact, it is now a few years that in several occasions this name no longer apples. Think at the tethering supported by your …

Wireless networks are everything but wireless. The “core” part is basically undistinguishable from the wireline network, however, their edges are quite different, of course, comprising base stations, poles, antennas … but still very “fixed” indeed. For many years these edges have been “passive”, dumb. Their role was to convert the …

All considered it may be unsurprising that devices like smartphones are driving service evolution. What is more surprising is that they are also driving the “physical network” evolution! Watching the iPhone 12 presentation I noticed the statement of Hans Vestberg, Chairman and CEO of Verizon, stating that “5G just got …

6. Network Architecture The telecommunication network, seen from a mile above, has kept evolving towards a flatter and flatter architecture. It was very hierarchical in the beginning, a call from Siena to Philadelphia would have to be routed via Florence, Rome, London, New York to reach its destination in Philadelphia. …

Power issues are not limited to devices,  they are also affecting the wireless network operation cost. As shown in the previous post we have seen an increasing demand of power in base stations as we moved to more advanced cellular systems. Increased bandwidth, MIMO and smart antennas, all require more …

5. Power requirement All this increase in processing on the device side goes hand in hand with the increase of power demand, yet such increase, as pointed out in previous posts, is not manageable because increased power means: increased dissipation in form of heat (second law of thermodynamics); increased drain …

4. Processing capacity in the devices Addressing spectrum efficiency and availability in the previous posts I mentioned over and over the need for processing power to both exploit the spectrum (efficiency) and taking advantage of available one. For the former the transmitting/receiving device needs to use multiple antennas and combine/process …

3. Spectrum availability Electromagnetic fields are pervasive. It took a long time to spot them. The first one to detect that something was going on was probably Ørsted, back in 1819, noticing that a current change in a wire placed nearby a compass would affect it. A few years later …

I had, recently, an interesting conversation with some analysts looking at the implication of 6G (yes, 6 not 5). That in itself was surprising since most of the time analysts are looking at the next quarter. Yet, they were interested on what kind of impact 6G might have on telecom …