The vision for 5G

To understand the value of 5G, we must first understand more about the technology. Cellular carriers are marketing 5G intensively, touting how it is designed to achieve up to 5Gbps in downlink peak data rate. The vision of 5G is predominantly about speeds that are 10X — 100X faster than 4G and capacity levels that are 1,000X greater.

There is a general industry consensus that traffic volumes will be multiplied

1,000 times, and 100 times more devices will require connectivity. Some applications will demand data rates 100 times the speeds the average networks can currently deliver. Some will require near-zero latency and the industry will work to enable battery lives up to 10 years.

For it to be effective, 5G must be integrated with previous generations, just as 4G LTE networks support 3G devices. 3G has not completely satisfied user performance demands, while 4G removed circuit switching and its wider frequency channels reduced the latency.

The technology is expected to dramatically improve quality of service, and extend that quality over a broader geographic area, for the wireless industry to remain competitive against the onset of gigabit fiber service, coupled with Wi-Fi. Utilities are less likely to be interested in improved speed.

Where 5G fits into telecommunications

Telcos have overrated network speeds. Current 4G networks deliver speeds more than 10Mbps/s when not congested. Some carriers market 4G speeds over 1Gbps/s when aggregating multiple 4G carriers, which makes it difficult to understand why speeds faster than 4G might be needed.

Latency is also an issue. 4G has a theoretical latency of 10 ms. Additional delays occur in the core networks of the cell carriers. Work is underway to reduce the theoretical latency to 5ms. Within the 5G community, the original 1ms latency target is impractical and has been modified to 8ms.

For telcos, data rates must continue to improve, and projecting a 50 percent growth per year is highly optimistic. So why do 5G advocates call for a growth data capacity of 100X or even 1000X? Regulators have struggled to find more radio spectrum. The actual data usage has fallen off somewhat. A plateau in usage will occur and has already been reached by the heaviest users. There can be additional spectrum re-allocated from 2G and 3G to 4G, and that can provide 2X-3X improvement in capacity.

In the past, utilities relied upon agreements with the telcos to provide 24-hour restoral service on their leased 4-wire circuits. Local telcos were the only way utilities could reliably and economically reach all sites, especially in rural areas, which meant utilities had little control over that part of their networks. Over time, the situation has changed dramatically. Now, the minimum telco lease is a T1 (and they are trying to move past those), so when one circuit is lost, it can take out up to 24 channels — not just one. Worse, trouble calls are answered only during the work week. Any failures outside of office hours have to wait until the next business day. Meanwhile, utility’s in-house technicians may be working on holidays like Christmas. So, when economically feasible, utilities prefer to run their own communications equipment.

5G doesn’t offer power utilities any more capabilities than the current 4G system. Sure, it offers much higher speeds, but utilities don’t need Gb speeds. In a recent conversation with a multi-state utility, I learned that the majority of their SCADA RTUs are still running on Bell 202 1200 baud modems. They deployed wireless for mundane tasks such as reading remote meters but rarely for SCADA. If they did use it for SCADA, it was temporary while they built permanent facilities.

Are "5G Evolution" and other intermediate steps necessary for 5G? The true purpose of 5G wireless is to produce a global business model where expenses are lower, and revenue from services is higher, due to the presence of more and greater services than 4G could provision for. So, there is a valid argument, from a marketing standpoint, in favor of a gradual deconstruction of 4G branding.

Last September, telecommunications companies began incorporating the term “5G” into their marketing efforts. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg declared, “5G is here,” specifically for cities such as Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis, where rival AT&T had already been drumming up excitement around its 5G trials. It was a bit like SpaceX's announcements in 2016 that the race to Mars had begun. They made the same announcements in 2017 and 2018.

Enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) aims to service more densely populated metropolitan centers with downlink speeds approaching 1Gbps indoors, and 300Mbps (megabits-per-second) outdoors. It would accomplish the installation of extremely high-frequency millimeter-wave (mmWave) antennas throughout the landscape — on lampposts, the sides of buildings, the branches of trees, existing electrical towers and in one novel used proposed by AT&T, the tops of city buses.

Since each of these antennas, in the metro use case, would cover an area probably no larger than a baseball diamond, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them would be needed to thoroughly service any densely populated downtown area. For more suburban and rural areas, eMBB would seek to replace 4G's current LTE system, with a new network of lower-power omnidirectional antennas providing 50Mbps downlink service.

The aesthetics of 5G networks

5G is touted as a fiber replacement, capable of delivering speeds up to a gigabit to homes and businesses. This kind of 5G (which is different than 5G cellular) is going to use the millimeter wave spectrum bands. There are a few characteristics of that spectrum that define how 5G networks must be deployed. This spectrum has extremely short wavelengths, and that means two things. First, the signal isn’t going to travel very far before the signal dissipates and grows too weak to deliver fast data (typically about 1500 ft at 24GHz). Second, these short wavelengths don’t penetrate anything. They won’t go through leaves, walls, or even through a person walking past the transmitter — so these frequencies require a true unimpeded line-of-sight connection.

These characteristics are going to be problematic for the typical residential street. Go outside your house and see if there is a perfect line-of-sight from any one pole to your home or to any of your neighbors. The required unobstructed path means there can be no tree, shrub or other impediment between the transmitter on a pole and each home getting this service.

Changes will need to be made to building regulations, and it seems that the FCC has thought of that, as unlike 3G/4G, municipalities are forbidden to regulate microcell locations. The city of San Rafael, CA had its city hall mobbed by angry citizens who didn’t want their city despoiled with what thus far is frankly, ugly equipment.

Dish Network and other satellite TV providers are 7.050 to 7.075 GHz, which can exhibit fading in heavy snowfall, meaning the signal disappears. It will be interesting to see what 5G 24 GHz cell site antennas look like, especially when there will be so many.

The next consideration is back-haul — how to get the broadband signals into and out of the neighborhood. Ideally, this would be done using fiber, but it’s hard to imagine anyone spending the money to string fiber in small towns or most residential neighborhoods, just to support wireless. The high cost of stringing fiber is the primary impediment for getting a newer network into cities.

One of the main alternatives to stringing fiber is to feed neighborhoods 5G nodes with point-to-point microwave radio shots. In a neighborhood like mine, these wouldn’t be any more practical than the 5G signal paths.

All of this sounds dreadful enough, but to top it off the network described would be needed for a single wireless provider. If more than one company wants to provide wireless broadband, the number of devices multiply accordingly. The whole promise of 5G is that it will allow for multiple new competitors, which implies a town filled with multiple wireless devices on poles.

With all of these physical deployment issues, there is still the cost factor. The cost to install the necessary neighborhood transmitters doesn’t make for a compelling business case for 5G.

Nobody is going to be building a 5G network in my neighborhood or yours, for the same sorts of reasons they aren’t building fiber networks.

The next waves

Once complete, 5G is expected to constitute an overhaul of communications infrastructure unlike any other in history. The real reason for the shift from 4G to 5G is not so much to get faster as it is to make the wireless industry sustainable over the long term, as 4G is claimed to be approaching unsustainability faster than the industry experts predicted.

The first wave of 5G-branded services is effectively 4G, or 4G extensions, which place consumers on the right track for future 5G upgrades, thus guaranteeing the revenue sources that 5G will require to be successful, or if only to just break even.

However, in January 2019, Verizon CEO Vestberg indicated to financial analysts that 5G Home rollout might remain limited to the initial test area for some time, as the company awaits new standards for customer premise (CP) equipment.

There are traditionally three ways the mobile industry can add more capacity to its network: by adding more spectrum, by improving spectrum efficiency, or by rolling out more infrastructure. As we've seen, no one's quite sure how the spectrum arm-wrestling will play out. As for improving spectrum efficiency, according to Volker Ziegler, technology and innovation chief architect at Nokia's networking arm, every generation of mobile tech brings a threefold improvement in efficiency — that is, you can get three times as many bits through on the same bit of spectrum. As Ziegler speculated, “Perhaps we could get that to five, 10 or 20 times,” but it still wouldn't be enough to hit the multi-gigabit future that 5G foresees.

That leaves installing more infrastructure, but the idea of more base stations going up in high-footfall areas is unlikely to be a popular prospect in most towns and cities. Small cells — shrunk-down base stations — offer a more palatable alternative for both operators and town planners.

Small cells help fill in gaps in coverage left by the full-fat base stations that underpin a mobile macrocell. Up until now, small cells have chiefly been installed in business premises and homes to bolster dodgy in-building mobile coverage; with 5G, the idea is to throw up loads of small cells in densely populated, high-data-demand urban areas.

Small cells are, as their name suggests, far more petite — even smaller than a home router — and don't need to be installed as high up as normal mobile masts. It’s claimed that small cells can be made almost unnoticeable, strapped to lamp posts, or in the future, built into bricks in buildings. Small cells have a much-reduced range compared to their bigger siblings, at around 1500 ft. That means there's a potential challenge with handover from cell to cell.

5G is a collective bargain between the telecom industry and society. To allow for anything close to evenly distributed coverage over a metropolitan area, the base stations containing the transmitters and receivers (the "cells") must be smaller, much lower in power, and much greater in number than they are today. Essentially, the new cell towers must co-exist with the environment. An outdoor photograph taken in any direction will be just as likely to include a 5G tower as not, more likely three.

Most of the pieces needed for device connectivity are now in place. Software is now available that can gather data from devices across multiple networks that include intelligence that can simplify the deployment process of smart meters that are turned on for the first time and automatically configured by the network software rather than requiring the installation technician to enter details of the customer. However, a key missing piece is a wide-area wireless solution that provides very low cost ($2 hardware, $2/year connectivity), 10-year battery life and ubiquitous coverage. History has shown that the market tends to bump along the bottom until all the pieces are firmly in place at which time it only takes a small stimulus (like the iPhone) to result in explosive growth.

Contiguous deployment throughout a city like Manhattan would require sites every 500-600 ft. Each site would need to be able to support large antenna structures (not the tiny antennas hidden in false bricks discussed previously. Lampposts are suggested, but they are unsightly (electronics in boxes strapped to the poles), and they’ll need fiber to backhaul to the network, which would be expensive.

Advances become expensive, requiring more antennas at the base station and more small cells, new frequency bands. Utilities now find it difficult to find room for their private wireless solutions such as mesh networks for metering and distribution automation such as S&C InteliTEAM switches. All are untried and will require substantial development.

The advent of 4G provided a capacity enhancement of around 2.5X at very little cost. This is not likely for 5G. Capacity enhancements appear to be below 2X (industry estimates as low as 1.2X) and come at a very high cost.

The driving force

So, what’s the driving force to 5G? It’s in the interests of all the key players to be supportive or even strong promoters of 5G. Academics rely on 5G for funding research, and of course, publishing technical papers (publish or perish as they say). Manufacturers will rely on the rollout of 5G to provide boosts in revenues. Those who understand the technology are mystified because much of rural America is still not covered by cell service, and 5G won’t be their savior.

The 5G community claims that 5G is intended to solve all the problems of the mobile community, but how it will benefit utilities remains to be seen. The current vision is utopian and reliant on fantastic breakthroughs in radio technology and subscribers increasing their spending.

Case in point, I recently visited a friend in Auburn, CA, which is an hour northeast of Sacramento. Once there, I discovered that my Verizon iPhone8+ couldn’t get cell coverage. My friend uses Dish Network TV as there’s no reliable cable in her subdivision. She gets Internet land line service from AT&T DSL, which occasionally provides 12Mbps/s down/6 Mbps/s up. AT&T is also her cellular provider, but the signal in her home is spotty, so I went to a Verizon store and purchased a $350 microcell device that is attached via an Ethernet cable to the DSL modem. I got five bars, and I used this during dinner one evening with my friend and her guests. The locals who had Verizon cellphones were astonished that their phones worked. A few hours into the evening, the DSL went out, so there was no land line, no cell service and no way notify anyone if an emergency occurred. Keep in mind, my friend lives in a suburb of Sacramento, which is one of the test cities for Verizon 5G.

The speed of data connection Is now becoming less important than consistency.¹ The ability to be connected at a reasonable speed everywhere, rather than aiming for ever-faster connections and enhanced coverage on some known problematic areas, such as my friend’s rural location, would probably generate greater economic value. The result — connectivity everywhere — would be one well worth striving for. A great communications system is one available everywhere, all the time, with minimum congestion and at low cost.

A more likely outcome is that there isn’t much true 5G deployment, but the industry saves face by claiming that 4G systems currently being implemented are actually 5G. Anyone can, and will, claim they have a 5G network even if they just have the latest 4G upgrade.

With this basic understanding of 5G technology, we can now ask, Is 5G valuable to utilities? I don’t think so. It’s having negative effects as investments are going into 5G, leaving 4G behind instead of finishing the job of providing reliable, seamless 4G cell coverage to all areas of the country.

The 1934 Telecommunications Act made the phone companies serve everyone with plain old telephone service (POTS). No exceptions. Why doesn’t Congress do the same for cell service as it has become plain old telephone service for a lot of people? If Congress passed an Act making it a law that broadband Internet service be provided to all, that would also be a good thing. It would improve our economy and create jobs, and it would enable utilities to benefit from seamless and proven 4G cell coverage.

¹ W. Webb, “The 5G Myth: When Vision Decoupled from Reality,” p.91-109, 2019