In this episode, Darren talks to frequent Intel guests Leland Brown, Principal Engineer: Technical Director of Advanced Communications, and Dr. Anna Scott, Chief Edge Architect for Public Sector, about the history of advanced comms.
The first generation of cell phone technology, the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), was developed in the late 70s and early 80s. In the early 80s, making a call from your car with a bulky bag phone was a luxury. The luxury of making a mobile device call soon became a necessity.
In the early 90s, technology progressed as the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard developed to describe the protocols for 2G, which became the global standard by the mid-2010s. 2G started to turn the mobile phone into something with more capabilities than just making a call, adding texting, and even playing games.
3G launched in the early 2000s and brought some nascent data capabilities with the internet, which is still in its early stages. Wi-Fi was not broadly available, but you could, for example, access a carrier’s data network by connecting a phone to a laptop. You could do minimal, of course, with modem or DSL speeds.
With 4G, technology transitioned into a unified standard, converging CDMA and GSM into one LTE under the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Every carrier started to adopt this common standard. This was when broadband proliferated. Leland credits the economy’s advancement through the 2010s to 4G, allowing companies such as Amazon, Netflix, and Uber and platforms such as YouTube, Google, and Facebook to exist and thrive.
Leland talks about 5G in terms of what the carriers have deployed. 4G and 5G are related because they are part of the same spec line release. Fourteen ends what we call 4G LTE advanced. Fifteen kicks in with 5G NR. In this crossover, there is a business objective and a strategy to adopt the new technology as part of the standard. The business objective is that companies have already invested in their 4G networks, so the current Evolved Packet Core and RAN components of the 4G networks are still in place. They add a 5G RAN box with a different frequency but is still connected back to the 4G core, called non-standalone.
Darren clarifies that 4G was revolutionary because it unlocked many new things and required all new equipment, whereas 5G is more evolutionary because it also opened new things. Still, the underlying technology is based on the same hardware and core.
It’s part of the modulation scheme that 5G provides in the air interface, but the architecture is different; it’s virtualized under 5G compared to more proprietary under 4G. That leads to many capabilities becoming part of the 5G deployments.
One example is a carrier deployed a 4G network by putting a RAN box next to an old 3G box. Many companies, such as Sprint, kept their 3G boxes and CDMA network up for years. In reality, 4G was just another box sitting next to a 3G box. 5G takes that proprietary box and gives the ability to spread the functions of that box across a virtualized network. Part of the baseband of 5G can now be software-defined in scale to multiple areas compared to being contained at one site, box, or location.
This means you can add functionality to your network without replacing hardware. As you go into stand-alone networks, however, you can take a 5G network and do something on-site. For example, suppose you have a skyscraper instead of depending on the network coverage from an antenna sitting outside with a core back at the carrier or a switch station. In that case, you can develop an on-premises network built within that building that proliferates coverage and data services throughout.
This stand-alone network opens up many new capabilities and enables new players. It also allows organizations such as the federal government and the Department of Defense to adopt the technology for their use cases. They have more flexibility when they are not highly dependent on the carriers.
Anna notes that in addition to new players and new on-prem capabilities, there is also the ability to use the CBRS spectrum. The way it is managed is complex, but there is non-priority that you can use for free, and priority, the Navy spectrum, that you can buy if you need no disruption. Some extensive manufacturing facilities are using the CBRS spectrum, either working with a primary carrier that does not charge for scope or working with a new entrant who will set up an on-prem stand-alone network with CBRS. This is a very different model, and there are real advantages to the wavelength and complexity of the systems that you can set up with 5G over Wi-Fi.
There are still some advantages to Wi-Fi, but setting up a robust Wi-Fi network can be challenging, especially if you are moving large pieces of metal around. If you have a set configuration, it makes sense to go with Wi-Fi 6, especially if the economics work.
Demand drives change; most end users are comfortable with 4G on their personal devices. So why go to 5G? The value 5G brings isn’t necessarily the higher data rates and lower latency; those services are provided at a broad scale because it’s virtualized. 5G is software intensive compared to 4G, which is more about proprietary boxes and based on hardware. 5G can be virtualized in position in many places. The frequency portfolio is dynamic, and you can utilize unlicensed bands, licensed bands, and CBRS, so there are many more options.
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