Samsung sends gigabit '5G' signal TWO WHOLE KILOMETRES

Marketecture wars The world is getting excited at the advent of “5G” wireless systems with a demonstration of a gigabit air interface using the 28 GHz band by Samsung.

It's not too bad as a piece of early-stage academic technology demonstration, as it happens: the engineers used 64 antenna elements in what you might think of as a “massively MIMO” system, getting a gigabit per second download over a distance of two kilometres.


That huge number of antenna elements is required because of what Samsung says are the “unfavourable propagation characteristics” experienced at such a high carrier frequency. The Samsung announcement doesn't mention the channel width required to get gigabit speeds.

5G it ain't: it's merely Samsung's demonstration of its proposed air interface for whatever eventually gets proposed for the full suite of 5G standards, at some point in the future. Right now, whatever over-excitable journalists in the mainstream think, “5G” is nothing more than a “marketecture”, that odd progeny of marketing and technology in which something that doesn't exist is conjured up by the application of the right jargon.

So let's get this straight: there is no such thing as 5G, except in the fevered minds of marketing departments.

There is, for example, no working group in any standards body, no allocation of 28 GHz spectrum anywhere in the world (in Australia the band is allocated to satellite applications). There is not even agreement about whether development beyond 4G should focus on channel capacity or other characteristics. Consider, for example, the battery life that can be anticipated in a handset that's processing 64 separate radio sets.

The main point of the Samsung announcement – apart from publicising a genuine piece of research and engineering – is probably bragging rights. NTT Docomo demonstrated a 10 Gbps link using 11 GHz spectrum in March.

In other words, vendors are jockeying for position, trying to cement their respective approaches to 5G so that it reflects their technology more than someone else's.

And with even the optimists in Samsung's marketing department saying 5G won't be a reality before 2020, we can expect plenty of “we set the record” demonstrations over the next few years. ®

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Samsung takes first 5G steps with advanced antenna

Samsung Electronics plans to use advanced antennas to boost the bandwidth in mobile networks by what it said was "several tens of Gbps per base station", but the improved bandwidth won't be commercially available until 2020.

The company said it can now transmit data at up to 1.056Gbps over distances of up to 2 kilometers using the 28GHz spectrum band.

Spectrum bands that high, which are called millimeter-wave because of the short wavelengths, have both pros and cons. They allow for access to lots of spectrum, which means higher speeds, but signals are not transmitted well over long distances.

Samsung thinks it can overcome that problem with a new adaptive array transceiver that uses 64 antenna elements. The company hasn't provided much detail on how the array works. But, in general, adaptive arrays are used to electronically control the direction of a signal, according to Jens Zander, professor and dean at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

However, Zander isn't convinced that Samsung can overcome the poor signal propagation characteristics.

"At these frequencies the wavelengths are so short that all obstacles become massive. Even your own body casts a large shadow. That has been shown by a number of studies," Zander said.

The key to building faster networks, especially indoors, lies in coming up with better ways of putting a larger number of smaller base stations closer to users, according to Zander.

Today, millimeter-wave spectrum is increasingly being used in cellular networks, but for wireless backhaul links. They are used to connect base stations of all sizes with the rest of the operator's network. The market is set to double in 2013, fueled by the growth of LTE networks, according to Infonetics Research.

Here adaptive arrays can be used simplify network configuration. Instead of having personnel in the field manually setting up the antenna it can configure itself, Zander said.

Samsung isn't the only company experimenting with next-generation networks. Earlier this year, NTT DoCoMo announced it and the Tokyo Institute of Technology had transmitted data at 10Gbps, using 400MHz of spectrum in the 11GHz band. The amount of spectrum compares to current LTE networks, which use up to 20MHz.

To make the higher speed it too used multiple antennas: eight to transmit the data and 16 antennas to receive it. The underlying techology is multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), which is already used in current LTE networks, but with fewer antennas.

Interestingly, the Japanese operator never used the 5G term in its announcement, instead referring to "super-high-bit-rate mobile communications."

But more announcements regarding 5G advancements will surely come, because even though it will take many years before the first networks become commercially available the race between vendors and countries is very much on. For a vendor like Samsung -- whose mobile network equipment isn't as well known as its devices -- it is important to show technological prowess and that the company is in it for the long haul.

"Samsung is still small, but did really well last year compared to the market. It has the ambition to grow and part of that is wanting to be seen," said Sylvain Fabre, research director at Gartner.

Others have also announced 5G plans, including the European Commission. In February, vice president Neelie Kroes announced a €50 million (US$65 million) investment in research to deliver 5G mobile technology by 2020, with the aim of putting Europe back in the lead of the global mobile industry.

NTT DoCoMo's experiment, meanwhile, was sponsored by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

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Slickdeals' best in tech for May 8th: Samsung NX1000 mirrorless camera and Amazon Kindle Fire

Looking to save some coin on your tech purchases? Of course you are! In this roundup, we'll run down a list of the freshest frugal buys, hand-picked with the help of the folks at Slickdeals. You'll want to act fast, though, as many of these offerings won't stick around long.



Sure, tablets and cameras discounted on the regular in our twice weekly roundup, but today an A/V system sees the big price drop. A Denon AVR-1613 receiver andHarmon Kardon HKTS 16 speaker bundle is reduced by over 50% with the aid of a simple discount code. All of the particulars, and the rest of the list, await on the other side of the break.








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