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CenterF use Broadband Feasibility Report • The standards set a speed goal to eventually achieve widespread cellular speeds of 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload. Contrary to the cellular company press releases, the official standards goal of 5G is not to create blazingly fast gigabit cellular service. • The last important improvement is to achieve latency at near-fiber levels. Latency measures a delay in a signal, and today cellular signals have higher latency than fiber connections. This is the one of the reasons why it often feels sluggish to download a web page on a cellphone. These improvements won't all be introduced at once. The cellular equipment manufacturers typically introduce each new improvement as they are perfected, and it's likely to take much of this decade for all 5G improvements to be implemented. The same thing happened with the transition from 3G and 4G and the first true 4G cell site that fully meets the 4G specifications was just activated at the end of 2018—even though the cellular carriers have been selling what they call 4G service for a decade. This gradual introduction of the 5G improvements will mean a gradual improvement of 4G technology. In industry lingo, in five years we might see enough of the 5G standards implemented that from a technical perspective we'll be at 4.5G. Until then, from a technical perspective the industry will grow through 4.1G, 4.2 G etc. Even though this will take a decade to be fully implemented, the cellular marketing folks started making claims about having 5G cellular in 2019. The goal of achieving 100 Mbps cellular speeds is due to a major change in the way that the cellular network functions. Today's network is based upon the idea of roaming. For both voice and broadband purposes today's cellphone makes only one connection at a time to the cell tower that provides the strongest signal (and which has an open slot). 5G introduces a radical change and would allow for a handset to connect to multiple cell sites and draw broadband from each of them. This is done using MIMO (multi-input multi-output) antennas that can make and sustain multiple connections. This is the most difficult 5G challenge to implement in the real world. First, in most places there are only one or two existing cell sites. Most of the cool 5G features are only going to work in places where enough new small cell sites are added to increase the available transmitters. In practical terms this means that in many places, cellular data speeds will remain at 4G levels, even after 5G implementation—any place where a customer can see only one cell site will not get faster broadband speeds. 5G Hotspots This is the product that Verizon shows on TV that delivers gigabit and faster speeds to a cellphone. There are a lot of features to this application that probably mean the technology is not going to see widespread use. • • The technology uses millimeter wave spectrum. This is extremely high frequency of 12 GHz and faster. The primary characteristic of millimeter wave spectrum is that it doesn't travel very far before dissipating. If deployed as an outdoor hotspot, as being done by Verizon, the signal is strong for perhaps 300 feet from the transmitter and the signal largely disappears by about 1,000 feet. To deploy this as an outdoor technology like Verizon is doing requires deploying a fiber-fed transmitter every 1,000 feet or even less. That means building fiber along the streets where the technology will be deployed— something that is expensive. Page 74