Experts say 5G will eventually deliver, but a speed boost for now

Experts are unanimous in saying Canada’s 5G networks will eventually deliver on their promise, transforming the way we use the internet and leading to an uptake in exciting technologies like augmented and virtual reality, autonomous vehicles and remote surgery. But despite the consensus that 5G will live up to the hype, academics, analysts and industry experts who spoke to The Wire Report say its benefits won’t be fully realized until standalone networks with an updated 5G core are built out and dedicated 5G spectrum is used. Canadians with 5G enabled phones and 5G access through their plans with BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. can receive initial 5G service in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal and the Greater Toronto Area, while Rogers Communications Inc. customers can access it in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa after recent launches. Telus and Rogers say they’ll expand those areas with 5G coverage to 26 and 20 by the end of the year, respectively, while Bell is yet to detail its next steps. With all of the big three not expected to build out their standalone 5G networks until after the 3500 MHz spectrum auction -- recently delayed until June 2021 -- has been held, Canadians will be using initial 5G services through non-standalone networks for the foreseeable future. Bell Mobility president Claire Gillies said in a phone interview that the 3500 MHz spectrum auction was “really the key” to the company building out its standalone 5G network. “The first thing obviously is we need to get 3500 MHz. When you think about all the great advancements, they’re starting here today in 2020 and you’ll see, I’m sure, 3500 MHz spectrum before the end of next year start to roll out, and so then you’ll say late 2021/22 you’ll start to see a significant change to consumer and business experience on 5G,” Gillies said. Asked about its 5G plans, Telus’ vice-president of network and architecture strategy, Bernard Bureau, said in an email that its 5G footprint would grow “over the course of 2020 and beyond” and that the company would look to invest in the 3500 MHz spectrum band, as well as other bands seen to be critical to 5G deployment, in due course. A Rogers spokesperson did not respond to questions about when its standalone network would be built out, but said in an email that 5G would deliver capabilities beyond just speed increases to customers over “the next several years as more 5G devices, spectrum, applications and improved network technology become available.” Catherine Rosenberg, a University of Waterloo electrical and computer engineering professor and the Cisco Research Chair in 5G systems, said in a phone interview that the decision on when standalone 5G networks would come to Canada would be based on commercial reasoning, rather than technology. “The technologies might be there in a year or two, but when it will be especially in Canada, I don’t know. I know we are going to have test beds with real traffic at the University of Waterloo very soon, at the beginning of 2021,” Rosenberg said. “The companies have invested heavily in 4G and they have to get their return on investment before they invest heavily in 5G.” Until those standalone networks are built out, the initial 5G networks of Bell, Rogers and Telus will use the core of their 4G networks, with alterations made to the radio access network (RAN). “Think of it as a set of 5G islands, small cells and so on, but the control, the signalling is still done through 4G. It’s really the RAN that is 5G, the rest is 4G,” Rosenberg said. “With the earlier versions of 5G you only get the advantages of the physical layer technologies, not yet of the new advanced network technologies.” In Canada, Bell, Telus and Rogers are all deploying spectrum that could have been used for 4G networks to deliver their initial 5G service. Bell and Telus’ service uses a 10x10 MHz channel of the AWS-3 band, while Rogers’ service uses 2500 MHz band. Both Telus and Rogers will also deploy 600 MHz spectrum acquired in last year’s auction later in 2020. Bell decided against purchasing 600 MHz spectrum in the auction, saying at the time that it had sufficient low band spectrum to deliver 4G and 5G services. Speed increases will vary Until dedicated 5G spectrum -- high frequency millimeter wave (mmWave), 3500 MHz and 3800 MHz -- is deployed on standalone networks, customers using Canada’s 5G networks with a 5G enabled phone will experience a “4G like” experience, but with faster download speeds, PC Mag’s lead mobile analyst Sascha Segan said in a phone interview. “If we’re talking about 5G in Canada specifically, all of the carriers are just adding 5G in channels that could have used 4G, and it’s going to be a very 4G like experience. It’s more that they are preparing for the future rather than using an old technology that they’re trying to phase out of, though,” Segan said. “If you’re in one of the 5G covered areas, which right now are five major cities, you’ll see somewhat faster speeds, that’s about it. Especially because the 5G channel is not crowded right now, so slowdowns that you would especially run into because the 4G channel is congested won’t happen on the less congested 5G channel.” Rosenberg said that 5G was promising three things -- better service for regular users, Internet of Things connectivity, and latency limited service for critical applications -- but that the last two promises could only be realized on a standalone 5G network. “5G at the end will be very different from 4G, but at this point it’s really trying to get a better rate for the users and this is being done through the earlier introduction of 5G,” Rosenberg said. Estimates and marketing of this speed increase offered by initial versions of 5G vary wildly, much the same as they did 4G network speeds. Gillies said Bell’s initial 5G service would deliver speeds of up to 1.5 Gbps, while Bureau said Telus’ service launched last week would reach “blistering” peak speeds of up to 1.7 Gbps. But those claims need to be taken with a grain of salt, especially ahead of any speed testing by PC Mag or OpenSignal, Segan said. “1.5 Gpbs is the theoretical maximum in the same way that 1.2 Gbps or 1.5 Gbps was the theoretical maximum for the 4G network,” Segan said. “In general when the carriers said 1.2 Gbps on 4G we were seeing an absolute maximum of around 800 Mbps and I think the averages were around 300 Mbps, so when they say 1.5 Gbps I’m expecting a maximum of around 1 Gbps and an average of 400 Mbps.” Most customers will experience a download speed increase of around 50 Mbps, Segan estimates, although PC Mag won’t conduct speed testing of Canada’s initial 5G networks until August. Those speed improvements will be particularly noticeable in the first few months of initial 5G service, because the bulk of customers are still using 4G channels, Segan said. “The first 10 people to buy 5G phones are going to have a really good time. Then it will get more congested and then hopefully the carriers will add more spectrum and that’s how it always goes, and that’s how it has always gone,” Segan said. Rosenberg said speeds on 5G would be “much, much faster” in the long run but the decisions every carrier makes about what kinds of spectrum and technology are used would dictate what speeds were delivered by their initial 5G service. “If it is to prove a point, to show you’re faster than somebody else, it’s very easy to install equipment in a certain way. That’s why it’s very hard to say, you can prove or disprove many things depending on the scenario you exhibit,” Rosenberg said. Gillies would not reveal what speed increase was being experienced by Bell’s customers using its initial 5G network -- stressing a full network test would be conducted over the coming months -- but said Bell’s initial speed tests were “indicating that customers are realizing a speed boost on 5G.” Early speed test results around the world show the average download speeds on 5G networks to be considerably faster than that under 4G, but they vary dramatically depending upon the spectrum being used and how much of it has been deployed. OpenSignal analyst Ian Fogg said non-standalone 5G networks around the world were already providing a “dramatically faster experience,” pointing at recent speed testing that showed average speeds for U.S. carrier Verizon Communications Inc. were 506.4 Mbps with 5G, compared to 27.4 Mbps using the 4G network. Similar huge increases were charted in South Korea, where LG Corporation’s LG U+, SK Telecom Co. Ltd. and KT Corporation had average 5G download speeds in excess of 200 Mbps, compared to 4G averages which ranged between 44 and 64 Mbps. But Canadian 5G watchers point out that all of those operators are using spectrum frequencies not yet available for deployment in this country, with Verizon using mmWave and the South Korean companies using spectrum in the 3500MHz band. Fogg said OpenSignal’s results showed 5G was already a “bit of a step change” compared to 4G and speeds would only increase over time. “I think what we’re going to see in Canada and every country is these initial 5G services are very much the initial take and every operator will be looking to add new capabilities, add new 5G spectrum, add new features like new parts of the upcoming 5G standards and so the experience we see today, which is already incredibly impressive across the initial batch of 5G operators, is only going to get better over the coming years,” Fogg said. Whether customers noticed the speed change associated with initial 5G services would depend on what they were using their cellular connection to do, Fogg said, pointing at mobile gaming and application updates and downloads as uses where it could be detected. 5G will lead to advances we can’t predict yet Although they can’t agree on what speeds users will experience, one thing analysts and the industry see eye to eye on is that 5G will live up to the hype and be truly transformational. Segan says 5G will definitely deliver on its promise, but blames carrier marketing for making people think the transition to 5G is occurring faster than it actually is. And although mobile providers are marketing the transition to 5G as opening the door to exponential increases in Internet of Things connectivity, smart cities, remote surgery, smart agriculture, augmented and virtual reality and autonomous vehicles, he says it’s extremely likely to lead to advances we haven’t predicted, or thought of yet. “I’ve been around through all of the previous wireless transitions and they’ve all massively changed society in very unexpected ways,” Segan said. “When we went from 1G to 2G we thought that the big feature would be clear phone calls but it turned out to be SMS, when we went from 2G to 3G we thought it was going to be video calling, it turned out to be mobile web, 3G to 4G we thought it was going to be laptop internet access and it turned out to be mobile social networking.” “So once the 5G SA networks on dedicated networks get up and running there are going to be these unforeseen new applications that appear and that massively change things and expand the online economy but we do have to get to that stage where they are standalone networks on dedicated spectrum.” Rosenberg said there were similar amounts of marketing at the beginning of 4G, and that while the network eventually delivered on its promise, it took a long time from when announcements were made and marketing campaigns were launched. “I don’t know if history will repeat itself, but at the beginning it’s a question of positioning yourself and everyone is claiming much more than they can really deliver, you have to do it because everyone is doing it,” Rosenberg said. “5G will deliver because we’re using more technology, we are thinking and improving, we understand what we want to do, so yes it will deliver. But how fast it will deliver is absolutely unclear because it’s a question of a lot of money, of priority and look at COVID -- the priority has shifted already. It will happen for sure, but when, I am not too ready to say too much about that.” There’s many key technologies crucial to 5G rolling out: carrier aggregation, which allows a radio to pick up multiple channels simultaneously; massive multiple-input, multiple output (MIMO) antennas that allow data to be transmitted across multiple antennas at once and Quadrature Amplitude Modulation, which allows for more data to be packed into radio waves, enabling multiple blocks of data to be sent simultaneously by each wave. But the two advancements continually spruiked by experts as key to latency dropping to a level where applications such as remote surgery become possible are mobile edge computing, which allows more data to be stored at smaller local data centres, rather than large regional ones; and network slicing, a type of virtual network architecture. A lot of latency experienced by users comes from waiting for data to be collected from regional data centres, Segan says, so carriers are using mobile edge computing to architect their networks to spread data throughout the country so it takes less time for data to travel between the network and a device. That will further shorten the latency that would naturally drop as a result of the additional bandwidth a standalone 5G network boasts, which will also significantly increase the amount of devices that can connect to a network. Network slicing allows priority paths to be created through the network for specific uses, allowing low latency slices to be created for technologies such as vehicular communications. Other slices can then be created to deliver coverage or manage the massive number of devices that will connect to the network under standalone 5G. Average latency under 4G is around 50 milliseconds, but it’s expected to decrease significantly under 5G. 5G technology has been promised to eventually reduce latency speeds to 1ms, about what would be required for remote surgery to be performed, but that claim is regularly cited as hard to verify, much like the hype around speed improvements. Industry sources say latency of less than 20ms is required for augmented and virtual reality applications, while more instantaneous applications require that to be sub 10ms. Fogg tempered some of the marketing hype around innovations that wireless companies say will only be possible because of 5G, saying large strides were being made in augmented reality and autonomous driving before the network was even launched, although a low latency, 5G-enabled experiences could allow types of augmented reality that simply weren’t possible at the moment. He also cast doubt on whether remote surgery would ever occur, saying he feared the risk was too great for it to be performed virtually. “The thing with 5G is you have to listen to these kind of things, and go ‘ok what works in the real world, what’s the real world experience’, not just what the vendors have used to hype up their marketing wares,” Fogg said. While the country waits for standalone 5G networks to be built out and tries to separate fact from hype about the newest generation of cellular technology, Segan said there’s one more marketing trick for Canadians -- particularly those in rural parts of the country -- to be aware of. Mobile providers will dramatically oversell the benefits of 5G networks using the 600MHz spectrum band in regional and rural Canada as a solution to the regional connectivity problem, Segan says. “5G on 600 is going to improve things but once again, that is basically 4G spectrum, it will be a 4G like experience,” he said. “The way it’s going to improve things though is because 600 MHz has such a great reach it will be able to get this 4G like connectivity into places that didn’t have 4G-like connectivity before. But as we’ve been saying before, 5G doesn’t become a really different experience from 4G until we get those broader amounts of dedicated spectrum.” – With reporting by Adam Langenberg at alangenberg@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Experts say 5G will eventually deliver, but a speed boost for now

News | June 29, 2020

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