There is a big debate going on the impact of the 5G over home Wi-Fi system since the emergence of 5G technology. Many operators across the globe started selling several options commercially to the public. Currently, the Wi-Fi is almost available to every household. If 5G technology swaps this current Wi-Fi system, it will create a big change in many aspects of people's lives and also to the operator's business? How do you see this?
What's the debate? The two technologies belong to separate industries, but they use many of the same techniques. Such as channel aggregation, massive MIMO, and frequencies up in the 10s of GHz, to achieve their wide channel bandwidths, for high capacity channels.
5G is the much-hyped telco scheme, moving to typically much smaller cells than previously used in cellular, to support more users, each with greater capacity channels, and to make these high channel frequencies work reliably. Where 4G is good for about 1 Gb/s channels, 5G should increase that to at least 10 Gb/s. (Note: 5G in the lower bands, such as the UHF band, will do nothing dramatic like that. Its bandwidth will be about the same as you get with 4G.)
WiFi is instead for unlicensed, local use, hotspots, where the newer variants, 802.11ad, 802.11ae, 802.11ay, do much the same thing as what 5G does, in terms of channel capacity. Smaller hotspots, for example localized to a single room, and capacities to 20 Gb/s and beyond. As opposed to about 1 Gb/s, for 802.11ac.
Just as 5G will be more laborious for the telcos to set up, as they need may, many new cells (to achieve the channel capacities they brag about), the newer WiFi variants will also be less convenient for households and businesses that use them. For instance, most homes with WiFi up to 802.11ac do okay with one WiFi access point, or at most two (in some cases, if excessive blockage occurs). Now, at 10s of GHz channel frequencies, a different story.
Hi,
Today's networks are optimized for humans using smartphones. In 5G systems, new classes of users will take advantage of the infrastructure:
- Humans (smartphone use case)
- Automotive (connected, autonomous driving, Vehicle-to-X)
- Industry 4.0 (Smart Manufacturing, private 5G networks)
- IoT, mMTC (Smart City, Connected Energy,...)
Take a look at
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/qos/201908/Documents/Jens_Berger_Presentation_1.pdf
Both are evolving standards with a different purpose. Wifi is a ultra low cost ecosystem both, well entrenched in all devices like PC / Smartphone / tablets - u name it, almost impossible to replace & with good reasons. While WiFi has some aspiration of being able to dent the 4G and 5G market, but the chances are less. 5G is a different new animal, should be well entrenched over the next 3-4 years.
I don't think we are in a position to answer this question today, as both technologies are rapidly evolving.
Wi-Fi 6 is just deploying now, and has access to more spectrum than 5G (I am not including mmW as part of 5G in this statement!). As of today, Wi-Fi has access to about 700MHz, with another 1.2GHz of 6-7GHz spectrum coming on-line in the next 2 years (and this will be called Wi-Fi 6E). Wi-Fi 6/6E is now using a technology called OFDMA, where all communication between the access point and user device is scheduled. If this sounds similar to 5G, it is; adding the scheduler makes much more efficient use of the available spectrum. Wi-Fi is "free" in the sense that you don't pay for airtime (but of course, you do have to pay for the networking hardware). It is widely deployed indoors, but is also seeing outdoor use as well. However, it will never replace cellular service for outdoor use.
The IEEE is currently working on a new technology called Wi-Fi 7, and this will increase throughput by another factor of 4 over Wi-Fi 6. In general, Wi-Fi tends to use more advanced modulation and much wider modulation bandwidths to stay 3-4 years ahead of cellular technology (they can do this because the coverage range of Wi-Fi tends to be a lot smaller than cellular).
5G uses a similar technology Wi-Fi (OFDMA), with a large number of bands. There is less total spectrum available, although the gap is narrowing, especially as C-band spectrum becomes available (in the 3.5GHz band). I suspect that 5G will continue the trend of unlimited data, so in a sense it could replace Wi-Fi for indoor use as long as indoor coverage is good. This may be challenging to achieve. 5G is also trying to access the same 5GHz and 6GHz unlicensed bands that Wi-Fi uses (this is called LAA for 4G, and NR-U for 5G), using the cellular band to set up the link. It is hard to predict where this technology will go, as there are many issues that still need to be resolved.
5G is also starting to deploy mm-wave devices, and this opens up even more spectrum. This will come eventually, but will likely have a lot of trouble with indoor coverage due to high building penetration losses. mmW will see deployment in urban cores, and venues like concerts or sports stadiums.
My guess is that both will continue to coexist and complement one another, but there are an awful lot of moving parts that make it difficult to predict where we will end up.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Mathematics
- Statistics
- Sampling Design
- Sample Size