After All the 5G Hype, Where Is 5G Today?
Image Source: putilov_denis/Stock.adobe.com; generated with AI
By JJ DeLisle for Mouser Electronics
Published October 16, 2024
At its launch in 2019, 5G promised to transform major industries such as robotics, create new applications, and let us communicate on an unprecedented scale. Now, five years later, where are we? This article examines whether we met the hype of 5G and where we are today with technology deployments.
Defining 5G
5G is the fifth generation of cellular mobile wireless technology, following the legacy of 2G, 3G, and 4G. Most people interact with this technology through smart devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches, but there are much broader applications and use cases for 4G and even more for 5G.
Many people will first interact with 5G when they acquire smartphones that display a 5G icon when connected to a high-throughput, 5G-compatible network. High throughput for mobile users, known as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), is only one of the primary use cases for 5G. Other primary use cases include ultra-high reliability and low-latency communications (URLLC) and massive machine-type communications (mMTC). URLLC refers to ensuring round-trip communication cycles with very low latency and a high rate of successful communication. mMTC refers to simultaneous communications among many machines at various data rates and communication frequencies—e.g., from dispersed sensors, controllers, autonomous robotics, and security. These machine-type communications often have varied communication types, modulations, frequency ranges, and bandwidths. Accounting for all this is a significant use case and is required for applications such as smart home and industrial automation.
Other use cases that are being explored for 5G are vehicle-to-everything (V2X) applications. V2X includes the ability of vehicles to communicate with users' mobile devices and nearby beacons, with each other (vehicle-to-vehicle [V2V]), and with infrastructure (vehicle-to-infrastructure [V2I]). V2X capabilities are being touted as a method of enabling autonomous vehicles and other enhanced vehicle safety features. Additionally, V2X could help reduce traffic and assist in emergency vehicle operations.
Is the Promise of 5G Exaggerated?
According to GSMA Intelligence, there were over 1.5 billion 5G connections at the close of 2023—just four years after the launch—which implies a very impressive adoption rate.[1] However, the 5G that has been deployed is not necessarily the same as the 5G capable of the eMBB, URLLC, mMTC, and V2X features. Moreover, as GSMA notes, the deployment of 5G is happening predominantly in high-income countries, with minimal deployments outside of wealthy urban areas. Even in places where 5G has been deployed, performance has largely been lackluster and, in some cases, inferior to previous 4G LTE deployments.
Understanding the reasons behind this helps to understand what exactly 5G is: a set of standards that dictate a range of frequencies and communication technologies that are compatible with those standards. 5G frequencies are classified into three bands—low-band, mid-band, and high-band—which are further divided into a series of frequency channels. The low-band frequencies, which are below 1GHz, tend to benefit from greater coverage area but lower throughput. Mid-band frequencies have a balance of coverage and throughput, though this varies over the 1GHz-to-7.125GHz frequency range. High-band is technically any frequency channel above 7.125GHz (maxing out at 40GHz or 71GHz, according to some sources) and is in a frequency range called the millimeter-wave (mmWave) range. mmWave frequencies benefit from very small device sizes and large bandwidths, but high atmospheric attenuation can lead to limited coverage.
Present-day 5G comprises mostly mid-band services that are simply additions and extensions of mid-band frequencies, not that much different than 4G LTE Advanced, but with some additional bandwidth. Some large telecommunications providers and mobile ISPs are deploying and testing limited high-band 5G services. Though the services appear to work and offer much higher throughput, they seem very short-range and require substantial energy to operate, which leads to short battery life and unreliable coverage. This is reasonable, considering that these services are incredibly new, and large-scale wireless services for mobile devices at these frequencies have never been provided. Some success has been seen in fixed wireless access (FWA) services that use mid- and high-band 5G services to provide wireless internet to homes. These services have succeeded in areas where broadband internet services are poorly deployed, expensive, or unavailable, and 5G services are available. As reported by GSMA Intelligence, FWA has reached more than 5 percent adoption in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Austria, the US, Germany, and Australia.
Other 5G successes include services that offer download speeds several times faster than those of previously available 4G speeds and more affordable data plans per gigabyte than 4G. However, some of these results could be skewed, as they could largely hinge on the outcomes of marketing tactics and not reflect actual costs. Also, 2G and 3G services in many regions are being phased out, leading many users to make the switch.
Next Stages Of 5G Deployment
Some of 5G's early growing pains will likely be alleviated as the technology develops and additional capabilities and use cases are enabled. This will require support from a wide ecosystem of device and service providers that will likely continue to grow slowly as 5G deployments spread and costs decrease.
The next two deployment modes for 5G are 5G standalone (5G SA) and 5G Advanced. 5G SA refers to standalone high-band/mmWave services that don't require 5G mid-band services or the 5G LTE core as support, which is the case with the presently common 5G non-standalone (5G NSA). 5G SA devices and applications that need only incredibly high throughput would require just a high-band-compatible chipset and not any 5G mid-band technology. This could lower costs and increase the use case for 5G high band, especially as 5G SA should vastly outperform 5G NSA. However, 5G SA requires 5G-compliant radio access network (RAN) technology and 5G-compliant core technologies.
5G Advanced, much like 4G LTE Advanced, is the term to describe the updated release of 5G—3GPP Release 18 through Release 21—expected in 2028. The new release is expected to bring enhanced massive multi-input multi-output (mMIMO) technology, reduced handover times, enhanced spectral efficiency, and access to non-terrestrial networks. Other new services include improved support for extended reality and reduced-capability (RedCap) devices, as well as enhanced positioning/time-critical support. 5G Advanced should also facilitate more energy-efficient services and use AI-based RAN load management/mobility optimization and air interface enhancements, possibly akin to AI-based cognitive radio schemes.
In all, 5G Advanced should allow for satellite-to-cell phone communications, time-critical applications, and precision positioning (an entirely new cellular wireless feature). Also, AI-enhanced automation features should lead to improved network load management based on the current environment of a user's devices and the infrastructure. It will likely be some years before widespread adoption of 5G Advanced takes hold; however, many of the Release 18 features may be available to infrastructure devices and possibly some user devices with software updates instead of requiring entirely new hardware.
5G For Private Networks, Automotive, & Industrial Applications
Though governments, defense agencies, enterprise, automotive, and industrial applications have used previous cellular generations, cellular services have been dominated primarily by consumer applications. These consumer applications include mainly cell phone services and, to some extent, FWA. However, with the new 5G use cases of URLLC, mMTC, V2X, and enhanced positioning/time-critical networking, it is more likely that 5G technologies will be deployed in these other applications—possibly to such an extent that consumer services become barely a majority of the services offered. With the push for more automation and wireless networking capability in these applications and the relative costs to deploy 5G networks, early adopters of the latest 5G technologies may even be government, defense, and industrial entities.
Conclusion
Though the introduction of 5G technology has had a somewhat rocky start, this deployment is still progressing at a breakneck pace, well exceeding that of previous generations of cellular wireless. Future use cases and applications for 5G services will likely continue to drive 5G adoption, as will applications not previously served by wireless communication services. Much of the hype around 5G will likely be justified in the next few years as 5G SA and 5G Advanced technologies are increasingly deployed and costs around 5G services decrease.