Technology companies love to hype their products and technologies, and Samsung is no different. Last month, the company claimed that it was testing 5G data speeds and that it was expecting the technology to go live to consumers by 2020. During the company’s tests, it was allegedly speeds of up to 1Gbps on the 28 gigahertz wave band, but it took 64 antenna elements to reach that data peak. According to several industry experts, however, Samsung is greatly over-hyping the technology and people are incredibly skeptical of Samsung’s claim regarding a consumer launch of 5G by 2020.
According to a new report from Technology Review, quoting two industry experts, many are skeptical of Samsung’s claims regarding the 5G mobile data technology. Victor Bahl, a principal analyst at Microsoft Research, says that no one can really believe what Samsung says regarding 5G until the company actually publishes the results of its wireless tests and allows other people in the industry to analyze them. In the end, Samsung would have to “show how [it] scales to accommodate real users in real settings.” As we all know, your mobile data speed differs greatly if you’re in a relatively small city and if you’re in a huge, crowded city. We can only imagine how the network will hold up when being tested by a few people to launching to millions of people.
Vanu Bose, the founder of wireless infrastructure company Vanu, Inc, claims that Samsung was far “too vague to really say anything concrete” about its 5G network tests and results. Either way, Bose says he is excited about Samsung’s claims because “if they have solved this, then they have opened up a large number of higher frequencies for cellular-type use, which are really not useful for cellular today.”
Samsung’s 5G technology relies on 28 gigahertz frequencies, which are about an order of magnitude higher than the cellular frequencies used today and can carry far more data than our current infrastructure.
The only problem with the high-speed frequencies is that they can get blocked easily by buildings, rain, and other obstructions. In order to combat this, Samsung uses 64 antennas in both the transmitter and receiver. This means that when the first device with 5G launches, Samsung will either have to reduce the number of antennas, or some how cram 64 into the phone.
Do you think Samsung is right when it says 5G will launch by 2020? Let us know down in the comments!
Source: Technology Review