In a previous post on this topic I was asking if anyone knew what the ‘g’ in gNB stood for. I got quite a number of suggestions but nobody knew for certain. So I dug a bit deeper and found the person who actually suggested the term.
Continue reading 3GPP 5G NR – What’s the ‘g’ in gNB all about – Part 2?
A while ago, I had a post on a Linux shell command to get the current power consumption of my notebook. Recently, I exchanged my battery for a new one and wanted to keep track not only of the discharge rate but the other parameters as well to see how quickly Ubuntu would recognize that it is a new battery and update it’s capacity values, etc. as well. Turns out there is a nice shell command for that as well: ‘upower’.
A couple of days ago, I had a post on the status of 5G and realistic timelines. A lot of politics is involved concerning the dates and when to do what but few technical details have so far emerged without looking deeply into the meeting minutes. Zahid Ghadialy over at the 3G4G blog, however, has now dug up some interesting technical details.
When using a Wifi network at home for voice telephony everything’s great and shiny as long as there is enough bandwidth for the call. But when you are stuck on a Wifi connected to a slow DSL line that has only little uplink capacity and someone else on the network starts uploading cat images, things get ugly quickly. Recently I was looking into how to simulate delay and packet loss to find out how a voice call sounds over Wifi and to my surprise this is actually quite easy to do, even if you don’t have a slow DSL line available.
Wifi in the 60 GHz band has been specified since 2012 in the 802.11ad extension of the IEEE WLAN standard. It has taken a number of years but it seems that products are slowly becoming available now. Heise and Anandtech have been reviewing the Netgear X10 access point here (in German) and here and the Wi-Fi Alliance has begun certifying products. So it’s about time to have a closer look at the technology.
We are very close to calling LTE a legacy technology as the 3GPP ‘circus’ is not only moving from town to town but also full steam ahead on the new radio access (“New Radio”) and core network (“Next Generation Core Network”) specification process. Many players are publishing whitepapers these days about New Radio and the content has started to align in many technical details so the picture of how the new air interface will look like is becoming clearer. There are claims in the press that first operators will start deploying pre-standard 5G networks in the 2018/19 timeframe, but is that really realistic?
Continue reading Current Status of 5G in 3GPP and ‘Real’ Timelines
We have a book exchange shelf at work where people can put books they no longer need and can take out other books in exchange. Recently I found the “Cellular Travel Guide”, a 1000+ page book published in 1993 that is about how to roam in the US with your mobile phone. A fascinating historical read that takes you back 20 years to a mobile world that hardly seems real from today’s perspective.
Continue reading The Cellular Travel Guide – Back in Time to 1993
I have an 802.11ac wave 1 capable router at home that supports an 80 MHz channel in the 5 GHz band. Unfortunately all my PCs are only 802.11abgn capable and the best I ever got out of the 40 MHz channel to which 11n devices are limited on 5 GHz through one wall was around 70 Mbit/s. I always thought it should have been more, given that my Thinkpad X230 with an Intel 6205 Wi-Fi card was pretty much on the high end of the price scale in 2013. So when I recently had a chance to put a current Skylake based Dell E5570 notebook with an Intel 8260 802.11ac chip in the same physical location I expected to see around twice that throughput as it can make use of the full 80 MHz channel. What I measured, however, took me quite by surprise.
Continue reading An 802.11ac vs. 802.11n Speed Comparison in a Real Life Scenario
I’ve been doing a lot of intercontinental traveling lately. Especially during day flights and for the long jet lag nights where nothing productive springs to mind it’s good to have an entertaining book at hand. For a long time I was a bit despaired when it came to techno thrillers because most main stream writers just don’t get the technology right. But then I’ve found ‘Indie’ (independent) authors and lots of interesting books that get the technology right. My latest discovery is Andrew Updegrove’s ‘The Alexandria Project’.
3GPP is putting a lot of meat on the bones these days to the 5G New Radio (NR) study item. In the recent edition of TS 38.801 (Study on New Radio Access Technology) I read that the base station in 5G New Radio (NR) will be referred to as gNB. Unfortunately it is not mentioned what the ‘g’ actually stands for!?
Continue reading 3GPP 5G NR – What’s the ‘g’ in gNB all about?