Tech-splaining All Things 5G -- Talking Tech w/ Stan Adams
Host Brian Wesolowski sits down with CDT's Open Internet Counsel, Stan Adams, to discuss the latest installments in our series of technology explainers, called "Techsplanations." In these installments, Stan's broken down the basics of spectrum and network management, all building towards talking about the much hyped 5G network. If you've got questions on this technology, Stan answers it here.<br><br>More from our Techsplanation series: http://bit.ly/CDTsplanations<br>More from the series on 5G: http://bit.ly/cdt5Gdeal<br><br>More on Stan: https://cdt.org/about/staff/stan-adams/<br>More on our host, Brian: bit.ly/cdtbrian<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
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Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.
CT. T.
Welcome to CDT's Tech Talk, where we dish on tech and Internet policy while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Brian Wazlowski, and it's time to talk tech. In today's episode, we're gonna get a bit technical, but just the appropriate level of technical. As part of CDT's series called Texplanations, we're taking a look at the technology of mobile communications, how it works, what we should all know, and what technology is on the horizon. Our policy counsel, Stan Adams, is the author of the series of these posts on mobile communications, and he's here to Texplain some stuff to us. Yes. Welcome, Stan. Hi, Brian. Are you ready to texplain? I'm ready to give it a shot. Oh, this is good. I love that. First, broadly speaking, what does this series of posts cover and why did you write it?
So this series of posts covers, mobile communications generally, but focuses on cellular communications, which is what we all use all the time. Right? All the time. Cell phones. You may be listening to this podcast right now via some wireless device or another. I would hope so. Well, not hope so. You can do wired ones too, but I definitely do it. So
that's awesome. Everyone needs to read this. Policymakers, should they read this series? Absolutely. Why? Absolutely. Even if they already understand how cell phones work. Do they?
They may or may not. Stan rolled his eyes. It would be good if they understood how things worked. And to the extent that they already do, great. If they don't, this will explain some of the fundamental technologies that will be coming into play as five g networks emerge. Alright. We'll divide five g at the end of this. So if you're interested in five g, listen through this whole thing. So let's get to our learning here.
You kick the series off with a conversation or an exploration of spectrum. What is it and how does it work, specifically, I can say that for cell phones?
So I don't think I can explain what the entire spectrum is. So I'll talk for just a few minutes about the part we talk about in this series which is the radio spectrum. Okay. So this covers everything from from extremely low frequencies. This is what submarines use to communicate because these frequencies travel through water. Most radio waves do not. Okay.
So whale sounds are on that frequency too?
Those are,
I believe sound waves. Sound alright. I'm an idiot. We'll just keep going.
So it's different than electromagnetic waves but,
Stan, I make sure I look like an idiot so you can sound really smart in this. Keep going. There you go.
So, so all the way from super low frequencies that travel through water up to tremendously high frequencies, which are used for some really fancy physics experiments, and some other things. Just for reference, the portion of the spectrum that is visible light, is a little farther up the spectrum than the radio radio frequencies. Which means they are even higher frequencies, which have even shorter wavelengths. Beyond the visible light spectrum, you get into the ultraviolet light and then the more damaging kinds of radiation like, gamma rays, x rays and gamma rays.
Okay.
So so sorry. I was gonna get to cell phones here. Yeah. Our cell phones use a few different parts of the radio spectrum. The parts we use now are currently sort of in the upper middle part of the radio spectrum. But soon we will start using, some higher bits of the spectrum called millimeter wave bands. And they're called that because the wavelength is, only a few millimeters long. Okay. Right. So these are kind of shorter, faster waves. Exactly. The the wavelengths we use now are between a few centimeters and up to almost a meter long. Oh, that's a long line. Which is why they can travel through things like walls, but not through things like,
thick walls. Right? Down underground. That's why in your basement sometimes you're not necessarily getting a good reception on your cell phone. That's right. But upstairs you are. That's right. Okay. So
the way that this works, the way our phones communicate wirelessly, or other devices, and I'm gonna oversimplify
dramatically here. That's okay.
Is that they send a couple of different waves at the same time. And those waves, if you can picture two different sign waves in your head, they overlap sort of in different ways that creates a sort of a kind of code of like dots and dashes that the receiving end, they're not dots and dashes, right? They're wave intersections. Wave intersections. Right. But it but it it's it represents a code that essentially transmits ones and zeros through the air, which is how all of our digital communications work. Yeah. Right? All ones and zeros. Those all add up to,
the cat video that you just streamed while you're riding. Were you watching over my shoulder? We are at work. I do not watch cat cat videos from one hour a day. Sorry. I'm telling you Brian.
So radio waves travel at the speed of light. So you can fit a lot of ones and zeros into a short amount of time. The more sort of waves you can send, clearly the more information you can get across. And that's why as we move further up the spectrum, especially up to the high bands like the millimeter wave, you can get what's supposed to be something like a 100 times more data across in the same amount of time Oh, wow. From from the spectrum that we're currently using.
Okay. That's a thing. So beyond cell phones, who else is using this kind of spectrum? I would imagine that there's either competition or competing interests, let's just say, for spectrum usage. Yeah. The spectrum is super useful. Right? We use it for all kinds of things.
Just the radio spectrum is used for things like all kinds of military communications. Even as I said between submarines but also aircraft. Military has its own bands all over the place.
Commercial aircraft have their own parts of the spectrum. I mean that seems like pretty important spectrum there. Aircraft for control. Yeah. Yep. Regular
AM and FM radio, CB radios, ham radios. Right? All the sort of traditional radio technologies use this. Television, satellite, and other sort of space related, communications, including radio astronomy. Right? This is how we measure the universe. Cool. And including microwave ovens. Right? They use the radio spectrum to heat up your food.
Makes Alright. That's not what I have logically gotten to. Yeah. It makes the water molecules
sort of flip back and forth really fast.
And that creates heat. That's how my food gets warm. Yeah. Yep.
But also things that we use everyday also like WiFi, Bluetooth. These are all bits of the radio spectrum that we use all the time.
Clearly we use other parts of the spectrum like light for all kinds of things, but we won't, we won't go into that on this, this podcast. Okay. So you already mentioned Wi Fi Wi Fi, Bluetooth, but also, you know, kind of the broad mobile communications we use. I would imagine that is, you know, there's more demand for the spectrum out there. So are we ever gonna run out of spectrum? And how do we manage that spectrum to make sure that, you know, we're not kind of crossing different paths? Right. Great question. And that's exactly what would happen,
without management. Right? So we we won't run out of the spectrum.
We can It's not like oil. Use it. It's not like oil. It's not like oil. It's not like oil. It exists. We use it.
But competing uses can interfere with each other. Right? So similar frequencies in the same location can get crossed up, and you'll your signal will get confused with the other signal, and neither one will make sense. Okay. So here in The United States, the Federal Communications Commission manages our use of the spectrum. And it does this, in two major ways, through licensing and also through power limits. So the licensing works like this. Basically the FCC divides up the spectrum for different uses. And also divides up the country geographically and then assigns, sort of spectrum and geographic locations. These, these block names, right. And then offers them to the highest bidder. And this is how your cell phone carrier obtains the permission to use the spectrum that it uses is through a bidding process, for the most part run by the FCC. So it also puts limits on the sort of transmission strength that they use. This is what keeps radio waves from interfering with each other from different cities, but it does the same thing for mobile, for cell communications also. So that applies to both the licensed uses, like the cell carriers, but also unlicensed uses. And so that's wifi, Bluetooth, some of the smaller radio, like CB radios are mostly unlicensed. Right? Okay. But they're unlicensed because the their power level is set so low that they're unlikely to cause interference beyond
their local air. They're gonna mess with not gonna mess with our air traffic controllers or any of that sort of stuff. Exactly. That's a good thing. Okay. Very good. What about globally? FCC does it. How do you manage that stuff globally? Because I feel as though, you know, think of a place like Europe or even if you're in a border community here. Right. That is a question I'm not prepared to answer this time. Alright. Well, that can be a later episode. I'll get another episode. More more text explanations to come. Alright. That sounds great. So let's let's move past spectrum. We've covered spend a lot of time on spectrum. That's an important part there. Let's talk more about the physical infrastructure of mobile communications. You know, there's no way that these waves, I would imagine, and you could correct me if I'm wrong again,
would travel from, say, Washington to Bismarck. There's got to be some sort of, like, physical infrastructure component. Yeah? That's right. Okay. At least for the parts of the spectrum that we use for our phones. Right? So your ham radio would reach from here to Bismarck. No problem. It can go most of the way around the the Earth, I think. But the parts of the spectrum that we use for cell phones and because the power limitations don't go all that far. Right? Okay. How far do they go? So a four gs cell might cover like a mile, a square mile. I don't think that much. Right. So you need towers pretty regularly, just to ensure blanket coverage. Right. And they have to overlap too. So when you make a call to your cousin in Bismarck, the sort of first connection between your phone and the nearest cellular antenna is wireless. From there though, it is probably converted into, a different kind of signal and sent across a wire of some kind. All the way to Bismarck. All all the way to Bismarck. Cool. Most likely that'll be fiber optic most of the way. And then it will go go back up some transmission tower and be transmitted wirelessly to your cousin's cell phone out on the outskirts.
I don't call my cousins enough.
All that stuff in the middle is called the core network. I think I addressed that specifically in the
third part of this series. If you because it's a five part series. Right? Oh, no. Tim's telling me more. Tim, our producer. Four part series. Right. Okay. Yep. Clearly, I've read it very closely. No. That's not true. I have read three
out of four. That's right. So so, I'll just make one more point about the the core networks. Modern core networks use the same transmission method that we use for all of our Internet traffic as well. It even
even uses
the same protocol, IP protocol. And that method is known as packet switching. And I won't go into a big spiel about the difference between packet switching and the old technology, which is called circuit switching. Other than to say that the acronym you see on your phone sometimes, LTE, stands for long term evolution. And that evolution is from No way. Circuit switching technology in the core of the network to packet switching in the core of the network. Wow. So that's that's what LTE means. Wow. This is what happens when you let engineers name stuff.
Short cute little acronym. I did not know that. But this is a good transition because we're gonna start to talk about five g. My phone currently does not say LTE. It says, five g e. What the heck does that mean? Do I really have five g? And then let's talk about five g. So
probably you don't really have five gs. Ouch. Okay. Some aspects of your carriers core network may be up to five gs standards. Probably the wireless portion isn't. They're just getting me excited for the next evolution to come, All the carriers are trying to spread as much hype as they can because they need all of us to buy into this program as well. Right?
Lots of people need to buy five g stuff in order to pay for all the five g things. Alright. So five g things, lots of things. My quick understanding of five g is that we're gonna go from these giant towers that we're kind of all used to hear seeing and also hearing about because a lot of communities don't love them when you build a tower, although they do like the connectivity, to kind of smaller boxes all over the place, you know, on buildings, on light posts, just in different things so that the network infrastructure's infrastructure smaller in size but more kind of connection points. Is that accurate?
Yes. So that's that is one, coming feature of five g networks is that for the and we're gonna get back to spectrum here, the millimeter wave bands, because they don't travel as far and don't travel through things as well. Those cells are going to be smaller. Okay. And so because they're smaller, there needs to be many, many more of them to cover the same area. Okay. So in a city here like Washington D. C, you might need to have a small cell on every corner, Wow. At every intersection and maybe some on every floor of every building. Wow. Depending on how they work. Big infrastructure build to get to five g. Lots and lots and lots of small cells. But that's only sort of at the upper end of the spectrum. Right? The millimeter wave bands. Those same towers that we use now will also be part of the five g g network. Oh, okay. Using, sort of upper middle bands in the spectrum like we use now already. Okay. So it's not like we tear down the towers once we move to five gs. Those will continue to exist. That's right. And they'll they will provide in the near term, four g, LTE and five g coverage Okay. As we as we make the transition.
And the main benefit of five g then is speed as you were saying earlier. You're gonna get more data faster because of those shorter faster waves. That's right. So in the in the short term, that's the first thing we as consumers are most likely to experience is is sort of enhanced
mobile broadband speeds. Especially where where you can connect to a five gs cell. Your speeds can be significantly higher. Even if you're just on a more traditional sized cell, operating with five gs technology, it will be probably still faster. Although maybe not like a 100 times faster. Right? It might be twice as fast. I mean it's not fast. Still pretty fast. Yeah. So small cells are one part of five gs that, that we expect to see. That'll be coming soon, mostly to cities. But, it'll be more than just, small cells. And I won't go into all the industrial uses, but five gs is expected to sort of take root in industrial applications, Maybe even before a lot of consumers see it. So Oh. That'll be going on in factories,
other kinds of industrial applications. Where speed might really matter.
Or where various other parts of the network matter. And that's what I'm gonna talk about next. Is it two different sort of aspects of five gs networks, that will change how we think about network capabilities. One is computing in the network. And for five gs that's called mobile edge computing. What does that mean? If you see it.
I have never seen it.
What this means is that, and again, this hasn't been rolled out yet. In theory, there could be a small computing station at the base of every single one of these millimeter wave small cells. So in the same way that we use cloud computing now to do some of our data processing, just like that, except distributed across the whole network. So it's not at one centralized location somewhere in the middle of Virginia. It's at the very first stoplight you come to in town. Right? Or every single cell you come across in town may have its own computer at the base of it that can do
certain kinds of processing for you or for other devices that connect to it. Was that off so what that then does is offload some of that computing
necessity from your own mobile device. That's right. That's one thing that it could potentially do. Could I have a thinner phone? You could have a smaller, thinner, lighter, cheaper phone that doesn't have to do as much onboard because it's relying on computing in the network to do that same thing. Potentially cool. Privacy risks there? Yes. Okay. We won't get into those in this episode but I'm just like There are lots of other policy implications about this. We'll delve into that some in future posts and episodes. The other sort of thing about mobile edge computing is that because it is so, because the computing power is so much closer to you, right? It's maybe only one hop between your device and the computer rather than going one wireless hop and then several wired hops into the network into Central Virginia to have the cloud compute for you and then sent back. Because it's a much shorter round trip, it can provide much lower latencies. Right? So this is a much quicker turnaround time essentially for the processing, which will enable technologies that, or improve technologies that we currently think of as not quite there yet. So this could be, let me find my notes here. This could be anything from like your self driving car communicating with the traffic control devices in a city so that traffic flows fluidly fast. Right. You also need to know what's going on, right? And your car needs to know what's going on. And so those low latency times enable that kind of processing and response times. But also for things like, augmented and virtual reality. Right? Where you don't want a whole lot of lag between what you experience and what happens.
You could see that being a bummer experience if you get that lag time in the zone. That's right. That's right.
The other, the other aspect of, sort of five g core networks is a thing called network slicing. Oh. And what this does is, it's a way to create multiple virtual networks over the same physical network infrastructure. And so each of these networks can then same for one purpose or another, the carrier in theory can create a network that just does that thing. Oh, okay. Right? And you get your own sort of dedicated slice through the network that is
geared entirely towards providing low latency communication. Cities like we're building out of the smart city. We need this grid to have its own network. That's right. Potentially
create that. So smart cities are expected to have millions and millions of little tiny centers all over everything. Right? That all communicate back to the city infrastructure about what's going on with the mailboxes and the trash cans and the parking and the traffic lights. Right? And so those communications require not the same thing as our mobile data usage. Right? And so you can create a swath of the network that just does that thing for those sensors connected cars. Same way. Also like high performance gaming could do this. Right? You could have your high speed gaming network that just does low latency, high, bandwidth communications. Specifically for that kind of thing. Alright. This also comes with policy implications clearly from an open Internet perspective. We'll be digging into that in some future posts as well. So so look ahead to that. Alright. Alright. So how soon is all this coming? You know, I don't have it now, apparently.
How soon could it cons from a consumer standpoint, you said industry may Sure. See a little bit sooner, but Yeah. So,
right now, there are a few limited deployments of five g networks, in some major cities here in The United States. I think those are very limited as I understand it. There may be a couple of millimeter wave cells. There aren't a lot. But carriers are deploying infrastructure now. It may take a while because there are one lots of cells to put up, right? And these all have to be approved by local governments. It also means a whole lot of fiber to put in the ground because each of these cells has to be connected back to the core network and to each other by fiber. Right? And so anything that means putting new wires on the ground adds time and money. Right? On top of that, the official protocols for five gs are not finalized yet. And so for things like equipment manufacturers who want to standardize across the world. Yeah. And manufacturing these things. What would seem like a good idea with those. You wanna wait until you have the agreed upon standard before you build to that. Right? So it could be I I suspect that we as consumers will see, growing five g networks in in major cities in America in the next couple of years. It will be sometime longer than that before we see anything like a nationwide coverage, here in The United States. Alright. All you folks who live out in the boonies, it might not ever make it to you. And if it does, you probably won't see the super high speed things,
that folks at The States get. So Oh, my parents won't like that, which they're loyal listeners. So sorry, mom and dad. You're not getting that. Okay. So I should cool my jets a little bit on the fact that five g is coming, but still sounds interesting. But yet, at the same time, a positive in this, policymakers at all levels, state, local, federal have some time to get this right. That's right. There's some time to think about it. Read the posts. Read the post. Any last thing that listeners should know, from your textplanations that you want to highlight?
I hope that they won't all be this long and technical and I thank you all for bearing with us as we trudge through four lengthy pieces on mobile communications.
Read them all. It's worth it. They are long but Stan does a very good job of putting clever questions in there and just when you're starting to get just a smidge board, not that I did, there's kind of a funny little witticism in there. So, well done Stan. And those Texplanations, you can find them on CDT's website at cdt.org. Thank you so much for joining us, Dan. Thank you very much. That's it for this episode of Tech Talk. For the very latest on what CDT is doing to shape a vibrant digital future, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or visit cdt.org. I'm Brian Wasilowski. Thanks for listening.
