Category: 5G

5G Is Coming, and It’s Fortified With Fiber

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5G will happen in the airy realm of radio waves. To get there, big telecoms have to harness underused parts of the spectrum. But there’s another crucial part underlying this system: lowly cable. Huge numbers of new transmitters will be needed to relay all that data to your phone, and many of those transmitters will still connect to the internet through fiber-optic cable—glass as thin as strands of hair carrying pulses of light. To make it all work, companies, including OFS Optics, a fiber-optics and cable company, are now being commissioned to produce millions of miles of new cable holding twice as many fiber pairs—two strands, one for the uplink and one for the downlink—as the old stuff.

What Do You Mean, 5G Wireless? What It Would Really Take to Make the Switch

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5G is the cool-sounding name everybody uses for the next generation of cellular wireless. Changes in the wireless protocols and use of different radio frequencies are aimed at increasing the bandwidth capacity of 5G to about 100 times greater than the current 4G LTE cellular systems. These goals, if achieved, will enable wireless connections to equal the bandwidth of current Wi-Fi and fiber-to-the-home networks. To achieve those goals, wireless companies must overcome several technical and financial barriers including installing more fibers to the cell sites and denser urban cellular sites using small cells with a coverage of a few blocks or less.

4 Applications For A Smart Water Quality Monitoring System Using The IoT »

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For many businesses, water quality monitoring is about more than safeguarding drinking water. Water monitoring programs are implemented for a wide variety of reasons—even for reasons unrelated to the quality of the water itself. And today, it’s easier than ever to find out whatever you need or want to know about your specific water-related application thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT). So how are “smart” water quality monitoring systems using the IoT being applied? Below are some of the use cases we’re seeing most commonly.

What Do Banks and Insurers Need to Do with Their Technology in the Second Half of 2019?

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IoT technologies will provide the insurance industry with new tools such continuous monitoring with sensors for sensitive food and drug shipments, wearables for machinery users and many other devices that monitor operations, prevent fraud prevention, and improve claims management and customer engagement. This can include “pay-as-you-go” or “pay-as-you-live” insurance products that are enabled by IoT.
 

5G – hypothetical hype and realistic reality

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Most of the recent hype about 5G has been about pure speed. The less obvious answer is that these higher speeds will enable completely new applications. 4G finally enabled the smartphone and true Internet access. The device was no longer a “phone” it morphed into a personal platform for connected applications. 5G makes the final step (at least so far …) – the devices are no longer phones – smart or otherwise. They may be tightly coupled to people, such as VR/AR glasses, connected pacemakers, or wearable sports trackers, but more often they are not, such as thermostats, refrigerators, coffee pots, drones, electric meters, autonomous cars, traffic lights, and robots. And being the Internet of Things all of these devices are incessantly chatting with each other.

Clearfield CMO Morgan: Fiber fuels 5G, edge computing

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Thanks to bigger roll-outs of 5G and the first edge compute use cases over the coming years, there will be an even bigger role for fiber going forward. According to Clearfield CEO Kevin Morgan. He says that the need for a quality fiber-optic connection can get overlooked in 5G discussions but looking at forecasts on the small cells that will enable 5G, an enormous amount of fiber will be required.

Do smart cities need 5G?

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Is 5G a requirement for a smart city? No. But will 5G serve as a major enabler for smart cities? Yes, particularly in terms of supporting up to a million connected devices per square kilometer, a major enhancement as compared to LTE. But this is somewhat paradoxical given the realities of what we’re seeing on the ground in terms of smart city investments. Limited pilot projects have proven very difficult to scale. So if there were hundreds of thousands of sensors blanketing an urban core in service of a smart city project, 5G would be the way to go, but, for the most part, that’s not the case anywhere.

Top 5 academic institutions leading in 5G research

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Whether it’s a group of students studying remote control robotics or professors going out into the field with students to take millimeter wave measurements, dozens of academic institutions all over the world are making meaningful contributions to 5G and the future of wireless. FierceWirelessTech decided to take a close look at the top 5G academic institutions. The result is a list of five (or six) top institutions that we think are especially worth keeping an eye on in coming months and years.

Only Connect: On 5G network cables

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Whilst many people think of 5G as a wireless network it is only wireless from the point of the masts that deliver the signal. Everything else is still delivered by traditional cabling systems. Fiber the backbone of all high-speed networks and the cost of ownership is coming down. I see a future where fibre will be the main cabling element of most networks as copper data transfer rates is near to saturation points with current copper-based technologies.