A report from South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency about Samsung offering 5G service by 2020 caught my eye. Speculation about 5G abounds, so the title was not a surprise. What was intriguing to me was a claim of transmitting data in the millimeter wave band to a distance of two kilometers.
My initial interest was due to my electrical engineering background, I always thought that millimeter wave band was not suitable for long distance transmissions. There is significant atmospheric attenuation in this band.
The news agency report did not tell me much but subsequent information from Samsung shed some light. Samsung used a frequency of 28 GHZ. This frequency is close to the lower band of the highest radio frequency band known as extremely high frequency which goes from 30 to 300 GHZ. Samsung used an adaptive array transceiver using 64 antenna elements to obtain a speed of up to 1.056 Gbps to transmit the signal up to two kilometers. Samsung claims that its transceiver technology overcomes large atmospheric attenuation. There are not many other details and I still cannot figure it out exactly how Samsung did it. In any case, the important point is not my inability to figure out how Samsung did it but the fact that Samsung is confident enough to make this claim.
More astounding is Samsung’s claim that 5G will offer transmission speeds of tens of Gbps, contrast this with a test that achieved a speed of only 1.056 Gbps. To say the least I remain skeptical even though the media is eating from Samsung’s hands without questioning the details…Read more on Forbes
