In the 5G era, you will choose mobile network or Wi-Fi

Many people often see public Wi-Fi networks in hotels, airports and other places when traveling or traveling, but the Internet speed is slow or the signal is unstable. Over time, people are more willing to use their mobile phone data than Wi-Fi networks. . Data released by OpenSignal, a global mobile network quality evaluation agency, shows that in 33 countries such as France and Australia, the average speed of a mobile network has exceeded the user's Wi-Fi connection speed. With the advent of the 5G era, the speed of mobile networks will further increase.

5G has extremely high network rates. For example, in some hotspot and high-capacity areas, the user's experience rate reaches 1 Gbps, and the peak rate even reaches tens of Gbps, meeting the increasing demand for business traffic. Dr. Li Yan, senior director of Qualcomm's technical standards, once pointed out that in the 4G era, we have seen rapid growth in mobile business traffic, and business traffic in the 5G era will be more. So, how to use new spectrum to fill these rapidly growing business flows? "Many countries have begun to consider using millimeter wave, that is, to bring millimeter wave into 5G technology. Even some operators in North America may be deployed in advance. Based on millimeter waves. "

In the field of mobile communications, 5G millimeter wave usually refers to electromagnetic waves with a frequency of 24 GHz to 100 GHz. Due to its short wavelength, the diffraction ability is not strong, and it is easy to cause rapid attenuation of energy during the propagation process, which is very difficult to apply. In the second half of this year, Qualcomm introduced a fully integrated 5G new air interface (5G NR) millimeter wave (mmWave) module that can be paired with Qualcomm Snapdragon X50 5G modem to support advanced beamforming, beam steering and beam tracking technologies, which can be significantly improved Coverage and reliability of millimeter wave signals. Moreover, the millimeter wave antenna module supports very few package sizes and can be integrated into mobile terminals such as smartphones.

In addition to mobile terminals, millimeter wave technology will also be applied to base stations to bring users a fast Internet experience. Dr. Li Yan said that at present, most of the indoor traffic is actually supported by outdoor base stations. We have built a large number of outdoor base stations to cover indoors by increasing power to achieve indoor business traffic. But in the 5G era, with the use of higher frequency bands, signal penetration will become weaker and weaker, making it difficult to cover indoors with outdoor base stations. Therefore, small indoor base stations, such as millimeter wave base stations, are required.

Compared with traditional base stations, millimeter-wave base stations are small in size and can be flexibly deployed in many scenarios. For example, setting up millimeter-wave base stations at airports provides visitors with ultra-high-speed, low-latency, and highly reliable mobile networks, which is equivalent to A "Super Wi-Fi hotspot". In addition, the coverage of millimeter wave base stations is relatively small, requiring a large number of deployments to achieve continuous coverage, and there is huge demand in the upcoming 5G era. At present, Qualcomm has cooperated with Samsung to develop 5G small base stations, which will help operators better achieve indoor and outdoor network coverage, and then bring excellent 5G network services to consumers.

Of course, millimeter wave technology has also entered the field of Wi-Fi to enhance users' Internet experience. For example, last month, Qualcomm launched the 60GHz Wi-Fi chipset series, which supports network transmission rates of more than 10Gbps, and can also be comparable to wired transmission in terms of latency. In addition, Qualcomm released the industry's first integrated 802.11ax-ready solution WCN3998 for smartphones, tablets and notebooks earlier, supporting 8-channel MU-MIMO detection, enabling more people to enjoy smoothness at the same time Wi-Fi network. It can be said that in the trend of increasing traffic demand for mobile services, mobile networks and Wi-Fi technologies are developing rapidly. So in the next 5G era, will you choose Wi-Fi or mobile networks?