Samsung 5G is no death knell of the NBN

May 14th, 2013

It seems like we’ve been here a few times before: an advancement in wireless technology, and those opposed to the National Broadband Network (NBN) claim that it spells doom for the fixed-line fibre network before it is even finished being built.

Fixed wire broadband will continue to deliver best available real world performance.
(Credit: NBN Co)

In a very limited trial this week, Samsung said it was able to get 1Gbps speeds on a 5G wireless network with 28GHz (yes, GHz) over a distance of 2 kilometres. The technology giant has said that it wants to be able to get 10Gbps speeds on its network for the public by 2020.

The argument between the Coalition and Labor has largely shifted away from the old fixed versus wireless debate, with the Coalition agreeing that fixed networks will play a role in Australia’s broadband future — but just what kind of network it should be is the sticking point. It was, however, not entirely unsurprising that a few people, including conservative commentator Andrew Bolt, would question whether Samsung’s 5G trial is the end of the line for the NBN.

The difficulty in claiming the newest lab trial is that the technology itself is still in very early days, and would be very expensive on its own. Samsung’s trial needed 64 antennas in order to achieve 1Gbps.

It also used 28GHz of spectrum. For a comparison, Telstra, Optus and TPG will collectively pay the government close to AU$2 billion for 0.2GHz in total for each to use for their own 4G networks.

It’s not a clean comparison, but you could roughly estimate that for 28GHz, you’d be looking at AU$280 billion, which is six times the cost of Labor’s AU$44.1 billion. And that’s even excluding the cost of building new 5G network infrastructure.

The price for the technology will come down over time, but it is difficult to see that the price for the spectrum would. Certainly, the technology might evolve over time and use less spectrum, but for now, that is more than the telcos in Australia can collectively afford by a long way.

Even if they were able to afford all of that spectrum, the costs would be recouped through high data prices for mobile users. The telcos even warned about this when the government set the reserve price for 4G spectrum late last year.

And that’s without even taking into account other factors that show fixed line will still ultimately be able to achieve higher speeds than wireless. While 1Gbps is all well and good in a lab test, what result will be achievable in a network full of users?

Given wireless’ capacity constraints, a new network with larger spectrum demand is not going to fix the daily commuter hell that many of us face each day. Short of some miraculous leap in technology that we haven’t seen yet, 5G would suffer the same congestion issues that every previous network iteration has suffered from.

Via ZDNet.com.au

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