How can one companies 5G be “better” than another? Doesn’t 5G refer to the speed/strength of the connection?
In: Technology
5G is an agreed upon set of protocols and processes. Every equipment vendor and company implements these protocols using their own interpretations of those standards. Now, what makes one better? The main bottleneck for speed are the bands [frequencies] used by the radios [cell towers]. Some may agregate multiple low frequency bands to attain speed, some may use higher frequencies. The higher the frequency the shorter the distance you need to be from the tower. Think of whales using low frequencies to communicate across oceans. Once your cell communicates with the tower there are several limiting factors. First, bandwidth to the tower. Second, number of high bandwidth users attached to that tower. Tower density and overall coverage where you go also are important. Second, once your packet leaves the tower it goes to the Packet Core. This is the heart of the network. Factors like latency [how close is the Packet Core from the tower], Packet Core capacity [how much bandwidth can the core handle], and local user plane traffic elements [are gateways near the user, or centaluzed] play a key role in performance. Most Packet Cores are centralized, with a few cores per region [east, central, west]. This is a simplified model, but you get the point
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