Will there be a 7G?

The area where wireless networks fall short is coverage. Obviously many homes and businesses are difficult to cover with wireless technology. Also many "IoT" and public service situations need wide coverage, and a network that works in 92% of places is "close but not cigar." There are few obvious answers rather than "lots of fiber and very cheap small cells" and "satellite technology" but it's what it takes to address wireless use cases that currently aren't addressed.

Calling that 5G obscures the fact that millimeter wave 5G standalone is a totally different beast, and a huge network engineering challenge.

It may seem bureaucratic to regulate what people can call 5G, but US consumers get ripped off thinking they're on an advanced network when in fact you could call it the long-term evolution (see what I did there?) of the existing network.

I do not give a shit if I can download at 500mbps while resting my phone on a wireless router. I need to be able to USE it.

Ive switched my entire home internet setup to 5G and haven't had an outtage in two years. Whereas it was once a week with fiber. I also can fallback with duel sims.

5G has legitimately changed my quality of (digital) life.

The interesting part of 6G doesn't seem to be faster downloads so much as sensing. ISAC is basically about making the network capable of sensing the physical environment as well as communicating.

Some of the current work is already discussing the "six sensing modes", involving different combinations of the network and UEs transmitting and receiving signals reflected from objects, and even how users might be incentivized to let their devices participate

That feels potentially much more consequential than another speed bump. 3G/4G didn't just make phones faster; they enabled an entire ecosystem that was hard to predict beforehand. My guess is that sensing could be a similar pivot for 6G.

3GPP releases are more fine-grained than that. E.g. rel. 99 introduced 3G/WCDMA, rel. 8 introduced 4G/LTE, etc. Other releases only add features.

In the industry Gs are used all the time to refer to the technology/architecture, then releases are used to refer to specific features, though generally noone supports all the features of a release.

For building penetration you need low frequencies but those low frequencies have less bandwidth available because the bands are smaller. At the same time bandwidth needs rapidly go up, making those low bands fuller. Because there's a limit to how many bits per second you can get out of a Hz of spectrum.

What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters. A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally. This could be incorporated into the standard. Then establishments could easily include a booster just like many of them offer free WiFi now.

/s

This same shit happened with launches of 5G NSA, eSIM, Apple Watch eSIM, RCS, and lots of other telco technologies...

At this point all the operators have 5G SA networks up and running for parts of Slovakia (Telekom even claims it covers 99% of Slovak population with 5G SA), but it's only available for business customers in private networks...

They all claim the same stupid reason for this - "most customer phones don't support it, and there are additional benefits for businesses"...

And there are rumors from all of them that they plan to launch it for regular customers by the end of this year...

I mean come on... In a fair market competition the first one to upgrade its network would launch first and heavily claim that they're the fastest innovator in marketing...

And when the network is up and running, why not open it up to regular people? And why it's always the same bullshit type of excuse that's basically trying to say "people don't want/need this"?

I remember people saying the same thing about 4G relative 3G and 5G relative 4G.

Talking is one of the steps towards making things available to the broad masses. You have to start these things ahead of time so they are ready to deploy when the time comes.

I guess other countries are further behind?

There is no reason you can't have phased array antennas of tens of elements on the handset and thousands on the masts, to give a massive bandwidth increase.

It will take a lot of generations to get to the limit physics sets.

Its extremely limited range and penetration is a benefit there because you can put up thousands of cells without them interfering with each other.

It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.

The speeds thing was just marketing BS as usual but mmWave did have benefits in niche scenarios.

In india, jio is using 26ghz for wifi now instead. It's a service called airfiber. This don't even use any 5G. It's a weird custom hybrid solution where all the frames are wifi. Density here means that it's feasible to put the receiver on the rooftop of apartment buildings wherever you can get LoS. So in some sense it's been salvaged and those bands are actually being used. It's a fairly popular service.

URLL failed because it's main immediate usecase was supposed to be vehicle to vehicle comms. And auto didn't want telcos middlemanning there. But there is still hope here.