You’re welcome to join us, BaronTalk
Every Year, August and September are the time for major manufacturers to release their flagship phones. Recently, Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi, Huawei and Apple successively released their flagship phones of the year, among which, in addition to Apple, other manufacturers have released 5G versions of phones. Coincides with the National Day, is bound to usher in a wave of replacement, and the major manufacturers released 5G mobile phone is likely to become the first choice of many students, today I want to give the students who are ready to buy 5G mobile phone pour cold water.
** For the average consumer, it’s not a good time to buy a 5G phone. ** There are four reasons:
- 5G standards are not yet fully determined, and a 5G phone bought now may not be available next year;
- 5G-related chips are not mature enough and their power consumption is high;
- 5G base stations require high density and are difficult to cover a large area in a short time.
- 5G ecological development still needs time, and currently lacks application scenarios;
1. 5G standards have not been fully determined
Today’s 5G has only a preliminary set of standards, which are scheduled to be finalized in March next year. Today’s 5G phones may not be available or functioning well when the final standards are confirmed next year.
When we talk about standards, we have to talk about NSA and SA.
-
Standalone networking (NON-standalone, NSA) : that is, using the existing 4G as the core network, 4G mainly, 5G as a supplement, corresponding to the standard 3GPP-R15-NSA, this is the early practice of 5G;
-
Standalone networking (SA) : 5G acts as the core network, with only 5G base stations working, corresponding to standard 3GPP-R15-SA, which was just established in Morocco in June this year.
In short, SA is building an entirely new network for 5G, including base stations, core networks, etc. The NSA is building 5G networks on top of existing 4G infrastructure.
In the NSA networking mode, operators will adopt 4G/5G public core network to save network resources, but the disadvantage is that it cannot achieve new 5G features such as low latency, which is fatal to application scenarios such as autonomous driving. Therefore, SA is the ultimate direction of 5G. However, in order to save money, some operators will adopt NSA to transition at the initial stage of 5G network construction, and the construction of SA network has just begun. From January 1 next year, Korea will not allow the NSA’s mobile phones to enter the network.
At present, only Huawei’s 5G phones support both SA and NSA, while the 5G phones of other manufacturers only support NSA. For these reasons, any NSA phone you buy now from Xiaomi, Samsung, etc., will have to be downgraded to 4G.
2. 5G related chips are not mature enough and consume power quickly
Although there are several 5G phones available today, they all have the common disadvantage of high power consumption and much lower battery life than 4G phones. A large part of the reason is that the current 5G-related chip technology is not mature enough and consumes a lot of power. This is a necessary stage of technology development, 10 years ago when 4G network was first popularized, both Android and iOS basically ran out of battery in half a day, so in the past few years your phone has not been half a day charged. And for those NSA phones that need to connect to both 4G and 5G networks, their power consumption will be higher than that of the SA, further reducing battery life.
That’s why the 5G version of the phone now on the market has a higher battery capacity than the 4G version.
3. 5G base stations require high density
Wireless network communication is essentially the transmission of electromagnetic waves. The characteristics of electromagnetic waves are as follows:
- The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, and the closer to the straight line propagation (wall and poor penetration ability);
- The higher the frequency, the greater the attenuation in the transmission medium.
The 28000MHz band is used in the test of 5G network internationally. Academician Wu Hequan, who is in charge of China’s 5G strategy, also said that China’s 5G will also use 28000MHz band in the future, which is an order of magnitude higher than the 1800MHz~2600MHz frequency used in 4G network. For this reason, the density of base stations is much higher for 5G networks to achieve the same coverage as 4G networks. If 4G requires a base station at 2-3 kilometers, 5G May require a base station at 200-300 meters, with a total of 100 times as many.
With so many base stations, it is not easy to achieve full COVERAGE of 5G network in a short time even in first-tier cities. So for the most part, your 5G phone will still only work on 4G networks. At the same time, your 5G phone will need to switch between 4G and 5G frequently due to poor base station coverage, or amplify power to receive a signal when the signal is bad, which further increases power consumption and reduces battery life.
Massive base station construction is a huge cost for operators, and HUAWEI, a 5G base station equipment manufacturer, will be the biggest winner. Even though Huawei is banned by the US, many European and East Asian operators choose to cooperate with Huawei because huawei equipment is cheap and saves operators a lot of base station investment.
4. 5G ecological development will take time
Even if you don’t care about the risk of not using it later, the loss of battery life, and the fact that you’re in 5G coverage for a long time, the only improvement you get with 5G is faster download speeds, but otherwise no different from 4G. Major Internet manufacturers and equipment manufacturers still need more time to explore various application scenarios under 5G network. For example, new things such as short video and live broadcast did not appear until the middle and late period of 4G era.
The significance of 5G is not just about speed improvement, but mainly reflected in the following three aspects:
- High bandwidth, high rate;
- High reliability, low delay;
- Supports a large number of concurrent devices.
These features will enable many technologies, such as driverless cars and the Internet of everything. These technologies will take time to arrive, and it’s not something you can just buy a 5G phone to experience right now.
In live.
For these four reasons, it doesn’t make sense for the average consumer to buy a 5G phone at this stage. Instead, it may cause you to lose battery life and may not be able to use the 5G network later. Of course, it is not a problem for geeks and technology fans who like to catch up with the new, such consumers are equivalent to the first batch of 5G network test users, and it is also very meaningful for the development and landing of 5G.
5G phones also have the problem of being more expensive. But… Expensive is not the problem of mobile phone manufacturers, is your problem!
References:
- Cutting-edge technology · Wu Jun speaks 5G
- Shao Heng headlines
- It’s the first time anyone has made 5G so straightforward
If you like my posts, follow my BaronTalk, Zhihu.com column, or add a Star on GitHub.
- Wechat official account: BaronTalk
- Zhihu column: zhuanlan.zhihu.com/baron
- GitHub：github.com/BaronZ88
