The Gigabit Wall: No More Need for Speed
No, we don't need mobile data rates faster than 1 Gb/s and three upcoming wireless technologies that are actively focused on features other than speed.
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Historically, the industry has pushed for faster wireless data rates anticipating that applications will require them. For the last thirty years, this has held true.
Today, do we have enough? Or do we need even faster speeds for wireless applications?
In this post, we will argue that a 1 Gb/s wireless data rate is what most consumers will ever need. For paid subscribers, we will discuss three wireless technologies that bring features other than speed to the table.
Outline:
Evolution of data rates
The 5G upgrade
The gigabit wall
🔒3 useful wireless technologies that don’t push for speed
Read time: 6 mins (free), 10 mins (paid)
Evolution of Data Rates
Let’s look at history to understand how data rates evolved and why.
The second generation 2G communication network brought in a digital implementation of the advanced mobile phone system (D-AMPS). EDGE and GPRS provided a data rate of about 40-50 kb/s. It was revolutionary for its time, primarily due to the introduction of the short messaging service (SMS). It made asynchronous communication possible for the first time in history.
The next revolution occurred in the late 1990s with 3G. The internet was widely available at the time, but the poor data speeds on mobile networks made it inconvenient to use while traveling. Standards such as UMTS primarily increased data rates by an order of magnitude, enabling speeds ranging from 0.5 to 1 Mb/s. Later 3G iterations sought for faster speeds, with standards such as HSDPA+ pushing data rates to around 10-20 Mb/s. Data speeds rose by nearly an order of magnitude within the same communications generation.
Surprisingly, 3G adoption was more slower than anticipated at the time due to a lack of devices capable of fully leveraging greater data rates. However, the emergence of the iPhone revolutionized everything, enabling the usage of social networking, video streaming, and multimedia texting. Asianometry has a great video that explains how data usage exploded after the iPhone was introduced.
The next significant advancement came in the shape of 4G in the late 2000s. Although adoption was sluggish initially, it represented a significant advancement in what was achievable. Real-world rates were between 50 and 100 Mb/s, providing a quick and responsive internet experience. Video streaming quality was improving, and phone screens were becoming more capable of supporting it. Online gaming was emerging.
With every increasing generation, there was a need for faster data rates as applications demanded it. With 5G, it was different.
The 5G Upgrade
The fifth generation (5G) upgrade in 2019 was a highly anticipated and hyped transition. It was even a matter of national security to protect the hostile takeover of Qualcomm by Broadcom in 2018, and to prevent China from taking over the reigns of 5G. Most initial 5G deployments used low-band (< 1 GHz) spectrum for communications, and the low frequency meant large propagation distances. The use of wider communication bandwidths of up to 40 MHz enabled higher data rates compared to 4G, which used 20 MHz bandwidth channels.
Even though we are now mid-cycle in 5G, adoption rate has not exceeded 4G. Every new generation of mobile networks require the new investment of infrastructure from telecom companies. The revenue from the hardware upgrade usually takes a while to have a meaningful impact considering the high capex spend. As a result, companies are always reluctant to jump to the next wireless generation.
The promise of 5G was to deliver speeds of 1 Gb/s, and if you ask why, most articles mention lower buffering times on streaming video. As we will see in the next section, such bandwidth is overkill even for 4K video. The other reason often stated is instantaneous large file downloads, which has been largely unnecessary since the proliferation of cloud-based file storage. In this decade, IoT has become much more relevant, with most household devices including cars having wireless connectivity. But latency and power are much more important for such applications than speed.
5G also introduced mmWave frequencies — in the 24 to 100 GHz range for high bandwidth communications. It had one major problem: these high frequencies did not propagate well. They were quickly attenuated by the atmosphere, and didn’t penetrate buildings well. Its restricted range meant that mmWave 5G required dense network infrastructure — or many base stations in a small area. It also needed complex techniques such as antenna beamforming to point the signal directly at the user. High infrastructure costs often cause telecom companies to take pause. Consequently, mmWave 5G never really took off and became a feature only on high-end phones.
Apart from these reasons, the uncomfortable truth is that we likely did not need increased speeds over what 4G already offered. This partly explains the low adoption rate for 5G.
At this point we must ask: how much wireless speed do we really need?
The Gigabit Wall
Most people have a wired internet connection in their houses with a bandwidth of 100-300 Mb/s. This normally provides adequate bandwidth for virtual meetings, video streaming across many devices, and online gaming. Most people consider a fiber connection with a bandwidth of 1 Gb/s to be overkill. By this extension alone, one can argue that 1 Gb/s wireless speeds are sufficient.
Let’s go one step further and list out what data rates applications actually need today.
Netflix recommends 15 Mb/s for 4K streaming (25 Mb/s for a better experience)
8K video requires 4x the requirement of 4K video. H.264 video encoding requires 100 Mb/s, but H.265 requires 50-60 Mb/s.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 requires an exorbitant 180 Mb/s bandwidth at high settings due to real time streaming of maps and other gameplay assets. Even if two people play simultaneously, we are still at 360 Mb/s. In reality, one would use wired, not wireless mobile connections for gaming due to latency issues.
Most of the other activities like social media, web browsing and remote work won't reach anywhere near the bandwidths mentioned above, so it is safe to leave it out.
One could argue that augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) applications like the Metaverse or Apple's Vision Pro headset would need high bandwidth wireless connections to render surroundings in high quality. While this is probably true, such technologies are not yet prevalent or have low adoption rates due to high cost.
Maybe AR/VR will be the reason we need higher data rates — the ‘killer app’ for the next wireless generation, that needs speeds in excess of 1 Gb/s in a mobile environment. For example, you’re in a park, but you’re live-rendering a walk through an Amazon jungle. This could require high bandwidth, ultra low latency video that is sent to the cloud for GenAI rendering of realtime surroundings.
Unless we have creative applications emerge (more useful from my lazy effort above), it does appear that we likely will not need speeds over 1 Gb/s for most practical scenarios.
We are at the Gigabit Wall, and 5G in its continuously evolving form (5G-Advanced, mid band frequencies) will meet most of our data rate needs.
3 Useful Wireless Technologies That Don’t Push for Speed
Just because we don’t need faster speeds does not mean it is the end of the road for innovation. It’s more about tailoring networks for the right application.
For paid subscribers below, we discuss three technologies that offer a host of additional benefits such as low power, better reliability and wider coverage, that hold promise in the future of mobile communications.