BARCELONA—To get 5G up and running, your town will need to install 5G base stations. That's a problem, especially in a lot of suburbs, because people are arguing that those base stations are ugly. On Tuesday at MWC19, Nokia Networks' Phil Twist showed me much smaller antenna panels and base stations that might satisfy picky suburbanites.
The technology that's causing all the drama is millimeter wave. This relatively short-range frequency needs some sort of low-power antenna every 1,500 feet or so, and that's more common than the current macro-cell sites that are placed in many suburbs right now. The small, individual millimeter-wave cells are much less powerful than larger cell sites, but the high frequencies drop off so quickly with distance that you need more of them.
While I've seen mmWave packages that are the size of a backpack, Nokia showed me one (pictured above) that looks more like the size of a coffee table book.
"These are significantly smaller than the first millimeter-wave products we had even just a few months ago," Twist said.
Sprint is the only US carrier not using millimeter wave; it's relying on "Massive MIMO" cell sites splitting its existing 2.5GHz spectrum across 4G and 5G. Those sites are bigger, but here at MWC19, Nokia showed me how it's making them smaller.
Nokia's liquid-cooled Massive MIMO base station (pictured below) takes a third of the weight and half the thickness out of the previous version of a similar panel, letting it blend in with walls and buildings better. In this case, Nokia can't reduce the area of the panel, which has a lot of small antennas. But it got rid of the cooling fins, which take up a lot of space. At one apartment building in Helsinki, they're even driving the waste heat down into the building to heat up the common areas; between lower power requirements and heat reuse, that's an 80 percent reduction in carbon usage for the base station site, Twist said.
"The products are getting much more discreet," Twist said.
5G Isn't Quite Ready...Yet
Twist also followed up on some things T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray told me about how 5G NR base stations aren't quite ready yet.
"The 3GPP standard we should all be using for 5G was supposed to have been set in September of last year. There have been some changes from September to December which weren't forward compatible…and versions based on December are now in the labs for interoperability testing and going through the fine-tuning process. There's some fine-tuning needed to make it a stable production system. We'll have launches in a few weeks' time," Twist said.
I have to be very careful here: Twist never mentioned AT&T, and probably wouldn't have answered the question if I'd used the name, but I was very much asking what's up with AT&T's mysterious "12-city" 5G launch where it won't let anyone independent see or test it.
I've been begging AT&T and Netgear to see for myself that their hotspot actually works for months now; they keep refusing. Netgear won't even show me one that turns on in 4G mode. AT&T, for its part, throws me quotes from a single customer in New Orleans who is apparently having a good time with the hotspot. It really does sound like AT&T launched impossibly early to have retail-ready hardware.
"It has to be a proper ecosystem launch," Twist said (although not, specifically, about AT&T).