3G is (at the time of this comment) the most important generational leap we have had in cellular technology. It was the generation that brought mobile internet to the masses. That is amazing.
I often find myself switching back to 3g from 4g just for a reliable connection that works. 3g is plenty fast enough for most situations, even outdoor laptop work.
As someone who works in the Telecom industry, I feel seen by this video Though I'm aware of the many many many unsaid things here, it feels nice to see how detailed yet simple this is, well done
I would have thought ICI is mostly avoided by network-controlled roaming. Or is that only the case with corporate WIFI? Enlighten me. It’s been a while since I left the industry.
@@paddor Actually you are correct for the most part. ICI hasn't really been a problem since about 2012. And the part about "small ultra dense networks" only exist on Verizon with their mmW and even then it's barely an issue. He missed almost everthing from 3G on. CDMA was only one of the methods for cell tower connectivity.
The real problem (for me!) is when you live on a cell boundary. I can walk out of my front door and walk down the road in either direction and see service improve, but when I'm at home it's rubbish. I know it's cell interference as someone crashed a car into one of the towers and for the week it took them to repair the tower I had great service at home! (It's a good job I have wifi)
@@max-definitely The towers where I am (South UK) tend to be like lampposts. The car left the pole slightly bent and the Health and Safety people came along and said it had to go straight away as it had been made weak and was dangerous. I didn't see the car that crashed into it, but I bet it was in worse shape than the pole. :-)
As someone who constantly drives up and down I-75 for university and going home, I definitely have noticed ICI (Intercell Interference) without knowing what it was. Every time I would hit a gradual turn in the highway my cell service would suddenly stop working if I'm using GPS or listening to music until I cleared the turn and would see a new cell tower in front of me a minute or two later.
I just need to watch that 3 more times and i might understand 50% of it. Actually very clear and informative, and no mention of bill gates, control chips or viruses! Nice.
That’s what I love about science. Science follows the evidence wherever it leads. It doesn’t assume a “truth” and then cherry pick things to reach the desired answer
@@davidweir8312 yea, instead of watching the video, they'll just jump straight to the comment section to find people to argue with. I just imagine one angrily replying to Paul R's reply.
As somebody who's house is smack dab in the middle boundary, my constant one bar of signal on my property, and full signal on the sidewalk or anywhere not in my yard or in my house, is very frustrating.
I have the exact same problem! The moment I step out my door to the curb I get amazing signal but almost anywhere I can stand indoors is just a lost cause
A friend of a friend who worked in telecoms observed that wanting to get good cell phone reception in your home is a bit like wanting to be able to read in your living room by using the light from street lamps. Except, of course, people actually do design the phone networks to do that...
Usually idk anything about these videos until I watch the videos, but after doing electrical engineering for my first semester I actually understood the tech/wave physics parts since I worked with that during a class, makes the video even more exciting when you at least somewhat understand the topic.
@@CuzlmBored Yup, roughly every decade so far. And by no coincidence, that's also how often I tend to get a new phone. Had a 2010 model until last month, but it only supported 1/2/3G, which are getting shut down now. So I upgraded to a late 2021 model with 4G+5G and will probably use it until the early 2030s. The old phone still works fine... and even shockingly still uses its original battery and lasts about a week with the screen off. It just doesn't get service any more, and its OS has been out of maintenance for a long time. Before that, I used a Treo... which also still works. But its keys are getting hard to press, and it's very difficult to get any data to/from it since it's designed to connect to a serial port. I still have some old data on it to export, but haven't done it because, with its proprietary formats and apps, it must all be exported manually. But I shouldn't have that problem on the new phone, because I've switched entirely to open-source apps which use plain text, and it all gets synced to my computer automatically. Maybe next time I can finally get a Linux phone. Like, fully open-source and running the same software I use on a desktop. Ideally Debian. I know Android is technically Linux, but everything above the kernel is so different, it's basically a different OS. So perhaps PinePhone or a derivative will be usable by then.
I worked at US Cellular when text first became a Thing, and when they upgraded from TDMA to CDMA. That was a headache and a half. RIP the Nokia 3310, the phone you cannot destroy, and will probably be the only thing left of Earth when the sun shrinks from a red giant into a white dwarf.
And now CDMA towers are becoming a thing of the past too. They've been almost completely eradicated in Canada for a few years now and slowly America has been following in their footsteps. The majority of the world uses GSM now.
@@xLolaLace The original GSM was based on a 2G/TDMA structure. 4G/LTE (and now 5G) is replacing what is traditionally known as GSM, as well as 3G/CDMA. Most phones have had a generational overlap, so GSM/LTE and CDMA/LTE phones have existed. The only issue that remains with having a "world phone" is the fact that there are separate bands in use across the world, and some technologies aren't compatible even if on the same "G" level.
A few years ago, I was at a sporting event. The stadium had banners of all the advertisers, including AT&T (who is only a cell company here, not a local phone/internet/TV company.) I had AT&T cell service. While I had signal, it was useless. Totally clogged. Then 4G came out. I got a 4G phone. I got service at games again! For a few months. Then it became unusable again. Unless I turned *OFF* 4G. 3G would work fine.
@@ValeriePallaoro Not for long though. The entire network is halfway through the process of shutting down 3G forever. Some carriers already finished retiring it, some are doing it right now, and there are a couple who might wait a few more months... but in all cases, there isn't much time left. Like, AT&T started the shutdown about a week and a half ago.
I work for a local internet company and one thing a lot of people get confused on is the 5G in terms of cell service is NOT the same as 5G. In the wifi case it's using the 5.8 Gigahertz band of the spectrum
@@r6u356une56ney Yes they're similar but they're not the same. Wi-Fi is 2.4GHz and 5GHz where GHz is a unit of measurement (Giga Hertz). Nothing to do with Gs of cellular network. Sadly people sometimes mixes them up.
Well, 5G can also be referred as NR (New Radio), as 4G is also called LTE, if we use the 5G-NR nomenclature it's less likely to be confused with WiFi 5G
This problem already has a solution that was mentioned but I will elaborate. Every phone has a different location so it also has a different signal strength relative to each tower in range. This means every phone has a sigature. If you combine the information from multiple towers your signal can be extracted from the noise using this information. This is computationally expensive but doable today.
The solution to this is peer-to-peer phased arrays. Then the more phones you have the better the system works. The network effect is tremendously powerful. Hypothetically it might be possible in the new Tesla phone when it comes out. It will have the hardware. Depends how hackable it is. Probably be the backbone of 7g, and when wireless starts to be more efficient than wired. Anywhere from 2 to 10 years from now or so, maybe. Assuming we aren't all glowing by then. After that, quantum entanglement. Atomic clocks fit on a PCI card, so it can make networking 2 to 10 times faster all by itself. Room temperature super conductors are really close. So you can use spooky action at a distance for ECC. And then there is AI compression with neuromorphic processing. Actually, now that I think about it, there's a lot of things we can still do. I'm buying Bitcoin today to help pay for my Neuralink. So I can apply these advances directly to my brain. I for one welcome our Borg overlords. Resistance is futile. Well that got dark quick.
@@ChinnoDog It's impossible to disambiguate based on signal strength alone. A unique identifier and relative signal strength on multiple towers that cooperate is the only way to solve this.
I actually had a telecom class last year and this video was an amazing summary of the first part of that class. I wish this video was out back then since the explanation of the different methods to increase data rates are much better than in my course
I love learning about our current technology and how it evolved! It's presented in such a simple manner, that it's easy to understand. I'm sure there are lots of tidbits left out, and some of it is probably over simplified, but it's an amazing video! Thanks for helping us learn about our current technologies, and how much thought our engineers have to put into it to make our devices work!
It's amazing how resourceful engineers have been to squeeze out as much of the limited frequencies as possible! I wonder if the other industries using the other bands are doing the same. It may be that to make further progress, we need to reevaluate whether the original allocation of bands across industries fit the current needs of society.
Many of the TV channels, the actual radio frequency channels, have been sold off to the cell phone industry. That is where the new bands come from. This is why over the last several years you had to rescan your TV every so often as stations were moved to different frequencies. It is called repacking. The digitally encoded TV signals include the logical channel number, the one displayed. The actual radio frequency channel can be (and usually is) totally different.
There’s always been a trade off between capacity and quality. In the commercial cellular industry, capacity requirements keep increasing, and it’s only because of the constant improvement in the phone chips that has allowed 5G to exist. The other bands are either reserved for government (police, military, fire, etc), or are opaque to radio waves (and therefore unusable). The very high frequencies can’t penetrate walls, so those are also unusable.
@@danielcarroll3358 That’s also why the government forced everyone to upgrade to HDTV. An HD channel uses about 1/4 the bandwidth of an old-style TV channel.
@@SonnyBubba And get ready for ATSC 3.0 soon. Within the decade we will be using converter boxes yet again. More channels, higher resolution and more features promised.
When my friend and I both had 4G phones, we would have no problems chatting as he drove home from work. Since we both upgraded to 5G phones there are times when we cannot get a signal, or our signal is so bad messages are garbled. However, when it works, the sound quality is superb. This video has helped me to understand a little of what may be going on.
You need to know the Radio Waves used for 5G are way smaller than those of 4G so 5G is way more prone to interference than the waves of 4G so sticking with 4G IS way better
Another thing to keep in mind is the congestion of a tower. Most common in denser cities, congested towers are considered "oversaturated" and may kick off users that are taking up a lot of the bandwidth and connect them to another Tower that's less saturated. The trade-off being a slightly slower connection with a less modulated signal. The benefit, on the other hand, is that less data hungry users can connect to that Tower, saturation levels permitted. Then there's also Tower handoffs and how those towers handle new cell phones connecting and other cell phones exiting their cell and sometimes mix ups happen which can cause weird issues with your Internet browsing or phone call. Yeah cell networks are weird.
Phones have started using the same frequencies as the wireless microphones used in some live theater, so interfering with the sound equipment. When you're asked to turn off there are many reasons for that, so please do it 🙂
This answered so many questions about cell phones that I didn't know that I had. What an informative video. Love all of the nitty-gritty details soo much. Thank you for making this
Wow, that was very informative! And the video didn't skip a beat despite the network tricks and engineering clearly becoming much more complex. This is top quality work from the Sci-show team, I gotta say.
It's interesting how it sounds like things were generally improving with each generation at first, but starting with 4G it seems like they're circling back around to having the same problems we had in the beginning, without necessarily having similar solutions to work around them.
The fundamental problem has always been that there is a trade off between capacity and quality. Too many users in an area and the service bogs down. In 2G this would mean your call didn’t go through (blocked call). In 3G this was either blocks or drops. In 4G it means slow data rates, as a garbled signal means the phone has to send more error correction codes, leaving less room for the data to come through. (In the analogy of people talking in a noisy room, “I didn’t hear you, can you repeat that” means you have to take longer to finish telling the story.)
This is one of the many videos on scishow that makes me really appreciate this channel. As a trilingual person, the way that the processes of FDMA and CDMA were broken down into lay terms by using foreign languages as a representation of frequency was awesome. I was actually able to follow this up until the last orthogonal ????? ???? multiplexing part 😅 (yes, I know I missed a lot but I tried) Shout out to the writers and very patient scientific minded people on the show for finding such creative ways to help us regular people understand how our world works around us!!
Worked in telecom for a long time and read a lot of Bell Labs journals. Your explanation of TDMA and CDMA is the best simple explanation I've ever seen.
omg! i finally understand why i have terrible service at my house when I live equidistance from two cell towers! it's that placement that causes the problem! I've been struggling to find a carrier that gives consistent coverage for almost a decade. now I understand why!
Curiously, something you seemed to overlook when talking about ICI and signal dropout is how carriers generally operate multiple "generations" concurrently, as well as some other tricks so your signal doesn't suddenly tank on the boundary. This is especially true with "5G" where the 600MHz band is used in a way that's functionally identical to 3/4G for long range communication, with the new millimeter wave frequencies for those high density cells you were mentioning. Cellphones always keep tabs on two towers at once, "serving" and "standby", generally based on signal quality. So even if ICI briefly makes your mm-wave signal drop, the standby 600MHz cell will take over.
You forgot about the wave's phase. Well, it might be lesser of key qualities of a wave and doesn't make sense without a reference, but it's one of the most used ones in digital radio. In modern cellular networks, including 5G, there's a *lot* of QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) involved, which encodes data into amplitude and phase. QAM was also used to transmit color information in analog TV :)
this episode was a hard throwback to the beginning of my engineering studies (technical informatics and communication technologies) lol great and easy to understand explanations!
I'm glad you included hobby/personal use bands in the list at the beginning, because, well, my dad used some of those bands (eg. 10m band) for many years. He was an amateur radio (ham) operator, and later volunteered for a military service whose acronym was MARS, which is Military Auxiliary Radio System. They send messages from military personnel on duty to their families hundreds or thousands of miles away (or I hope they still exist!), where it's unsafe or impossible to have telephone communication (even mobile/cellphone use, which was brand new back then, but, well, is ubiquitous now, lol!), letting them stay in contact. It uses slightly different bands than ham radio does, so he needed different antennae (we had what's colloquially known as an antenna farm!), which I helped string up around our property. 😄 No cell towers to help, though we DID have our own tower. 😁 And... there's also CB, Citizen's Band, which was a thing, then. Dunno if it still exists or not, since I haven't had a CB radio for (does mental math) - er, well, a lot of years. 😂 Anyway... 😅 Great explanation, SciShow - damned well done. 👍🏼
Also during the 1980s while driving both sides of conversation heard in the background an"FM noise" get gradually louder. Handy warning of a cell change-over coming soon. After the change-over the background noise dissapeared completely and you could then hear any song the other end playing in the background as clear as hearing it on the car radio your end. In no way garbled like it is now. All this "say it again you're breaking up..." had all started with 2G- onwards
@@nolesy34 the first people to use cellphones were 80s businessmen who demanded the most accurate sound call quality money could buy with every single word counts. They did not tolerate poor call quality and demanded every word they spoke get through instantly. Hardly suprising when phone bills were more than many people's salary.
I regularly get no service whenever there are lots of people around. I'm in a tourist zone so whenever there's something happening everything just dies.
This was probably one of the best videos you made. I mean almost every single video you make is awesome... But I've been wanting to learn about cell phone Gs and you explained it incredibly well!!!
In the 70's i worked on 1200 baud FSK modems (bell 202 or 201? I don't remember). Bits would drop out, group delays (looks like bits arrived before sent), and other weird stuff. We had to send a pattern to determine the acoustic data (1200, 600, 300 bits per second) had to have the frequency shift keying at tone boundaries lest the data would generate new tones. It was just data like ASCII. (Sales orders, field service reports etc.) It was fun for a few years with HW & SW development. RF noise was not tested. Once a demo over phone lines worked when someone noticed it was not connected. Ooops! Square waves produce every third harmonics. I went somewhere else before cell phones appeared. Thanks for the 1-5 G review.
I wonder how an AI would arrange the cell coverage, given ordinary 5G hardware and freedom to use it via its own generated software as it pleases in order to maximize service and speed.
Wifi access points have similar issues with drop outs between points when there's overlapping wifi fields in the same network like at a shopping centre. Counterintuitively, adding more access points can make reception issues worse for this reason.
Having just upgraded to a 5G-capable phone and unlimited data plan, I am simultaneously looking forward to the super speeds promised but now also worried about drops.
I came expecting to hear why 6G will be necessary too. I still think 4G is good enough, and don't really see the use for 5G. But it was cool to learn about signal interference instead, too, I guess 😅
5G is important to improve the accessibility of Mobile Communication. it can support more people and at better speeds. This will be needed more and more, especially when everything starts having a connection to the internet, which will induce hopefully a drastic expansion in the IoT (internet of Things) sector too.
If you don't see the use for 5G then you don't understand it, 5G will be revolutionary compared to the previous four generations as all they did were offer incremental boosts in bandwidth so people could send more or bigger downloads, but 5G is about connectivity and is aimed at the Internet of Things, it will allow piggybacking of signals so someone who gets knocked unconscious will receive help because their watch or phone asked the nearest phone, laptop or car to send a 911 call, it will allow self driving vehicles to download traffic and weather conditions from street lamps, it will allow your fridge to restock your orange juice while you're at work. I don't think 6G will be a thing since 5G delivers on what the aim was back in the 1990's with 2G of having universal connectivity. For instance the previous four generations were solely phone-based but this one encompasses everything from cell towers to Wifi to Bluetooth and NFC. It's like the grand unifying equation for IT.
One time, way back in 2004, I stopped in Vegas on my way to Coachella. There were so many people there on a Friday night, all cell towers were overloaded. No phone calls could be made until the next morning.
IMO. Fix 4g before making 5g. My 4g was already faster than I needed and faster than my home connection. My new 5g phone doesn't feel any faster despite speedtest scores being higher.
Fix 4G? Fix what about it? Sounds like you were happy with it. I agree that 5G is overkill, anyway. When I purchased a phone 6 months ago I wasn't willing to pay for a 5G model, and I still don't know what I'm missing. 4G seems fine.
A very informative and easy-to-follow explanation of a complex technology. Well done. I'm curious about the issue of signal loss between two cell towers, because the phone doesn't know which to communicate with. Can we use a hierarchy system, assigning each cell tower a random number, and towers with a higher number will take preference over ones with a lower number, when a phone is between two towers? The numbers could be randomly reassigned periodically so that certain towers aren't always used more than others, thus requiring more maintenance. I'm not an engineer and there are probably several better ideas out there, or reasons why this idea wouldn't work. But just as a layman watching this video I began thinking about it.
We just need people to perfect circular polarization. The amount of data that can be extracted from radio waves that have undergone this transformation is going to put each jump between G's to shame.
Without going into too much Quantum Mechanics, ya know how polarizing sunglasses give that weird shading effect? That’s because light can have different polarizations (directions the light is “tilted“, not to be confused with travel direction). Mantis Shrimp can see circularly polarized light, but are the only species that can AFAIK. If you find any good sources, please notify me!
There is nothing to perfect. CP is a technology older than I am (I turn 70 this year) but it has limited application. CP has few real world advantages, being essentially a blend of horizontal and vertical polarization. The primary advantage is that reflections reverse polarization so it can reduce multipath problems, which can be messy in urban areas. A major disadvantage is that non-directional patterns are very difficult; it is most useful point to point. (Amateur radio licensed since 1967, FCC Radiotelephone licensed since 1969. 48 years in radio electronics as an avionics tech for 14 years, Fortune 100 electric company comm field tech for 34 years.)
Code Division Multiple Access is derived from Carrier-sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance. Developed in the early days of computer networking. It is a network multiple access method in which carrier sensing is used, but nodes attempt to avoid collisions by beginning transmission only after the channel is sensed to be "idle".
Like G force? Or generations like 5G or WiFi generations… oh I see..wait why was the thumbnail a speedometer then?? (Edit: nvm it’s not a speedometer🤣🤣🤦🏾♀️ pay me no attention) I thought racecars🏎💨 🤦🏾♀️
Thank you so much for explaining this! So much of how our technology works is a complete mystery to me. I feel like I should understand better how things like cell phones and computers work, since we use them all the time.
Fun fact! TDMA was used for the GSM 2G system. However, at least in America, a competing 2G CDMA-based system was deployed. It was used by Sprint and Verizon, with T-Mobile and AT&T using TDMA-based GSM. 3G GSM is wideband CDMA, or "WCDMA". This is how AT&T was able to advertise the ability to use voice and data at the same time during this era! But they received criticism for the very heavy bandwidth used by the "wideband" part of that. The competing CDMA equivalent was EV-DO, "Evolution - Data Optimized/Data Only". Phones that use this technology could be recognized by having a second signal bar for the EVDO band - EVDO could not carry control information, and relied on the existing 2G network for this important supportive role. CDMA carriers continued to *briefly* compete with the coming of 4G-LTE through use of WiMax based 4G, however LTE .... quickly won, and became the universal standard we know it for today. -- Footnote. Some phones, usually older budget models, would advertise "4G" capability without actually being capable of 4G-LTE. This is because W-CDMA based "3G" received numerous upgrades over the years, that were actually backwards compatible with each other. Impressively, they got downlink speeds all the way up to 42Mbits with the fully upgraded alphabet soup of HSDPA+, while still maintaining full backwards compatibility with the first 3G capable phones. You may still see this today when you lose 4G coverage on some phones, which will display "3G/H+" by your data connection indicator. However some carriers (AT&T in particular) insist on the "4G" advertising, and your only clue of operating in this mode is the loss of the "LTE" light. This is why I emphasize "LTE" above.
Wow. The last thing I knew about cell phone technology was an article I read in the 1980s which explained about the honeycombs and why the coming phones would be called "cell phones". Everything else in here was new to me.
you know it would help a lot more if we also had the cell phone services used the cell phones themselves as a wireless bandwidth transmitting and receiving wifi/radio relays/repeaters with peer to peer data communication with other cellphones in a daisy chain if the 5g cell phone tower is slightly to senficily to far away! it would instead have data go to and from other cell phones instead of a cell phone tower when needed! also it's more of a back gonud data backend supply chain thing that would not count as using your limited bandwidth data limit for your cell phone service!
You can lead the charge. Set up your phone to provide a wifi hotspot at all times, and find a way to either disable encryption, or name your network "Public wifi password abcde" or something, so people can figure it out. Then, if other people around you tell their phones to connect, you've effectively got your mesh network in which a lot more of the communication goes through your phone rather than directly to towers. (I'll leave it to you to figure out the flaws in this plan.)
I work for a cell phone company and this is needed education because so few understand the basics of cell phone technology and it’s limitations. Thank you!
LOL, Great job on the video, but you got to 5G and forgot to mention its biggest selling point, that it's also using a new block of the spectrum that 1G-4G didn't have.
I implemented wireless telecom networks in the 2G, 3G, and proto-4G eras. 2G and 3G used CDMA and TDMA roughly equally, It depended on your provider, and what patents they were wiling to pay for. CDMA sounds like it would have a massive improvement over TDMA, but we've since discovered that in practice, it doesn't change much. 2G digitized communication, which is critical for any multiplexing . 3G fixed some massive inherent security flaws (but still left a big one in place), and it shifted IP traffic to being a major feature, instead of the hack-afterthought that it was 4G fixes all the major security flaws, and finally concluded that the IP part is in fact everything, and it's the things like voice-calls and txt messages that should be treated like the afterthought, reimplemented on top of it. I'm not as up to speed on 5G, but the major improvement I've come across in it is support for "fixed mobile" over line-of-sight connections. This potentially greatly facilitates something approaching broadband Internet Access. It also has improved specs for using multiple frequencies at once to increase bandwidth. Beyond that the average user would not be all that wrong in thinking that 5G is basically 4G but more-faster.
@@Ckcdillpickle 4G was designed with the ability to be crazy fast. And in many situations it can be all that is needed. 5G defines alternate mechanism to reach those high data-rates.
So... all the fear about 5G is completely unfounded. Seeing as the base technology is exactly the same, and 5G is just a different way for the devices and towers to interpret the signals.
For a "Scientific" oriented channel you sure as heck don't know that there is *no* such language as "Chinese". People in China do not speak "Chinese". Most people in Honk Kong speak a different language, but that's not called "Chinese" either. Perhaps you don't even understand what i'm saying as I don't speak "American" language.
There is a thousand dialects and subdialects to every language, it is easier to lump them all into one word then name exactly which one you mean when it’s not relevant to the subject.
@@blakeryan7894 Name me just ONE language that has "a thousand dialects", let alone "every" language... You won't be able to. Because no language has that many. You lack of knowledge of what a dialect is, combined with your poor spelling, grammar and incoherent sentence structure is a clear indication that it's not worth spending anymore of my time speaking with you following this reply. I'm was not talking about dialects. I was shaming the writers of SciShow of not knowing name of the number one language that is spoken by more people on Earth, than any other. "Chinese" is a nationality, generally referring to the Han people living in China, 3/4 of whom speak *Mandarin* with the other languages being Cantonese, Shanghainese and Fuzhou. Each of these have their own dialects and accents.
@@PushyPawn Y'all punking youse sick XYL, bro? Those are fragments of six of the American dialects I am vaguely familiar with. (XYL is "wife" in English speaking amateur radio) I didn't even get into cajun, trekkie, lineman, Glaswegian, Cockney, Malayali, Telugu, Maharashtrian, Punjabi, Bengali, Ulster English, West/South-West Irish English (including Cork English), local Dublin English, non-local Dublin English, Hiberno-English, Scots, Cardiff, Merseyside.... A thousand would be a very conservative number of English dialects,
It's not just frequency and amplitude that are used for encoding digital data. In fact, the changing phase angle of the signal is the most important factor, allowing higher data rates.
oh hell yeah! scishow cover everything in just a 10 minutes video where the school teacher would never teach or the college lecturer would take entire semester to explain and yet learning new things from scishow never have to take exam for it
Really enjoyed the style of this presenter &/or script! Both informative and very funny 😁 It's the PACE of all these developments that gets me...? Within half my lifetime, we've gone from electric typewriters to laptops & tablets, from landline phones to increasingly function-packed cellphones. The incredible convenience of info access & communication we take totally for granted now in developed countries is really a very, very new thing. And when I think how far telecommunications tech has altered in my grandma's near-century lifetime... mind truly blown 🤯 How anyone manages to keep up even slightly with that degree of change is a true testament to human adaptability!!
When I started the video, I was wondering to what depth you were going to go and how you were going to explain the more advanced schemes. The language analogy for CDMA was brilliant, very well done giving an accessible overview of a fiendishly complex topic!
Some businesses have cell repeaters to provide cell service inside of large buildings that normally block signals. Did some work at one that could only handle 100 users at the same time. This was at the dawn of 3G so they didn't think more then 100 people would be using phones at the same time. With streaming and apps that were always on it ended up grabbing the first 100 phones and only those would work unless you left the building and it grabbed someone else's. The IT guy told me people got in early and didn't take lunch outside of office because they didn't want to lose service.
This has gotta be the best video description of cell phone theory out there, awesome job this stuff usually dry as hell in a desert. Alot of people are visual learners and its happening in real time and space we can see the towers!
Quite a few inaccuracies. in 2G cell « phase » not amplitude, I.e. start degrees of the sine wave, was used to modulate or generate the signal, amplitude and phase started to be used again in 3G. 3G used WCDMA Wideband CDMA, CDMA was used in 2G at that time there was 2 competing standards with GSM (TDMA), the codes were quasi-orthogonal, some A x B would still have some residual values and very few couples were truly orthogonal, meaning when combined together the result is all zeros. 4G: you don’t use orthogonal frequencies but codes again, and 4G uses only orthogonal codes Ever since 3G codes are used to differentiate users on networks as all users on the same frequency or band talk at the « same time » on the same « airwave asset »
4G has range advantage, 5G has speed advantage. I think it's smart to keep both technologies at this time just because people want to be able to connect. Maybe 3G is still worth something too. Perhaps Triple G phones based on 3 4 and 5?
Probably a good idea to keep some land line phones around for emergency calls then. Cell phones are all well and good until you need to call 911 and can't get a signal.
9:14 guess that’s why my local tower I know of fully and the possible ones near me make my phone not have service fully in town, but go near either of them, and it fully functions.
Whatever G it changes to the massively lossy compression makes your voice sound like you're being impersonated by a robot reading out a speech-to-text script of you talking. That's why there's a long delay. Before 'G's you could hear music through a cellphone clearer than MP3. There was a 80s advertising campaign running in Japan of a concert musician participating via cellphone in a live orchestra which was actually possible then. .
No you couldn't... otherwise people would call call centres to listen to hold music Music is always bad over a phone line Thats why in Eminems song he gets accused of "phoning something in" means it was a bad attempt If you like music sing it yourself to your freind and tap the beat.. it always sounds better when you make it live because the phone is made for human vocal chords Why do you think in back to the future the man put his phone to the guitar of Michael j fox when he was playing something strange
@@nolesy34 I can tell you weren't even born in the era I'm talking about so you wouldn't know. Before GSM both ends conversation both persons on either end of the line could simultaneously speak and listen at the same time IN REAL TIME not only that could at same time clearly hear music playing in background as though in same room. Many phone companies provided Dial-a-Disc of latest chart music, and hearing it though a pre-GSM cellphone was as about as clear as over FM radio, except for lack of bass. The concept of Back to Future calling friend on phone to listen to music was really actually done back in the 1950s and 60s and people used to call eachother to play back part of new record and it was as clear as the radio. There was no GSM 'autotune' emulation of vocal cords then, until GSM it was clear Voice-Shaped Currents going from A to B which conveyed much more than just spoken words, things like subtle tonal expressions and sounds between words.
Good video. Nice to hear, simply stated, the complexities involved. Not just techno babble you can't understand, and not so simple it doesn't really explain anything. Well done.
3G is (at the time of this comment) the most important generational leap we have had in cellular technology. It was the generation that brought mobile internet to the masses. That is amazing.
Yup
I often find myself switching back to 3g from 4g just for a reliable connection that works. 3g is plenty fast enough for most situations, even outdoor laptop work.
I think you might be location biased. In my country it was actually 4g that bought the same change, and changed how we use internet forever
@@kabirjain11 you dont get points for being last
Hahaha, not expecting points. Just saying that there are more perspectives to the internet story
As someone who works in the Telecom industry, I feel seen by this video
Though I'm aware of the many many many unsaid things here, it feels nice to see how detailed yet simple this is, well done
Yup
I would have thought ICI is mostly avoided by network-controlled roaming. Or is that only the case with corporate WIFI? Enlighten me. It’s been a while since I left the industry.
@@paddor Actually you are correct for the most part. ICI hasn't really been a problem since about 2012. And the part about "small ultra dense networks" only exist on Verizon with their mmW and even then it's barely an issue. He missed almost everthing from 3G on. CDMA was only one of the methods for cell tower connectivity.
You might want to close the blinds if you find yourself being overly seen
@@Skinhound for some reason those who 'feel seen,' make me throw up in my mouth a little.
The real problem (for me!) is when you live on a cell boundary. I can walk out of my front door and walk down the road in either direction and see service improve, but when I'm at home it's rubbish. I know it's cell interference as someone crashed a car into one of the towers and for the week it took them to repair the tower I had great service at home! (It's a good job I have wifi)
Then crash your car into the tower every week!
@@Anonymous-df8it 3ven better: Steal the tower to your home!
Qhos gonna stop them?Radio tower police?
you can buy a cell signal booster that'll boost the signal into your home
or just call over wifi
How do you crash a car into a cell tower for it to brea? Either the tower was made of wood, or the car was a truck...
@@max-definitely The towers where I am (South UK) tend to be like lampposts. The car left the pole slightly bent and the Health and Safety people came along and said it had to go straight away as it had been made weak and was dangerous. I didn't see the car that crashed into it, but I bet it was in worse shape than the pole. :-)
As someone who constantly drives up and down I-75 for university and going home, I definitely have noticed ICI (Intercell Interference) without knowing what it was. Every time I would hit a gradual turn in the highway my cell service would suddenly stop working if I'm using GPS or listening to music until I cleared the turn and would see a new cell tower in front of me a minute or two later.
Sounds like a KSU student
@@punk1attitude there's more than one KSU on I-75
@@punk1attitude Yeah which KSU are you referring to lmao. I only know of the one in GA
@@saaddagoat There's a Kansas State University in Georgia?
@@MapMonkeyTube Kennesaw state!
I just need to watch that 3 more times and i might understand 50% of it. Actually very clear and informative, and no mention of bill gates, control chips or viruses! Nice.
We all know the viruses ordered the 5g towers to create bill gates
That’s what I love about science. Science follows the evidence wherever it leads. It doesn’t assume a “truth” and then cherry pick things to reach the desired answer
Well, now you've done it *facepalme*
@@ValeriePallaoro
Don't panic, I really don't think they'll have the attention span to watch this.
@@davidweir8312 yea, instead of watching the video, they'll just jump straight to the comment section to find people to argue with. I just imagine one angrily replying to Paul R's reply.
As somebody who's house is smack dab in the middle boundary, my constant one bar of signal on my property, and full signal on the sidewalk or anywhere not in my yard or in my house, is very frustrating.
I have the exact same problem! The moment I step out my door to the curb I get amazing signal but almost anywhere I can stand indoors is just a lost cause
My wifi fixes that issues for me but im assuming it doesn't work for you.
@@oopsy444 I use WIFI calling yes. It does solve it, but I had to do a lot of upgrading to have perfect wifi throughout my property.
A friend of a friend who worked in telecoms observed that wanting to get good cell phone reception in your home is a bit like wanting to be able to read in your living room by using the light from street lamps. Except, of course, people actually do design the phone networks to do that...
@@rmsgrey Yup. It's all about frequency, materials, and power. The delicate dance.
Usually idk anything about these videos until I watch the videos, but after doing electrical engineering for my first semester I actually understood the tech/wave physics parts since I worked with that during a class, makes the video even more exciting when you at least somewhat understand the topic.
Hopefully soon you'll get to do some signals processing, which is where all the fun of it begins 😋
Very instructive video! the only missing part for me was the year each generation began, to have an idea of the progression over time.
0G 1947
1G 1979
2G 1991
3G 2001
4G 2006 OR 2009 (debate on what constitutes 4G)
5G 2019
(dates are first successful commercial deployment)
So pretty close to one generation every 10 years.
@@JustinShaedo Cool! Thanks.
each G has a roughly 10 year interval between them since 2G
@@CuzlmBored Yup, roughly every decade so far. And by no coincidence, that's also how often I tend to get a new phone. Had a 2010 model until last month, but it only supported 1/2/3G, which are getting shut down now. So I upgraded to a late 2021 model with 4G+5G and will probably use it until the early 2030s.
The old phone still works fine... and even shockingly still uses its original battery and lasts about a week with the screen off. It just doesn't get service any more, and its OS has been out of maintenance for a long time.
Before that, I used a Treo... which also still works. But its keys are getting hard to press, and it's very difficult to get any data to/from it since it's designed to connect to a serial port. I still have some old data on it to export, but haven't done it because, with its proprietary formats and apps, it must all be exported manually. But I shouldn't have that problem on the new phone, because I've switched entirely to open-source apps which use plain text, and it all gets synced to my computer automatically.
Maybe next time I can finally get a Linux phone. Like, fully open-source and running the same software I use on a desktop. Ideally Debian. I know Android is technically Linux, but everything above the kernel is so different, it's basically a different OS. So perhaps PinePhone or a derivative will be usable by then.
I worked at US Cellular when text first became a Thing, and when they upgraded from TDMA to CDMA. That was a headache and a half. RIP the Nokia 3310, the phone you cannot destroy, and will probably be the only thing left of Earth when the sun shrinks from a red giant into a white dwarf.
And now CDMA towers are becoming a thing of the past too. They've been almost completely eradicated in Canada for a few years now and slowly America has been following in their footsteps. The majority of the world uses GSM now.
I think I still have one of those in a box somewhere.
@@xLolaLace The original GSM was based on a 2G/TDMA structure. 4G/LTE (and now 5G) is replacing what is traditionally known as GSM, as well as 3G/CDMA. Most phones have had a generational overlap, so GSM/LTE and CDMA/LTE phones have existed.
The only issue that remains with having a "world phone" is the fact that there are separate bands in use across the world, and some technologies aren't compatible even if on the same "G" level.
A few years ago, I was at a sporting event. The stadium had banners of all the advertisers, including AT&T (who is only a cell company here, not a local phone/internet/TV company.) I had AT&T cell service. While I had signal, it was useless. Totally clogged. Then 4G came out. I got a 4G phone. I got service at games again! For a few months. Then it became unusable again. Unless I turned *OFF* 4G. 3G would work fine.
Nicely done. this might be the work around for the future, thanks for saying
@@ValeriePallaoro Not for long though. The entire network is halfway through the process of shutting down 3G forever. Some carriers already finished retiring it, some are doing it right now, and there are a couple who might wait a few more months... but in all cases, there isn't much time left. Like, AT&T started the shutdown about a week and a half ago.
So, when everyone goes to 5g, 4g will be great.
So, as in many things, it’s all those other people that are the real problem. 😈😂
I have a 5 G phone and when 5 G is not available it reverts back to 4G. Just like all routers for wifi are backwards compatible 802.11 protocol.
I work for a local internet company and one thing a lot of people get confused on is the 5G in terms of cell service is NOT the same as 5G. In the wifi case it's using the 5.8 Gigahertz band of the spectrum
There is "5G" cellular service. And there is 5Ghz band wifi. Yes, many people incorrectly use the former term for the latter concept.
@@r6u356une56ney Yes they're similar but they're not the same. Wi-Fi is 2.4GHz and 5GHz where GHz is a unit of measurement (Giga Hertz). Nothing to do with Gs of cellular network. Sadly people sometimes mixes them up.
@@tesfabpel while the *terms* sound similar, the two technologies are only "similar" in that they both involve transmitting data using radio waves.
Well, 5G can also be referred as NR (New Radio), as 4G is also called LTE, if we use the 5G-NR nomenclature it's less likely to be confused with WiFi 5G
5G for mobile is 5th Generation , not in reference to any GHZ
Is this why phone signal is terrible at festivals, because thousands of people are in the same place using the same bands/cell towers? 🤯
This problem already has a solution that was mentioned but I will elaborate. Every phone has a different location so it also has a different signal strength relative to each tower in range. This means every phone has a sigature. If you combine the information from multiple towers your signal can be extracted from the noise using this information. This is computationally expensive but doable today.
Yes and it is also a problem during major emergencies and everyone tries too call for help or home.
The solution to this is peer-to-peer phased arrays.
Then the more phones you have the better the system works.
The network effect is tremendously powerful.
Hypothetically it might be possible in the new Tesla phone when it comes out. It will have the hardware. Depends how hackable it is.
Probably be the backbone of 7g, and when wireless starts to be more efficient than wired. Anywhere from 2 to 10 years from now or so, maybe. Assuming we aren't all glowing by then.
After that, quantum entanglement. Atomic clocks fit on a PCI card, so it can make networking 2 to 10 times faster all by itself. Room temperature super conductors are really close. So you can use spooky action at a distance for ECC. And then there is AI compression with neuromorphic processing.
Actually, now that I think about it, there's a lot of things we can still do.
I'm buying Bitcoin today to help pay for my Neuralink. So I can apply these advances directly to my brain.
I for one welcome our Borg overlords. Resistance is futile.
Well that got dark quick.
@@ChinnoDog It's impossible to disambiguate based on signal strength alone. A unique identifier and relative signal strength on multiple towers that cooperate is the only way to solve this.
Yup.
I actually had a telecom class last year and this video was an amazing summary of the first part of that class. I wish this video was out back then since the explanation of the different methods to increase data rates are much better than in my course
Did you go to BCIT?
Damn bro said RUclips delivers information better than in Uni 😂
I love learning about our current technology and how it evolved! It's presented in such a simple manner, that it's easy to understand. I'm sure there are lots of tidbits left out, and some of it is probably over simplified, but it's an amazing video! Thanks for helping us learn about our current technologies, and how much thought our engineers have to put into it to make our devices work!
It's amazing how resourceful engineers have been to squeeze out as much of the limited frequencies as possible! I wonder if the other industries using the other bands are doing the same. It may be that to make further progress, we need to reevaluate whether the original allocation of bands across industries fit the current needs of society.
Many of the TV channels, the actual radio frequency channels, have been sold off to the cell phone industry. That is where the new bands come from. This is why over the last several years you had to rescan your TV every so often as stations were moved to different frequencies. It is called repacking. The digitally encoded TV signals include the logical channel number, the one displayed. The actual radio frequency channel can be (and usually is) totally different.
@@danielcarroll3358 Thanks, Daniel, that's interesting to know!
There’s always been a trade off between capacity and quality.
In the commercial cellular industry, capacity requirements keep increasing, and it’s only because of the constant improvement in the phone chips that has allowed 5G to exist.
The other bands are either reserved for government (police, military, fire, etc), or are opaque to radio waves (and therefore unusable). The very high frequencies can’t penetrate walls, so those are also unusable.
@@danielcarroll3358
That’s also why the government forced everyone to upgrade to HDTV. An HD channel uses about 1/4 the bandwidth of an old-style TV channel.
@@SonnyBubba And get ready for ATSC 3.0 soon. Within the decade we will be using converter boxes yet again. More channels, higher resolution and more features promised.
When my friend and I both had 4G phones, we would have no problems chatting as he drove home from work. Since we both upgraded to 5G phones there are times when we cannot get a signal, or our signal is so bad messages are garbled. However, when it works, the sound quality is superb. This video has helped me to understand a little of what may be going on.
You need to know the Radio Waves used for 5G are way smaller than those of 4G so 5G is way more prone to interference than the waves of 4G so sticking with 4G IS way better
Another thing to keep in mind is the congestion of a tower. Most common in denser cities, congested towers are considered "oversaturated" and may kick off users that are taking up a lot of the bandwidth and connect them to another Tower that's less saturated. The trade-off being a slightly slower connection with a less modulated signal. The benefit, on the other hand, is that less data hungry users can connect to that Tower, saturation levels permitted.
Then there's also Tower handoffs and how those towers handle new cell phones connecting and other cell phones exiting their cell and sometimes mix ups happen which can cause weird issues with your Internet browsing or phone call.
Yeah cell networks are weird.
And also ISI, inter symbol interference
Phones have started using the same frequencies as the wireless microphones used in some live theater, so interfering with the sound equipment. When you're asked to turn off there are many reasons for that, so please do it 🙂
I'll turn it silent buttercup. I might need to respond and I'll step out to do it but I'm not turning my phone completely off.
@@capturedflame Meh, some people have kids, patients, or are on call for other things...
@@peteranon8455 Back in the days of pagers you would leave your pager at the front along with your seat number and they would come and get you.
Some older QLXD's are gatering dust for some time now because of this
The frequency you are talking about is 2.4ghz band. We are moving Away from this.
This answered so many questions about cell phones that I didn't know that I had. What an informative video. Love all of the nitty-gritty details soo much. Thank you for making this
This was amazingly made. I've wondered about how the networks work for a long time, and this was very digestible. Amazing overview!
Wow, that was very informative! And the video didn't skip a beat despite the network tricks and engineering clearly becoming much more complex. This is top quality work from the Sci-show team, I gotta say.
9
It's interesting how it sounds like things were generally improving with each generation at first, but starting with 4G it seems like they're circling back around to having the same problems we had in the beginning, without necessarily having similar solutions to work around them.
The fundamental problem has always been that there is a trade off between capacity and quality.
Too many users in an area and the service bogs down.
In 2G this would mean your call didn’t go through (blocked call).
In 3G this was either blocks or drops.
In 4G it means slow data rates, as a garbled signal means the phone has to send more error correction codes, leaving less room for the data to come through.
(In the analogy of people talking in a noisy room, “I didn’t hear you, can you repeat that” means you have to take longer to finish telling the story.)
This is one of the many videos on scishow that makes me really appreciate this channel. As a trilingual person, the way that the processes of FDMA and CDMA were broken down into lay terms by using foreign languages as a representation of frequency was awesome. I was actually able to follow this up until the last orthogonal ????? ???? multiplexing part 😅 (yes, I know I missed a lot but I tried)
Shout out to the writers and very patient scientific minded people on the show for finding such creative ways to help us regular people understand how our world works around us!!
Yes 6.99 M subs!
We:How many subs do you want?
They: yes 😏😏
Nice
Nice
Nice
nice
Awesome content! I love learning things like this. It's all around me yet I never knew how it worked.
same lol
Worked in telecom for a long time and read a lot of Bell Labs journals. Your explanation of TDMA and CDMA is the best simple explanation I've ever seen.
Explained accurately, yet in a way that's easy to understand. This is why I love SciShow!
Now this is excellent science communication. Surprisingly accessible and interesting.
This will go down as a SciShow classic. What an incredibly informative video.
omg! i finally understand why i have terrible service at my house when I live equidistance from two cell towers! it's that placement that causes the problem! I've been struggling to find a carrier that gives consistent coverage for almost a decade. now I understand why!
That was super cool. I never knew how this worked. Thanks SciShow.
Curiously, something you seemed to overlook when talking about ICI and signal dropout is how carriers generally operate multiple "generations" concurrently, as well as some other tricks so your signal doesn't suddenly tank on the boundary.
This is especially true with "5G" where the 600MHz band is used in a way that's functionally identical to 3/4G for long range communication, with the new millimeter wave frequencies for those high density cells you were mentioning.
Cellphones always keep tabs on two towers at once, "serving" and "standby", generally based on signal quality. So even if ICI briefly makes your mm-wave signal drop, the standby 600MHz cell will take over.
Cellphone user: 4G is good, 5G is even better!
Fighter pilot: 4G sucks, 5G is even worse!
LOL took me a minute to get that. Yeah, 5G for very long doesn't feel too good.
Lol yes I assumed this video would be about the Gs in take off.
@@lenabreijer1311 Me too. I thought the video would be about jets or rockets. I assume it's because the thumbnail is a speedometer.
LOL 😂 excellent delivery of "......picture messages..."
I didn't know I needed to learn so much from this episode🤓 Thanks, SciShow!
You forgot about the wave's phase. Well, it might be lesser of key qualities of a wave and doesn't make sense without a reference, but it's one of the most used ones in digital radio. In modern cellular networks, including 5G, there's a *lot* of QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) involved, which encodes data into amplitude and phase.
QAM was also used to transmit color information in analog TV :)
this episode was a hard throwback to the beginning of my engineering studies (technical informatics and communication technologies) lol
great and easy to understand explanations!
I’d like to see how Bluetooth actually works. I feel like I’m not alone
Me too!
It uses radio frequencies too.
I'm glad you included hobby/personal use bands in the list at the beginning, because, well, my dad used some of those bands (eg. 10m band) for many years. He was an amateur radio (ham) operator, and later volunteered for a military service whose acronym was MARS, which is Military Auxiliary Radio System. They send messages from military personnel on duty to their families hundreds or thousands of miles away (or I hope they still exist!), where it's unsafe or impossible to have telephone communication (even mobile/cellphone use, which was brand new back then, but, well, is ubiquitous now, lol!), letting them stay in contact.
It uses slightly different bands than ham radio does, so he needed different antennae (we had what's colloquially known as an antenna farm!), which I helped string up around our property. 😄 No cell towers to help, though we DID have our own tower. 😁
And... there's also CB, Citizen's Band, which was a thing, then. Dunno if it still exists or not, since I haven't had a CB radio for (does mental math) - er, well, a lot of years. 😂 Anyway... 😅
Great explanation, SciShow - damned well done. 👍🏼
I've definitely noticed ICI with my 5G phone and now I know what it is what caused it, super cool!!
This is the most informative lesson on a topic I was previously completely ignorant of, talking about a device i use everyday. Amazing
Very interesting! ICI explains some of the random dead spots of reception in our area haha. Great work as always sci show team:)
Also during the 1980s while driving both sides of conversation heard in the background an"FM noise" get gradually louder. Handy warning of a cell change-over coming soon. After the change-over the background noise dissapeared completely and you could then hear any song the other end playing in the background as clear as hearing it on the car radio your end. In no way garbled like it is now.
All this "say it again you're breaking up..." had all started with 2G- onwards
Also me: mum: honey did you do your homework
Sor
Mu
Your break
Up
Mum: cut the bs your dad bought you the latest phone with anti breakup tech
@@nolesy34 the first people to use cellphones were 80s businessmen who demanded the most accurate sound call quality money could buy with every single word counts. They did not tolerate poor call quality and demanded every word they spoke get through instantly. Hardly suprising when phone bills were more than many people's salary.
@@jagmarc so helicopters of today are like the mobile phone of yester year?
I regularly get no service whenever there are lots of people around. I'm in a tourist zone so whenever there's something happening everything just dies.
This can be an overloaded network though, not necessarly an ICI problem, but more a capacity problem, I guess
This was probably one of the best videos you made. I mean almost every single video you make is awesome... But I've been wanting to learn about cell phone Gs and you explained it incredibly well!!!
i learned so much from this episode. i thought i knew things but SciShow came in with crystal clear explanation. thank you so much!
I've searched through and watched multiple videos on the topic and I've concluded this is the best one so far
Good and informative, without being 'shouty'. Want more like that!
In the 70's i worked on 1200 baud FSK modems (bell 202 or 201? I don't remember). Bits would drop out, group delays (looks like bits arrived before sent), and other weird stuff. We had to send a pattern to determine the acoustic data (1200, 600, 300 bits per second) had to have the frequency shift keying at tone boundaries lest the data would generate new tones. It was just data like ASCII. (Sales orders, field service reports etc.) It was fun for a few years with HW & SW development. RF noise was not tested. Once a demo over phone lines worked when someone noticed it was not connected. Ooops! Square waves produce every third harmonics.
I went somewhere else before cell phones appeared. Thanks for the 1-5 G review.
I wonder how an AI would arrange the cell coverage, given ordinary 5G hardware and freedom to use it via its own generated software as it pleases in order to maximize service and speed.
Wifi access points have similar issues with drop outs between points when there's overlapping wifi fields in the same network like at a shopping centre. Counterintuitively, adding more access points can make reception issues worse for this reason.
Having just upgraded to a 5G-capable phone and unlimited data plan, I am simultaneously looking forward to the super speeds promised but now also worried about drops.
Learned more about Gs in 10 minutes than I knew in 10 yrs...great video
Damn my boi really has been hitting the gym 💪🏾
This is a question I never knew to ask and I'm so happy to know the answer! This is why I love this channel.
I came expecting to hear why 6G will be necessary too.
I still think 4G is good enough, and don't really see the use for 5G.
But it was cool to learn about signal interference instead, too, I guess 😅
5G is important to improve the accessibility of Mobile Communication. it can support more people and at better speeds. This will be needed more and more, especially when everything starts having a connection to the internet, which will induce hopefully a drastic expansion in the IoT (internet of Things) sector too.
If you don't see the use for 5G then you don't understand it, 5G will be revolutionary compared to the previous four generations as all they did were offer incremental boosts in bandwidth so people could send more or bigger downloads, but 5G is about connectivity and is aimed at the Internet of Things, it will allow piggybacking of signals so someone who gets knocked unconscious will receive help because their watch or phone asked the nearest phone, laptop or car to send a 911 call, it will allow self driving vehicles to download traffic and weather conditions from street lamps, it will allow your fridge to restock your orange juice while you're at work.
I don't think 6G will be a thing since 5G delivers on what the aim was back in the 1990's with 2G of having universal connectivity. For instance the previous four generations were solely phone-based but this one encompasses everything from cell towers to Wifi to Bluetooth and NFC. It's like the grand unifying equation for IT.
One time, way back in 2004, I stopped in Vegas on my way to Coachella. There were so many people there on a Friday night, all cell towers were overloaded. No phone calls could be made until the next morning.
IMO. Fix 4g before making 5g. My 4g was already faster than I needed and faster than my home connection. My new 5g phone doesn't feel any faster despite speedtest scores being higher.
True, i got 5g for 2 months but switched back to 4g because it did exactly the same plus it costs less
Fix 4G? Fix what about it? Sounds like you were happy with it.
I agree that 5G is overkill, anyway. When I purchased a phone 6 months ago I wasn't willing to pay for a 5G model, and I still don't know what I'm missing. 4G seems fine.
@@ps.2 I think he meant continue ironing out the ICI issue instead of introducing more of it through 5g
A very informative and easy-to-follow explanation of a complex technology. Well done.
I'm curious about the issue of signal loss between two cell towers, because the phone doesn't know which to communicate with. Can we use a hierarchy system, assigning each cell tower a random number, and towers with a higher number will take preference over ones with a lower number, when a phone is between two towers? The numbers could be randomly reassigned periodically so that certain towers aren't always used more than others, thus requiring more maintenance.
I'm not an engineer and there are probably several better ideas out there, or reasons why this idea wouldn't work. But just as a layman watching this video I began thinking about it.
We just need people to perfect circular polarization. The amount of data that can be extracted from radio waves that have undergone this transformation is going to put each jump between G's to shame.
Any good explanatory resources on that? For a semi-lay person?
Without going into too much Quantum Mechanics, ya know how polarizing sunglasses give that weird shading effect? That’s because light can have different polarizations (directions the light is “tilted“, not to be confused with travel direction). Mantis Shrimp can see circularly polarized light, but are the only species that can AFAIK. If you find any good sources, please notify me!
There is nothing to perfect. CP is a technology older than I am (I turn 70 this year) but it has limited application. CP has few real world advantages, being essentially a blend of horizontal and vertical polarization. The primary advantage is that reflections reverse polarization so it can reduce multipath problems, which can be messy in urban areas. A major disadvantage is that non-directional patterns are very difficult; it is most useful point to point.
(Amateur radio licensed since 1967, FCC Radiotelephone licensed since 1969. 48 years in radio electronics as an avionics tech for 14 years, Fortune 100 electric company comm field tech for 34 years.)
Code Division Multiple Access is derived from Carrier-sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance. Developed in the early days of computer networking. It is a network multiple access method in which carrier sensing is used, but nodes attempt to avoid collisions by beginning transmission only after the channel is sensed to be "idle".
Like G force? Or generations like 5G or WiFi generations… oh I see..wait why was the thumbnail a speedometer then?? (Edit: nvm it’s not a speedometer🤣🤣🤦🏾♀️ pay me no attention)
I thought racecars🏎💨
🤦🏾♀️
Like G force?
Yes, but can't afford GeForce
I'm a retired rf engineer and your explanation was spot on and easy for the interested consumer to understand. Well done!
Planned obsolescence of older devices.
Thank you so much for explaining this! So much of how our technology works is a complete mystery to me. I feel like I should understand better how things like cell phones and computers work, since we use them all the time.
The way world is right now, we will not see what 8G looks like.
Fun fact!
TDMA was used for the GSM 2G system.
However, at least in America, a competing 2G CDMA-based system was deployed.
It was used by Sprint and Verizon, with T-Mobile and AT&T using TDMA-based GSM.
3G GSM is wideband CDMA, or "WCDMA". This is how AT&T was able to advertise the ability to use voice and data at the same time during this era! But they received criticism for the very heavy bandwidth used by the "wideband" part of that.
The competing CDMA equivalent was EV-DO, "Evolution - Data Optimized/Data Only". Phones that use this technology could be recognized by having a second signal bar for the EVDO band - EVDO could not carry control information, and relied on the existing 2G network for this important supportive role.
CDMA carriers continued to *briefly* compete with the coming of 4G-LTE through use of WiMax based 4G, however LTE .... quickly won, and became the universal standard we know it for today.
-- Footnote. Some phones, usually older budget models, would advertise "4G" capability without actually being capable of 4G-LTE. This is because W-CDMA based "3G" received numerous upgrades over the years, that were actually backwards compatible with each other.
Impressively, they got downlink speeds all the way up to 42Mbits with the fully upgraded alphabet soup of HSDPA+, while still maintaining full backwards compatibility with the first 3G capable phones.
You may still see this today when you lose 4G coverage on some phones, which will display "3G/H+" by your data connection indicator. However some carriers (AT&T in particular) insist on the "4G" advertising, and your only clue of operating in this mode is the loss of the "LTE" light. This is why I emphasize "LTE" above.
TIL why cell phones are called cell phones 🤯
In the UK we call them mobile phones, I had assumed Americans called them cell phones because they ran on a power cell/battery.
Wow. The last thing I knew about cell phone technology was an article I read in the 1980s which explained about the honeycombs and why the coming phones would be called "cell phones". Everything else in here was new to me.
you know it would help a lot more if we also had the cell phone services used the cell phones themselves as a wireless bandwidth transmitting and receiving wifi/radio relays/repeaters with peer to peer data communication with other cellphones in a daisy chain if the 5g cell phone tower is slightly to senficily to far away! it would instead have data go to and from other cell phones instead of a cell phone tower when needed! also it's more of a back gonud data backend supply chain thing that would not count as using your limited bandwidth data limit for your cell phone service!
Maybe, but interference has limits.
You can lead the charge. Set up your phone to provide a wifi hotspot at all times, and find a way to either disable encryption, or name your network "Public wifi password abcde" or something, so people can figure it out.
Then, if other people around you tell their phones to connect, you've effectively got your mesh network in which a lot more of the communication goes through your phone rather than directly to towers.
(I'll leave it to you to figure out the flaws in this plan.)
I work for a cell phone company and this is needed education because so few understand the basics of cell phone technology and it’s limitations. Thank you!
LOL, Great job on the video, but you got to 5G and forgot to mention its biggest selling point, that it's also using a new block of the spectrum that 1G-4G didn't have.
I think it's biggest selling point is that it allows people to do what no previous generation did like all of the IoT stuff.
I implemented wireless telecom networks in the 2G, 3G, and proto-4G eras. 2G and 3G used CDMA and TDMA roughly equally, It depended on your provider, and what patents they were wiling to pay for. CDMA sounds like it would have a massive improvement over TDMA, but we've since discovered that in practice, it doesn't change much.
2G digitized communication, which is critical for any multiplexing . 3G fixed some massive inherent security flaws (but still left a big one in place), and it shifted IP traffic to being a major feature, instead of the hack-afterthought that it was 4G fixes all the major security flaws, and finally concluded that the IP part is in fact everything, and it's the things like voice-calls and txt messages that should be treated like the afterthought, reimplemented on top of it.
I'm not as up to speed on 5G, but the major improvement I've come across in it is support for "fixed mobile" over line-of-sight connections. This potentially greatly facilitates something approaching broadband Internet Access. It also has improved specs for using multiple frequencies at once to increase bandwidth. Beyond that the average user would not be all that wrong in thinking that 5G is basically 4G but more-faster.
is 5G really faster than 4G though? I was getting 1Gbps speeds on 4g years ago
@@Ckcdillpickle 4G was designed with the ability to be crazy fast. And in many situations it can be all that is needed. 5G defines alternate mechanism to reach those high data-rates.
So... all the fear about 5G is completely unfounded. Seeing as the base technology is exactly the same, and 5G is just a different way for the devices and towers to interpret the signals.
Yes the sun emits all radiation that is produce by 5G technology. So if you are afraid of 5G you should also avoid the sun.
9:51 wonderful example of the different applications of the similar but different quantifiers "fewer" and "less."
I thought girls man 😅
Glad to see my paper as a source, Keep up the good work 👏@SciShow
First :)
Lol liked your own commenr
More of this please!!!
For a "Scientific" oriented channel you sure as heck don't know that there is *no* such language as "Chinese".
People in China do not speak "Chinese".
Most people in Honk Kong speak a different language, but that's not called "Chinese" either.
Perhaps you don't even understand what i'm saying as I don't speak "American" language.
There is a thousand dialects and subdialects to every language, it is easier to lump them all into one word then name exactly which one you mean when it’s not relevant to the subject.
@@blakeryan7894 Name me just ONE language that has "a thousand dialects", let alone "every" language...
You won't be able to. Because no language has that many.
You lack of knowledge of what a dialect is, combined with your poor spelling, grammar and incoherent sentence structure is a clear indication that it's not worth spending anymore of my time speaking with you following this reply.
I'm was not talking about dialects.
I was shaming the writers of SciShow of not knowing name of the number one language that is spoken by more people on Earth, than any other.
"Chinese" is a nationality, generally referring to the Han people living in China, 3/4 of whom speak *Mandarin* with the other languages being Cantonese, Shanghainese and Fuzhou. Each of these have their own dialects and accents.
@@PushyPawn Y'all punking youse sick XYL, bro? Those are fragments of six of the American dialects I am vaguely familiar with. (XYL is "wife" in English speaking amateur radio)
I didn't even get into cajun, trekkie, lineman, Glaswegian, Cockney, Malayali, Telugu, Maharashtrian, Punjabi, Bengali, Ulster English, West/South-West Irish English (including Cork English), local Dublin English, non-local Dublin English, Hiberno-English, Scots, Cardiff, Merseyside.... A thousand would be a very conservative number of English dialects,
It's not just frequency and amplitude that are used for encoding digital data. In fact, the changing phase angle of the signal is the most important factor, allowing higher data rates.
oh hell yeah! scishow cover everything in just a 10 minutes video where the school teacher would never teach or the college lecturer would take entire semester to explain
and yet learning new things from scishow never have to take exam for it
Really enjoyed the style of this presenter &/or script! Both informative and very funny 😁
It's the PACE of all these developments that gets me...? Within half my lifetime, we've gone from electric typewriters to laptops & tablets, from landline phones to increasingly function-packed cellphones. The incredible convenience of info access & communication we take totally for granted now in developed countries is really a very, very new thing.
And when I think how far telecommunications tech has altered in my grandma's near-century lifetime... mind truly blown 🤯 How anyone manages to keep up even slightly with that degree of change is a true testament to human adaptability!!
"programmers love acronyms" as a programmer... no, not always, thanks for the chuckle though! haha!
this answered like a dozen different questions we had about internet technology!! really cool stuff
When I started the video, I was wondering to what depth you were going to go and how you were going to explain the more advanced schemes. The language analogy for CDMA was brilliant, very well done giving an accessible overview of a fiendishly complex topic!
Some businesses have cell repeaters to provide cell service inside of large buildings that normally block signals. Did some work at one that could only handle 100 users at the same time. This was at the dawn of 3G so they didn't think more then 100 people would be using phones at the same time. With streaming and apps that were always on it ended up grabbing the first 100 phones and only those would work unless you left the building and it grabbed someone else's. The IT guy told me people got in early and didn't take lunch outside of office because they didn't want to lose service.
This has gotta be the best video description of cell phone theory out there, awesome job this stuff usually dry as hell in a desert. Alot of people are visual learners and its happening in real time and space we can see the towers!
We call this phenomenon "Too Many Acronyms," or, "TMA"
I noticed that 5G reception drops a lot where LTE didnt. Im glad i now understand why.
Quite a few inaccuracies.
in 2G cell « phase » not amplitude, I.e. start degrees of the sine wave, was used to modulate or generate the signal, amplitude and phase started to be used again in 3G.
3G used WCDMA Wideband CDMA, CDMA was used in 2G at that time there was 2 competing standards with GSM (TDMA), the codes were quasi-orthogonal, some A x B would still have some residual values and very few couples were truly orthogonal, meaning when combined together the result is all zeros.
4G: you don’t use orthogonal frequencies but codes again, and 4G uses only orthogonal codes
Ever since 3G codes are used to differentiate users on networks as all users on the same frequency or band talk at the « same time » on the same « airwave asset »
Great explanation!
Bro the amount of times this channel makes me go "Ohhhh" is amazing
4G has range advantage, 5G has speed advantage. I think it's smart to keep both technologies at this time just because people want to be able to connect. Maybe 3G is still worth something too. Perhaps Triple G phones based on 3 4 and 5?
Probably a good idea to keep some land line phones around for emergency calls then. Cell phones are all well and good until you need to call 911 and can't get a signal.
9:14 guess that’s why my local tower I know of fully and the possible ones near me make my phone not have service fully in town, but go near either of them, and it fully functions.
Thank you. Very clear explanation
Whatever G it changes to the massively lossy compression makes your voice sound like you're being impersonated by a robot reading out a speech-to-text script of you talking. That's why there's a long delay. Before 'G's you could hear music through a cellphone clearer than MP3. There was a 80s advertising campaign running in Japan of a concert musician participating via cellphone in a live orchestra which was actually possible then. .
No you couldn't... otherwise people would call call centres to listen to hold music
Music is always bad over a phone line
Thats why in Eminems song he gets accused of "phoning something in" means it was a bad attempt
If you like music sing it yourself to your freind and tap the beat.. it always sounds better when you make it live because the phone is made for human vocal chords
Why do you think in back to the future the man put his phone to the guitar of Michael j fox when he was playing something strange
@@nolesy34 I can tell you weren't even born in the era I'm talking about so you wouldn't know. Before GSM both ends conversation both persons on either end of the line could simultaneously speak and listen at the same time IN REAL TIME not only that could at same time clearly hear music playing in background as though in same room.
Many phone companies provided Dial-a-Disc of latest chart music, and hearing it though a pre-GSM cellphone was as about as clear as over FM radio, except for lack of bass.
The concept of Back to Future calling friend on phone to listen to music was really actually done back in the 1950s and 60s and people used to call eachother to play back part of new record and it was as clear as the radio. There was no GSM 'autotune' emulation of vocal cords then, until GSM it was clear Voice-Shaped Currents going from A to B which conveyed much more than just spoken words, things like subtle tonal expressions and sounds between words.
Good video. Nice to hear, simply stated, the complexities involved. Not just techno babble you can't understand, and not so simple it doesn't really explain anything. Well done.
This was great!!!! I never understood why I should need to upgrade to a new "G". Now it makes sense!
7:16 Hexagons are the bestagons