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Thursday, January 03, 2019

How 5G networks could help rural America, maybe

Wireless providers began launching the nation's first 5G hotspots last month, but rural areas won't see any for a while. Here's what you can expect when 5G does make it out to rural areas:

"Rural areas won't be left out of the 5G world, but 5G will be different there. It will enable new ways of farming and living. It will be a big deal, and many of its applications haven't been invented yet. But it probably won't give rural homes unlimited high-speed access to Netflix next year, which is what rural residents probably most want and are most frustrated by right now," Sascha Segan reports for PC Reviews. "The multi-gigabit speeds and massive capacity you hear about with 5G is by and large an urban phenomenon, driven by the huge bandwidths of millimeter-wave spectrum, which doesn't travel very far. Rural areas will get a form of 5G called "low-band" or "sub-6" 5G, which will have less capacity but still have extremely low latency and be able to work with massive networks of industrial sensors."

The 5G network Sprint is building out will probably be suitable for home internet and could provide a big boost to farming and telemedicine, but it's not clear how much 5G will improve speeds in rural areas. Later this year, AT&T and T-Mobile will build out 5G networks in rural areas as well, and Segan predicts rural customers can expect a 35 percent increase in upload/download speeds and much faster data transmission speeds.

The planned rural networks for AT&T and T-Mobile will transmit on low-band, frequency-divided spectrum networks, which can use existing towers and coverage areas but probably won't increase capacity enough for rural households to experience the nationwide home usage average of 151 gigabytes per month. "In a 2016 paper, scientists from nine countries including the US concluded that only government subsidies would turn 5G into a real solution for rural home broadband issues," Segan reports.

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