News - AR.Done 2.0 flown over 1km with 4G LTE

[HEXUS]

4G's high bandwidth and multitude of large antennas could see new distances being reached.

Read more.

[jnutt]

Think you mean Drone

[SciFi]

Well Drone !

[ajones]

For some strange reason, I'm finding the following quote:

at the cost of capacity over the same spectrum width.

hard to swallow. In similar radio conditions, 5MHz of 800 spectrum provides the same bit rate as 5MHz as at 2.6G. In other words; bits per hertz at a given LTE bandwidth is roughly the same. The difference is that the path loss in 2.6G is far greater so you have to be closer to the cell to get the same performance.

[miniyazz]

For some strange reason, I'm finding the following quote:



hard to swallow. In similar radio conditions, 5MHz of 800 spectrum provides the same bit rate as 5MHz as at 2.6G. In other words; bits per hertz at a given LTE bandwidth is roughly the same. The difference is that the path loss in 2.6G is far greater so you have to be closer to the cell to get the same performance.

So are you saying there is no benefit to using higher frequencies?

[ajones]

So are you saying there is no benefit to using higher frequencies?

The advantage is spectrum availability. If you examine the trends, operators are trying to get the lower spectrums because of the coverage is larger; you need a fraction of the number of base stations to provide coverage at 450MHz than at 2.1GHz for example. However, as a result, there is generally less spectrum available for the lower frequency bands (30Mhz for the 800 band versus 70MHz at 2.6) as it's competing with other/legacy technologies that require good radio propogation and also serving rural areas.

To achieve the capacity that LTE is aiming for, you either need lots of spectrum, or lots of smaller cells, and this is where the higher frequency spectrum comes into play. When you deploy a low power base station that only needs a 50m range, then high frequency propagation loss becomes less of a factor. You'll probably see the carriers deploy a low-frequency umbrella network to provide coverage, and then another layer underneath using the higher frequency spectrum to provide capacity. There are also features in the pipeline for LTE that allow the devices to aggregate spectrum together from 2 or more base stations (Carrier Aggregation).

The reason I posted was that the only reason there is more capacity at 2.6G over 800, is because there is more spectrum available, not (as the OP suggested) that the radio interface is different.