Any way you look at it, different methods of handling indoor cell phone coverage will have to be created in the 5G era, partly because millimeter wave signals do not penetrate building walls, partly because energy-efficient glass blocks RF signals and partly because even mid-band and low-band signals are attenuated by building walls, hills, trees and other obstacles.
So what emerges might include new organizational or industry roles for indoor mobile communications, as well as more indoor transmission platforms, extending beyond traditional distributed antenna systems and built on indoor small cells.
Less clear are business models which might be built by third parties to supply indoor communications in business settings. Is there a possible new role for third parties that build, operate and maintain indoor 5G networks? How big is that opportunity? What is required and what sorts of firms might be positioned to capture any opportunity?
Organizations and consumers might also create their own infrastructure, businesses perhaps relying on use of private 5G or Wi-Fi, consumers relying mostly on Wi-Fi, but with possible signal boosting techniques becoming more commonplace.
Much depends on how difficult or easy, costly or not, creating indoor 5G coverage eventually becomes, as a practical matter. Roles for third party integrators and infrastructure suppliers increase if indoor 5G remains costly, but diminish to the extent end users can build their own networks affordably.
The best example are local area networks of all types, including Wi-Fi.
Millimeter wave spectrrum is the big change, because millimeter wave spectrum represents the biggest portion of new spectrum assets to be made available for mobile and untethered communications suppliers (licensed and unlicensed) for the foreseeable future, even if spectrum sharing and aggregation become key methods for increasing network capacity.
There simply is not that much available spectrum below 6 GHz that is not already licensed for use, as the National Telecommunications and Information Administration frequency allocation chart shows.
In this illustration, the width of the bars corresponds to capacity. Note the skinny bars to the left, which are the traditional “mobile” bands.
The horizontal axis represents the frequency spectrum from approximately 1 to 90 GHz. The orange bars show the approximately 11 gigahertz of new spectrum released by the FCC for both licensed and unlicensed use. Again, the width of the bars represents capacity, so compare the orange blocks with the “current IMT bands” in the one gigaHertz to 3 GHz range.
The red and green blocks show frequency allocations for the aerospace, defense and satellite communications industries, parts of which might ultimately be available using shared spectrum mechanisms.
As most are becoming aware, frequency and coverage are inversely related. Millimeter wave signals, compared with 4G signals in the mid-band (around 2 GHz), might be as much as 30 times less able to penetrate obstacles such as walls.
That makes indoor signal reception a big deal for 5G using millimeter wave spectrum. But indoor signal reception also has been a problem for 4G signals inside buildings. That is going to be true even for 5G signals in low-band and mi-band regions.
SureCall, a supplier of cell phone signal booster technology, has released what it calls the world’s first 5G signal booster, the Force8 for boosting 5G signals inside commercial buildings.
The Force8 will boost 5G signal strength for T-Mobile users in commercial buildings throughout urban, suburban, and rural areas across North America, while also amplifying 3G and 4G LTE signals for all North American service providers, SureCall says.
The Force8 will amplify mobile signals for T-Mobile US 600 MHz signals and AT&T’s 2.3 GHz frequencies.
