5G Survives a Critical Test: The Backcountry
Researchers from New York University have offered a surprising demonstration of millimeter-wave wireless communications.
While this largely unused and untested frequency band—usually assumed to be a key component of 5G—is characterized by its poor performance across long distances and among even low-density intervening objects (like bushes), engineering professor Ted Rappaport and colleagues found in experiments spread across the wooded, rural hills of southern Virginia that it performs much better than expected. Even where signal paths were interrupted by trees or hills, millimeter-wave signals could in some cases be detected over 10 kilometers from their source, a base station on the porch of Rappaport’s cabin.