5G Explained

3Positioning of 5G

3.1 Overview

The evolving mobile communications technologies provide us with vastly increasing data rates, faster response times, and increasingly fluent means to access more content than ever in the history of telecommunications. Along with the development of the standards, the commercial solutions keep appearing for our selection. Often in this highly dynamic environment, the vast amount of technical and marketing terms challenges us to capture the real meaning of the messages that operators, device vendors, and service providers want to give us. One of the most confusing topics in this field is the definition of the “mobile communications generations” so let's have a look at the principles. The summary of the following sections is based on Refs. [1,2].

3.2 Mobile Generations

Mobile generations are an evolving story. Early mobile networks paved the way for a totally new era liberating users from communicating in fixed locations back in the late 1980s. In fact, there were some much earlier systems deployed, although they have been basically forgotten in the history. As an example, Swedish automatic MTA (Mobile Telephony System Version A) was deployed in 1956 for operative use in Stockholm and Gothenburg. As the equipment was bulky, it was suitable merely for a car‐mounted environment. This initiation was still ahead of its time, so it did not have commercial success. As another example from 1971, the technology was finally mature enough in Finland for the ...