Requirements for 5G are getting equally ridiculous [1]. 5 ms latency and 100 devices per square meter? Whenever I hear something like that, I like to outline a meter by meter of empty floor space and ask people what they imagine 100 devices will be doing in that particular spot.
What are you really going to do with a 1gbps residential connection, that doesn't sound as tentative and outlandish as my plan to push a shopping cart full of iPhones streaming their own episode of GoT down the street? (it's art, don't ask)
This isn't about having a feasible plan to exhaust the new standard using current technology and use cases, it's about pushing the new standard as far as possible (within technological limits), so it can last as long as possible without needing to be redesigned. Also, reality has a nasty habit of catching up to the possible much faster than anticipated.
It's funny how each standard is made to "last as long as possible without needing to be redesigned". LTE stands for "long term evolution" - as in "we made this standard so that it will be possible to evolve it according to demands without total redesign". It has been in commercial use for what, 4 years? As far as I know, current plans for 5G are "screw LTE, we'll redesign it from the ground up".
Maybe I'm miscalculating, but I think you're off by an order of magnitude.
According to [1], a dense open space office in Manhattan has 100-120ft² per employee; let's take 108ft² which is ~= 10m². That means each m² has ~1/10 of an employee. Even if you multiply by 100 floors, you're only getting ~10 employees/m².
I think your miscalculation might be devices per person, not people per square meter.
My desk area in Tokyo (so maybe not 120ft²; let's call it 60ft²) has a whole lot more devices than people. 4 computers + personal/work phones + 1 watch + 3 tablets + wireless camera + let's say 5 other random items with an IP address that might be paying a visit (think health/fitness devices, teledildonics, wifi-enabled geiger counters, etc.).
I may not be typical in April 2016, but I'm also not that much of an outlier. 10+ devices per person seems to be the direction we are heading, so... at 100 floors, yeah 100+ devices per square meter.
While I do think you're an outlier, remember that we're specifically talking about 5G-enabled devices. "Wifi-enabled geiger counters" don't really, er, count :)
>I may not be typical in April 2016, but I'm also not that much of an outlier. 10+ devices per person seems to be the direction we are heading, so... at 100 floors, yeah 100+ devices per square meter.
Not sure where you get this "100 devices per square meter" again.
Even if it was 10+ devices per person (which is at best 3 or 4), there are hardly more than 1 or 2 persons per square meter still.
And across floors there are one or several meters of empty space -- above people's heads and before the ceiling.
Well, the example I was replying to was for a 100-story building, with a total of ~10 employees/m².
I think this absurdly specific hypothetical building is getting in the way my point, which is simply that we humans have an increasing number of networked devices on and around us, and ~10 devices is already common for some people.
Yeah, I know, but that's the specific calculation I was replying to — icebraining's figure of people per square meter of land.
This subthread veered off from the original linked post about broadband speed in general to discuss how upcoming "5G" cellular service is expected[1] to support 100 devices per square meter - that means per square meter of coverage area, regardless of how many floors are stacked up on that square meter. E.g., Mbps/m².
[1] https://5g-ppp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/BROCHURE_5PPP_B...