5G Rollout in the USA: Long Way to Go

There is a 3 way race for 5G leadership in the US between T-Mobile(+Sprint), Verizon and AT&T. There are competing claims for the number of 5G subscribers, coverage area and download speeds. But let us look where the 5G industry stands today compared to the expectations a few years back. More than 80% of US population lives in urban areas which comprise of 2% of the total land area of about 10 million squared kilometers. That is 80% of the population lives in an area of about 200,000 squared kilometers.

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Resolution of Discrete Fourier Transform

In the previous post we had introduced the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) as a method to perform the spectral analysis of a time domain signal. We now discuss an important property of the DFT, its spectral resolution i.e. its ability to resolve two signals with similar spectral content. Initially one might think that increasing the sampling frequency would increase the spectral resolution but this totally incorrect. In fact if the sampling frequency is increased, keeping the number of time domain samples to be the same, the resolution actually decreases. So how do we calculate the spectral resolution. One simple way is […]

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LTE Spectrum Allocation

LTE devices operate in either of two modes: TDD (time domain duplex) or FDD (frequency domain duplex). In FDD transmission and reception takes place at different frequencies whereas in TDD transmission and reception takes place at the same frequency but different time slots. The are separate frequency allocations for these two modes but some bands are common between the two modes. Given below are the frequency allocations for FDD. LTE FDD There is suitable separation between the uplink and downlink frequency bands (at least 10MHz) so that the transmitted signal does not feedback into the receiver. It is extremely difficult […]

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