Bell Launches 5G in Canada: Exclusive Tech Details

It looks like where one Canadian carrier zigs, another zags. Bell yesterday appear Canada's second 5G network in five metro areas, setting upwards a challenge between its approach and that of Rogers, which we volition see play out in our Fastest Mobile Networks Canada tests later this year.

Both Bell and Rogers are using mid-band spectrum for 5G, merely they're using unlike forms of mid-band. Bell's approach, the company says, is letting it cover more of Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver than Rogers.

Bell's Vice President of Wireless Technology, Bruce Rodin, explained that the new 5G network uses a 10x10MHz channel of band n66, likewise known every bit AWS-3, which the company got in a 2022 auction. Band n66, at 1700MHz, has been used for 4G services in the US since 2022, and is the basis of much of Freedom's existing 4G network in Canada. Bell and Telus snapped upward some of that spectrum in 2022 and kept it in their pockets until now.

Rodin said that Bell'due south electric current 4G network is prepare to aggregate iv carriers, or lanes of spectrum, in bands two, 4, 7 and vii. (Band vii is broad, and Bell frequently has 2 separated 20MHz chunks of it.) Adding 10MHz of n66 gives the effect of 5-carrier aggregation.

Bong's website claims a theoretical maximum speed of one.5Gbps, which is based on its 4G network having a theoretical maximum of 1.2Gbps and the boosted 5G band adding 300Mbps. In our real-life Fastest Mobile Networks 2022 tests, Bell'due south 4G network had a maximum speed of 799Mbps with an average speed of 227Mbps. So I'd expect the 5G network to add 30-50Mbps in real life.

That isn't a huge change, and Bell could have seen similar speeds by dedicating the new spectrum to 4G. Rodin said that 5G is the time to come, and Bong intends to slowly shift its existing 4G channels over to 5G using dynamic spectrum sharing, then "why not put your 5G aqueduct out there, implement it when information technology's gear up, and support it more broadly?"

Even in the short term, the 5G channel volition offer lower latency and more capacity than 4G would, Rodin added, and so it'due south a amend bet than 4G.

Further downwards the road, those 5G channels volition be able to support many more than devices per square kilometer (preventing problems like when all your calls are blocked during a Raptors parade) and have guaranteed quality-of-service for specific uses similar home broadband.

Bell'south network will initially run on iii phones—the Samsung Milky way S20 Ultra 5G, the LG V60 5G, and the Moto Border+. Other phones support these bands, including the small-scale Galaxy S20, the Nokia 8.3 5G, and the OnePlus eight, and then hopefully those will come out for Bell as well.

According to MobileSyrup, a 5G plan supplement will cost $10 in theory, but will be waived until March 31, 2022.

Strike Up the Band (66, Not 7)

Rogers is using part of its band 7 allocation for 5G, so I asked Rodin why he isn't doing the same. He said Bell already uses Ring 7 heavily for LTE, and switching some of information technology to 5G can crusade some degradation in existing LTE channels.

Band seven has somewhat less range from each cell site than Band 66 does, which may explain why Rogers is showing somewhat less 5G coverage correct at present.

In other words, both Bong and Rogers took a look at the existing 4G airwaves they had and decided to turn the ones they weren't yet heavily using to 5G. That'due south the fashion things are going to stay for a while in Canada, it looks similar, because the government at that place recently delayed an important auction of dedicated 5G spectrum until mid-2021.

Canada avoided taking the initial US approach of auctioning brusk-range, difficult-to-utilize millimeter-moving ridge airwaves, which is what Verizon is using. But the US may yet spring ahead of Canada, every bit the US is auctioning 300MHz of mid-band spectrum in late 2022.

Both the Usa and Canada are significantly behind other countries in terms of the most flexible, dedicated mid-ring 5G, because many other countries already auctioned and implemented those airwaves.

Probably Telus'southward Network, As well

Here'southward a fun twist: in Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver, Bell is using airwaves that aren't fifty-fifty theirs. There, the spectrum is owned by its competitor Telus. Bell and Telus have a complicated network-sharing agreement where Bell uses Telus's towers largely in the due west, and Telus uses Bell's, largely in the east. This 5G spectrum was previously announced to be part of the agreement.

Bell has no towers of its ain in Vancouver, just takes reward of Telus'southward very dense tower layout. (Source: ertyu.org)

That means that fifty-fifty though Telus hasn't launched its 5G network yet, this is about certainly going to be Telus'southward initial 5G play, too. Expect Telus'south network performance to initially be very similar to Bell's, with some minor differences because of the way it configures its core networks.

Both Bell and Telus have been working hard in contempo years to "densify" their tower networks, adding many smaller cells in urban areas. This makes better use of their airwaves, because each smaller cell can reuse the aforementioned spectrum for different customers.

"We're investing [our] money in creating a dumbo constellation of sites," Rodin said. "You get [more] capacity gain that way, and traffic is growing at 50 percent a year."

In downtown Toronto, Bell has cell sites on nearly every cake. (source: ertyu.org)

Telus has another play a joke on upwards its sleeve, though. In a recent auction, Telus and Rogers, but non Bell, bought a lot of low-band 600MHz spectrum, the kind of stuff T-Mobile in the US has used to brand its "nationwide" 5G network. I am non certain whether or not that is covered by the sharing agreement. If it isn't, then Telus will have a channel of exclusive 5G in suburban and rural areas, while Bell is more probable to employ dynamic spectrum sharing to switch over its existing 4G channels when they aren't being used for 4G.

"When we looked at 600, we said, we take 850 and 700 already, and the prices were pretty loftier for what you got. It's [as well] a narrow aqueduct, a 10MHz aqueduct," Rodin said.

Nosotros'll test all the Canadian networks this fall to run across how these new 5G approaches hold up.

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Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/race-to-5g/37793/bell-launches-5g-in-canada-exclusive-tech-details

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