March 28, 2024

Sapiensdigital

Sapiens Digital

Bell Launches 5G in Canada: Exclusive Tech Details

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

Both Bell and Rogers are using mid-band spectrum for 5G, but they’re using different 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, also known as AWS-3, which the company got in a 2017 auction. Band n66, at 1700MHz, has been used for 4G services in the US since 2015, and is the basis of much of Freedom’s existing 4G network in Canada. Bell and Telus snapped up some of that spectrum in 2017 and kept it in their pockets until now.

Rodin said that Bell’s current 4G network is set up to aggregate four carriers, or lanes of spectrum, in bands 2, 4, 7 and 7. (Band 7 is wide, and Bell often has two separated 20MHz chunks of it.) Adding 10MHz of n66 gives the effect of 5-carrier aggregation.

Bell’s website claims a theoretical maximum speed of 1.5Gbps, which is based on its 4G network having a theoretical maximum of 1.2Gbps and the additional 5G band adding 300Mbps. In our real-life Fastest Mobile Networks 2019 tests, Bell’s 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 future, and Bell intends to slowly shift its existing 4G channels over to 5G using dynamic spectrum sharing, so “why not put your 5G channel out there, implement it when it’s ready, and support it more broadly?”

Even in the short term, the 5G channel will offer lower latency and more capacity than 4G would, Rodin added, so it’s a better bet than 4G.

Further down the road, those 5G channels will be able to support many more 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 like home broadband.

Bell’s network will initially run on three phones—the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G, the LG V60 5G, and the Moto Edge+. Other phones support these bands, including the small Galaxy S20, the Nokia 8.3 5G, and the OnePlus 8, so 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, 2021.

Strike Up the Band (66, Not 7)

Rogers is using part of its band 7 allotment for 5G, so I asked Rodin why he isn’t doing the same. He said Bell already uses Band 7 heavily for LTE, and switching some of it to 5G can cause some degradation in existing LTE channels.

Band 7 has somewhat less range from each cell site than Band 66 does, which may explain why Rogers is showing somewhat less 5G coverage right now.

In other words, both Bell 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’s the way things are going to stay for a while in Canada, it looks like, because the government there recently delayed an important auction of dedicated 5G spectrum until mid-2021.

Canada avoided taking the initial US approach of auctioning short-range, difficult-to-use millimeter-wave airwaves, which is what Verizon is using. But the US may yet leap ahead of Canada, as the US is auctioning 300MHz of mid-band spectrum in late 2020.

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

Probably Telus’s Network, Too

Here’s a fun twist: in Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver, Bell is using airwaves that aren’t even 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 west, and Telus uses Bell’s, largely in the east. This 5G spectrum was previously announced to be part of the agreement.

Telus VancouverBell has no towers of its own in Vancouver, but takes advantage of Telus’s very dense tower layout. (Source: ertyu.org)

That means that even though Telus hasn’t launched its 5G network yet, this is almost certainly going to be Telus’s initial 5G play, too. Expect Telus’s 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 recent 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 same spectrum for different customers.

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

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

Telus has another trick up its sleeve, though. In a recent auction, Telus and Rogers, but not Bell, bought a lot of low-band 600MHz spectrum, the kind of stuff T-Mobile in the US has used to make its “nationwide” 5G network. I am not sure 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 likely to use 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 have 850 and 700 already, and the prices were pretty high for what you got. It’s [also] a narrow channel, a 10MHz channel,” Rodin said.

We’ll test all the Canadian networks this fall to see how these new 5G approaches hold up.

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