I'm really curious about the mmWave, it just sounds really interesting. Do you have any project that you personal worked on or your team worked on that you can share with us? Sure. Me and my team have worked on multiple millimeter wave related projects in the North American market by now. One of them that I can highlight is that of a deployment in a Super Bowl stadium. Super Bowl, as you know, is the grand season finale of American football, and that makes a Super Bowl venue very unique and challenging environment for a wireless communication system to be deployed in. As you know, Super Bowl is regularly attended by 60 or 70,000 people, all of whom want to snap pictures, share those pictures on their social media or talk to their families while they're in the stadium, live stream the game or live stream the halftime performance, which is another reason why people prefer being there in person. As you can tell, there is an absolutely unprecedented data demand in a Super Bowl stadium on both up link, as well as down link which is fundamentally different from the way we use cellular networks in our day-to-day life. That environment brings up several unique challenges as far as designing and deploying and optimizing that 5G network is concerned. From what I recall of the results at a high level, we were able to get median or typical throughput of more than one gigabits per second. Now, you might wonder, Wi-Fi gives me gigabits per second, LTE gives me gigabits per second, so what's so special about the Super Bowl millimeter wave deployment? There is a star that says conditions apply when you say LTE gives you one gbps or Wi-Fi gives you one gbps. In that, those numbers, that LTE or Wi-Fi port are often given in the best of the network operating conditions. Let's say you are located right close to the cell phone tower, there is no other user interfering with you, and you get 100 percent of networks attention. If all these proverbial stars align, what is the throughput you will get? That is a number that Wi-Fi often quotes and that number is over one gbps, whereas the number of or the millimeter wave number I'm talking about is a median number, in that the typical user in the network was able to see more than one gigabits per second of individual throughput. When I say typical user, I mean located somewhat far away from the cell phone tower, located in a place where there are multiple other users interfering with the transmission of that user. So typical conditions you and I encounter in our daily life, like if you're sitting in traffic and if you're browsing phone, chances are other people who are sitting on the passenger seats of adjacent cars are also trying to browse Internet or check their e-mail i.e try to interfere with your data transmission. That one gigabits per second number is observed in real life conditions in typical scenarios that you and I will encounter. That in my mind, speaks of the promise of millimeter wave technology as compared to Wi-Fi, for example, in that the data rate that Wi-Fi can provide in the best of the cases, let's say top one percent of the cases millimeter wave is able to provide that to the typical user, or let's say the top 50 percent or even top 60 percent of the population depending upon your network. To me, the significance of all this is that 5G millimeter wave is not just about providing high-throughput to a select few users who are located in good network conditions, but it is about democratizing access to high-speed connectivity. When I said democratizing, I am looking at the median typical user who's located at the 50 percent of the network operating conditions. If you could provide that typical user with one gigabits per second throughput or even beyond, that in my mind, is an extremely powerful proposal in favor of millimeter wave. Millimeter wave is no longer just a theoretical possibility or a pipe dream, it is indeed being achieved in reality in some of the very real life scenario, some of the most challenging network conditions in fact, and that to me, as I said, speaks of the true promise of millimeter wave as it will be deployed in reality. Yeah, I love it. It's just sounds like mmWave is not just a use case, it's actually a solution that's fixing one problem. I think we all have this experience in a stadium, browsing it's just not working because everybody trying to connect to the network. Precisely. Very well said. Yeah, that's very fascinating. The other point I want to bring back is some of the technology you mentioned that facilitates 5G, like OFDM with the advanced channel coding, is millimeter wave rely on any of those or rely one over the other? Because millimeter wave is a variant of 5G technology, yes, it will utilize all the technologies that you correctly mentioned such as OFDM, channel coding, etc. 5G deployed in millimeter wave will need to use some of the same considerations as 5G deployed in some of the lower bands. There are, however, some of the features that millimeter wave 5G will utilize to a broader extend, or more effectively than some of the other variants of 5G deployed in lower frequency bands. One example that comes to the floor is that of massive MIMO. We have touched upon what massive MIMO is. Here is how it impacts millimeter wave more than it impacts any other variants of 5G in that, we have established that higher the operating frequency, smaller the size of your physical antennas. If you have a certain antenna panel to be filled with individual antennas, higher the operating frequencies. You can fit many more antennas within the same physical space when you're operating at a higher frequency, as compared to when you're operating at a lower frequency. Because millimeter wave operates in significantly higher frequencies as compared to other 5G variance, it is naturally well-positioned to fit many more antennas in the same physical space as compared to other variants of 5G. Massive MIMO is one example that comes to my mind that millimeter wave will be able to utilize to a broader extent or more effectively, as compared to its utility in the variants of 5G deploy in the lower bands. I realized that I may not have given the broader background on massive MIMO just yet, but I believe that is precisely what we are going to do in the subsequent module to come.
