5G is here, but it won’t really take off. next generation mobile phone and 5G connected car Until the network is built. That physical network will be vaster and denser than what powers today’s networks. It will also cost him as much as $750 billion worldwide over the next five years. But it comes amid unprecedented economic challenges that have put every major project under intense scrutiny. So?
![Sean Inorsa](https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/83b24ad212f9f3cfa04f22f1cd141fe5ffd46e73/hub/2020/08/12/23949992-7789-4ce7-bff4-83aed5227db2/sean-inorsa.jpg?auto=webp&width=768)
Look at this: 5G small cell sites are very different from 4G towers
“This is the largest infrastructure project after the Interstate Highway System,” said Sean Shahini, CEO of Inorsa, an engineering startup focused on building efficient, high-speed 5G network sites. These sites are not just retrofits of existing 4G towers. Some of this is easy to do, but “the range of (most of) the antennas is much smaller than 4G, so instead of building 100 antennas to cover Manhattan, for example, he’s building 5,000 antennas. ~20,000 antennas need to be built,” says Shahini.
The reason 5G requires so many cellular antennas, or “small cells,” is because it often uses high-frequency radio waves that have huge data capacities but short ranges. These high frequencies are also less likely to bend around buildings and obstacles than his 4G signals, increasing the number of small cells needed to cover dense cities.
![5G small cell site engineering](https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/42ff4532855b66ee9dabc47d2219700ed0d0c71e/hub/2020/08/13/7cc1d6a4-9a2d-460f-909f-898e1fabed45/rapidturnaround.png?auto=webp&width=1200)
5G small cells may be small by mobile phone standards, but they can outnumber 4G towers by up to 200 times.
Another hurdle is what’s behind the thousands of antennas. “The biggest factors are power and fiber, and one solution doesn’t fit all,” Shahini says, describing the challenge of pulling electrical wiring and high-speed fiber into thousands of cells. With 5G technology, there is also a trend to use mini data centers for cell sites, taking advantage of 5G’s low latency, rather than sending all packets to remote he servers.
![Sean Shahini, Inolsa CEO](https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/961770cf20873ccf817df9b1ab6fce97bd6443aa/hub/2020/08/13/96259f0d-75ee-492b-88d5-702cbd2ede9a/img-4879.jpg?auto=webp&precrop=2268,2292,x0,y0&width=768)
Sean Shahini founded Inorsa to focus on the speed and cost of designing and building 5G sites. This is important because each average city will require thousands of 5G small cells.
Once the cell is technically planned, it must also pass a visual review in the community. “A typical 5G antenna will be about 2.5 feet tall and 1.5 feet wide,” Shahini says. “After a while, people get used to the way they look, or they become very hard to see.” With an antenna the size of a movie poster, he could imagine a city receiving 20,000 lines at a time. , that may be wishful thinking. Opposition to the existence of 5G has sparked some fierce opposition.
Inorsa CEO Sean Shahini shared more insights about building out 5G. Listen to the entire conversation with CNET’s Brian Cooley in the video above.
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