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A very happy & healthy 2020 to you all! I hope gate this alternative or consider purchasing a
your holidays were filled with joy….. new PC with Win 10 preinstalled.
Let me start by thanking Liz Barnett for coordi- On a positive note, 5G wireless service is mov-
nating our Holiday Party food (and cooking deli- ing forward across the country. As an example,
cious turkeys), J.J. Johnson for buying our door T-Mobile has been running recent TV ads,
and raffle prizes, hosting our Ugly Sweater, claiming to be the only wireless provider offer-
Tasting and Gingerbread contests and helping ing nationwide 5G service. (However, this is
distribute raffle prizes, Judy Dunham and Linda somewhat misleading - as discussed below).
Busch for ticket sales and everyone else who
bought and/or sold raffle tickets, brought food, There are three frequency bands planned for
helped with set-up and clean-up and otherwise 5G wireless service. The low 5G frequency
made our December party a success! band will offer marginal speed increases over
current 4G LTE networks but has the ad-
So, now that the holidays are over, what lies vantage of covering a much greater area than
ahead as we move into a new decade? the mid or high frequency 5G bands. It will also
For starters, we can be sure that technology will penetrate walls and buildings better.
continue to change – and that scammers will (As an analogy, consider the 2.4GHz and 5GHz
continue to evolve along with those changes. frequencies offered by dual-band routers in
We’ll need to keep abreast of both develop- home Wi-Fi networks. The 2.4GHz band max-
ments, to benefit from positive technology es out at 450 Mbps but will cover all areas of
changes and protect ourselves from new and your home much better than the faster 5GHz
different threats. band that maxes out at 1,300 Mbps.)
On a negative note for those still running Win- T-Mobile’s current “nationwide” 5G wireless
dows 7 on their PCs, Microsoft will stop provid- network relies primarily on the lower 5G fre-
ing security updates to Windows 7 on January quency band. Thus, they can cover broad are-
th
15 . (MS stopped providing feature updates to as with each antenna – and may well be using
Win 7 some time ago.) If PC owners continue current antenna sites with upgraded electron-
to use Win 7 for Internet access after January ics. Their competitors seem to be directing
th
15 , they run an increasing risk of malware at- their efforts toward the mid- and high-frequency
tacks directed at any unpatched software vul- bands, and are thus faced with erecting many
nerabilities. However, the good news is that more, new antennas – and will probably be
PCs with sufficiently robust hardware to run Win concentrating their efforts in high-density areas.
7 should also be able to run Win 10. And, alt- Hence, 5G availability on their networks is likely
hough MS is no longer publicly offering free up- to take a while – but is likely to be faster.
grades to Win 10, there are work-arounds de- (An added wrinkle in all this is that new cell
scribed on the Internet that will allow you to in-
stall and use Win 10 without having to purchase phones will be required for 5G – and may need
to work with all three 5G frequency bands if
a stand-alone version from MS. If you are still
using Win 7 for Internet access, please investi- providers mix & match frequencies to fit their
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