FR2
Frequency Range 2: the millimeter-wave bands (24.25 GHz to 52.6 GHz) used in 5G NR, offering very high bandwidth but limited coverage requiring dense deployments and beamforming.
FR2 is millimetre wave — 24.25 to 52.6 GHz in the original definition, with later releases pushing toward 71 GHz (FR2-2). The appeal is raw bandwidth: channels up to 400 MHz, with carrier aggregation stacking several of those, which is how you get the multi-gigabit demos. The catch is everything else.
Propagation at these frequencies is unforgiving. Range is short, signals don't go through walls, foliage and rain attenuate them, and a human body stepping into the path can drop the link — which is why FR2 is unusable without beamforming and tight beam management. Deployments end up dense and targeted: stadiums, transit hubs, dense urban corridors, fixed wireless access to homes, rather than wide-area coverage. Subcarrier spacing for data is usually 120 kHz — 60 kHz is also allowed — with 240 kHz available for SSB, the wider spacings chosen because the short symbols cope with the phase noise and Doppler that get worse as frequency climbs. FR2 is a capacity layer, not a coverage layer.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does mmWave 5G have such short range?
- Higher frequencies suffer steeper path loss and are blocked far more easily — walls, foliage, rain, even a person standing in the way can interrupt an FR2 link. The signal also pairs with tiny antennas that capture less energy. Beamforming claws back some of this by concentrating energy into narrow steered beams, but the practical result is still short-range, line-of-sight-favouring cells, so mmWave is deployed densely in hotspots rather than for wide coverage.
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