7 ms·

The Promise of 5G

45 points by twsted 11y ago

_mikz 11y ago
What? Faster internet? Again? How 4G helped? 0. We need power efficient network, not faster one. It would be faster than what you get through fiber. Does that make sense? Shouldn't we focus on making the networks cheap, power efficient and with most possible coverage? This article screams bulshit to me.
- emj 11y ago
  Faster transfers means less time and less total power draw from the radio.
  - abduhl 11y ago
    I disagree. Faster transfers just means people will find more garbage to transfer. It's the same principle as with traffic - allowing more capacity often leads to no net decrease in traffic.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    Why do you think it'll mean less total power draw? Didn't we see that devices consumed more energy when using 4G vs 3G? Why do you suspect 5G will be different? http://developer.att.com/application-resource-optimizer/docs/best-practices/comparing-lte-and-3g-energy-consumption http://developer.att.com/application-resource-optimizer/docs...
    - emj 11y ago
      Thanks for the superb article, I'm basing my statements from testing in real world. I have some 3G/4G phones connected to large batteries, transfering 1MB to 100MB now and then, while they do run different kernels the 4G phones consistently draw less power. YMMV!
- 7952 11y ago
  4G lets a greater number of people use smart phones by increasing the amount of shared bandwidth available.
- EugeneOZ 11y ago
  I don't need more power efficient, I need exactly faster cellular network internet. I very rarely have issues with phone battery and a lot of times I hate quality of cellular network.
slight 11y ago
What a load of nonsense. The idea that faster and faster wired and wireless broadband open up huge new opportunities just doesn't make any sense to me. 4G just gives me webpages a bit faster, it's not even especially noticeable most of the time. I can already stream 720p video to my phone which is more or less indistinguishable from 1080p at that size. What other massive fast downloads do you need on a mobile device while data caps are still in the low gigabytes?
- gbl08ma 11y ago
  You are ignoring the fact that it's not just mobile devices that take advantage of fast mobile data connections. Being able to bring a LTE hotspot on long out-of-home stays is pretty nice, and while you may not want to do big downloads on your phone or watch 1080p videos on a screen with less vertical resolution than that, you may want to do so on your laptop. If for you 4G is only slightly faster than 3G, then blame your service provider, because it's not supposed to. Where I live (Portugal) I get 2-7 Mbit/s speeds with 3G and 10-40 Mbit/s speeds with 4G. But most importantly, I was getting 100 ms pings with 3G while 4G pings are more like 20 ms. Or perhaps your service provider is limiting LTE usage to phones and forbidding tethering, which is silly too. LTE is, right now, the only way to even get proper Internet connections on rural areas, where the alternative is DSL with speeds below 1 Mbit/s, and sometimes not even that. I believe it's also much cheaper for the network operators to cover those areas with wireless Internet than by laying copper, let alone fiber. The main issue, that can't be stressed enough, is indeed the data caps. As things are now, higher speeds only lead to hitting the limits in less time. Worse, some sites now seem to detect faster connections and deliver more/heavier content over these (cough YouTube in auto quality mode cough), completely ignoring that a faster connection may still have caps. But I have no doubt there are uses for having fiber-like experiences over wireless broadband, especially if the latency is reduced (IMO more important than increasing the speed).
  - rcarmo 11y ago
    Re: the rural angle, and considering I'm near Alentejo and only getting 384Kbps right now, allow me to explain that 3/4G at 2.1GHz won't cut it for wide-area coverage, and that it isn't cost effective to upgrade most transmission lines in rural areas to the point where you can have multiple simultaneous users with high bitrates. That said, my current situation is not representative - I'm in a known poor spot (it's tricky to get a decent signal due to lack of line-of-sight to a base station, and the nearest is 5 klicks away as the crow flies) and if I go uphill and bask in the sun with my iPad things improve markedly :) Also, LTE at lower frequencies will fix most of these issues - we already have some of the best mobile broadband connectivity on the planet here in Portugal, and it's only going to get better.
pbowyer 11y ago
5G? I'd be happy with reliable 3G coverage in the UK.
- eliaspro 11y ago
  3G coverage? I'd be even happy with reliable EDGE coverage. Half of my daily commute has no coverage at all. Location: one of the most economically powerful regions in Europe/West of Stuttgart/Böblingen in southern Germany. The network coverage (with all three major networks) along railroads in Germany is a fucking joke.
mtgx 11y ago
Does 5G bring forward secrecy and strong end-to-end encryption for phone calls and texts? If not, why not? The likes of AT&T don't want to upset their spymasters?
- indeyets 11y ago
  the good thing is, that it's trivial to use alternative voice-apps over 4g. no one forces us to use the default one with 5g it would be even more so
quonn 11y ago
The article at least mentions latency, which would provide measurable gains. I don't think the bandwidth of 4G is holding the network back in any way. Progress is nice of course, but better 3G coverage, affordable global roaming and higher data caps are more important.
yeldarb 11y ago
One thing I would like is more tower capacity for dense events like sporting events and music festivals. Even with a strong 4g connection I often can't even reliably get a text to go through while tailgating at a football game.
- edwhitesell 11y ago
  That's usually a result of poor backhaul capacity. A lot of tower sites likely still running on copper (or PtP wireless) instead of fiber, so the capacity just isn't there for locations that only have a lot of connected devices "sometimes" Many sporting venues, universities, college/corporate campuses have on-site cells or wifi offloading already built. But there are lots of them that don't. In the past, it's because the carriers won't pay for the capacity themselves, but want the location to do so. Which doesn't make sense, because if you owned a venue, how would you pick between ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile & Sprint? You're definitely not going to pay all of them to put in cells. Wifi offloading makes it somewhat easier for the location to build-out capacity, but it's still not cheap. 100s of thousands of dollars...
ricardobeat 11y ago
Somehow I made it through the whole article. I'd love to hear why the author thinks increasing bandwidth by 10x will cause such massive changes. Does 5g tech improve concurrency/crowded towers, range, latency? Will radios be simple and cheap enough for IoT? This report is so devoid of content I wonder if there is some marketing agenda behind it.
nugga 11y ago
One thing nobody seems to mention is NAT. When can we have end-to-end connectivity with phones? More bandwidth is nice but if the connection is still crippled what good is it for?
- ghshephard 11y ago
  IPv6 resolves that.
snorrah 11y ago
Due to line contention / crosstalk, my 4G connection is now faster than my continuously degrading home VDSL2 connection (BT's "super fast broadband" fibre-to-the-cabinet offering). However, it still doesn't mean a huge amount because data caps here in the UK seem pretty restrictive. It costs a small fortune to get a data package that might start to give you a landline-replacement service: A 20GB package is probably going to be £40 a month or more.
- matthewmacleod 11y ago
  Wow, I had no idea there were caps that low! Virgin's 152Mb cable is costing me around £40/mo and there are no limits on the downstream. I understand they limit upload speeds using some kind of rolling threshold though, but it's still unlimited.
- Gracana 11y ago
  As bad as that is, that's £25 less and 5GB more than what I've seen available in the US. I've been wanting to switch to wireless internet, but it just doesn't seem practical.
- zimbatm 11y ago
  Did you have a look at virginmobile's 10GBP/month for "unlimited" data ? Three is around 17GBP/month I believe.
- jsingleton 11y ago
  I regularly find my 4G is faster than friends' fixed broadband. It's often not worth connecting to the WiFi. The one problem is contention. Mobile networks may give you full signal but they'll have under-provisioned the back-haul and won't connect you. Very annoying when this happens. I used to have unlimited data on 3G but couldn't find a 4G package which offers this. I'm sure it isn't a technical limitation as it's available in the far east.
mdasen 11y ago
More than the speed of 5G, I'm hoping for its capacity. If it offers 40x the capacity of 4G (within the same amount of spectrum), it could become a good contender to replace home broadband (and add a lot of competition). T-Mobile already offers 7GB for $50 and 40x that would be 280GB, plenty for most home users. Fixed broadband prices could be significantly cheaper than mobile broadband and installed antennas could offer better reliability and and speed than mobile devices. It could create a much nicer and more competitive market for home broadband. With AT&T owning DirecTV and Dish owning a bunch of spectrum, there are two companies that could want to do installed, fixed home broadband in the 5G era to support a triple-play of wireless, tv, and home-broadband. Sprint is sitting on over 200MHz of spectrum in most areas with a lot of it being high frequency BRS and EBS spectrum (2.5GHz). Installed, fixed, directional antennas would work a lot nicer with that spectrum than mobile devices and it would offer up a new revenue stream for a company that has lost $50B since 2006. If 5G really has a big boost in capacity, it could make a big impact against home-broadband monopolies. Wired might still offer a better experience for enthusiasts, but given that a lot of people I know want to save $20 a month and drop from 110Mbps to 25Mbps, the competition could have broad appeal for a lot of people.
- Gracana 11y ago
  > T-Mobile already offers 7GB for $50 Does that include tethering? I've noticed a lot of carriers offer a... well, not a large amount of data, but some amount that's on the better side of terrible, but if you tether, the limit is much lower.
  - boredinballard 11y ago
    Includes tethering, for me at least. I use the $30/month prepaid which has a similar data plan structure. As far as I know, T-Mobile let's you do whatever you want with your phone and data.
- e12e 11y ago
  > T-Mobile already offers 7GB for $50 and 40x that would be 280GB, plenty for most home users. Um, lets say conservatively that an hour of 4k video is 8GB (1080p is ~4.7GB/hour on Netflix). 280GB gives you one hour of video/day in a month - which sounds a little low, considering you may have 3-4 people watching different streams. And that doesn't even include video chat, which surely should be something we expect for the next 10 years?
jccalhoun 11y ago
I skimmed through the article and saw hyperbolic statements like, "Now with the leap to 5G networks, we can start to completely reshape entire industries, and rethink how we run our cities and manage critical national infrastructures." I thought to myself, "Ugh, who is writing this crap?" then scrolled up and saw it was "Hossein Moiin is executive vice president and CTO of Nokia Networks." I never thought I would long for the good old days when Mike Arrington would just write about companies he invested in instead of cutting out the middle man and letting companies write their own articles.
- pixelbath 11y ago
  Same with the prosthetics story. Increased bandwidth over mobile networks could enable them to print more arms? This is only solvable with 5G?
- jsingleton 11y ago
  He should have run the post through http://www.hemingwayapp.com http://www.hemingwayapp.com. "adverb. Remove it." Edit: It gets a 13. "17 of 59 sentences are hard to read." "27 of 59 sentences are very hard to read."
AriaMinaei 11y ago
VR websites will need this.
jsingleton 11y ago
5G hardware is still pretty bulky. It requires a motorised trolley. I'm sure that will be miniaturised though. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30224853 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30224853
Joeri 11y ago
For IoT you don't need higher speeds, you need lower power requirements. I am much more interested in things like LoRa networking. It allows upgrading base stations to receive sensor data directly from the sensor, while the sensor can run years on battery power. It allows retroactive upgrades of buildings with sensors without having to put in new cabling or figure out where to put bluetooth networking gear.
ksec 11y ago
We need to hugely increase capacity. 4G Speed is fine, but it wasn't designed for these kind of intensive use we are doing today. We can do 20 - 30Mbps on most 4G network during normal use, when things go bad it stops loading. Dropping to mere 1 - 3 Mbps with high latency. We need even lower latency, best case 4G is around 20 - 30ms. Most of the time it is 50+ to 90ms. That is much better then then 100s to 300ms in 3G. But 5G should bring even the worst case to 10ms max. Latency is important in Webpage / Apps loading speed. And then hopefully 5G can do all these while using even less energy then 4G.

45 points by twsted 11y ago

_mikz 11y ago

What? Faster internet? Again? How 4G helped? 0. We need power efficient network, not faster one. It would be faster than what you get through fiber. Does that make sense? Shouldn't we focus on making the networks cheap, power efficient and with most possible coverage? This article screams bulshit to me.

emj 11y ago
Faster transfers means less time and less total power draw from the radio.
- abduhl 11y ago
  I disagree. Faster transfers just means people will find more garbage to transfer. It's the same principle as with traffic - allowing more capacity often leads to no net decrease in traffic.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  Why do you think it'll mean less total power draw? Didn't we see that devices consumed more energy when using 4G vs 3G? Why do you suspect 5G will be different? http://developer.att.com/application-resource-optimizer/docs/best-practices/comparing-lte-and-3g-energy-consumption http://developer.att.com/application-resource-optimizer/docs...
  - emj 11y ago
    Thanks for the superb article, I'm basing my statements from testing in real world. I have some 3G/4G phones connected to large batteries, transfering 1MB to 100MB now and then, while they do run different kernels the 4G phones consistently draw less power. YMMV!
7952 11y ago
4G lets a greater number of people use smart phones by increasing the amount of shared bandwidth available.
EugeneOZ 11y ago
I don't need more power efficient, I need exactly faster cellular network internet. I very rarely have issues with phone battery and a lot of times I hate quality of cellular network.

slight 11y ago

What a load of nonsense. The idea that faster and faster wired and wireless broadband open up huge new opportunities just doesn't make any sense to me. 4G just gives me webpages a bit faster, it's not even especially noticeable most of the time. I can already stream 720p video to my phone which is more or less indistinguishable from 1080p at that size. What other massive fast downloads do you need on a mobile device while data caps are still in the low gigabytes?

gbl08ma 11y ago
You are ignoring the fact that it's not just mobile devices that take advantage of fast mobile data connections. Being able to bring a LTE hotspot on long out-of-home stays is pretty nice, and while you may not want to do big downloads on your phone or watch 1080p videos on a screen with less vertical resolution than that, you may want to do so on your laptop. If for you 4G is only slightly faster than 3G, then blame your service provider, because it's not supposed to. Where I live (Portugal) I get 2-7 Mbit/s speeds with 3G and 10-40 Mbit/s speeds with 4G. But most importantly, I was getting 100 ms pings with 3G while 4G pings are more like 20 ms. Or perhaps your service provider is limiting LTE usage to phones and forbidding tethering, which is silly too. LTE is, right now, the only way to even get proper Internet connections on rural areas, where the alternative is DSL with speeds below 1 Mbit/s, and sometimes not even that. I believe it's also much cheaper for the network operators to cover those areas with wireless Internet than by laying copper, let alone fiber. The main issue, that can't be stressed enough, is indeed the data caps. As things are now, higher speeds only lead to hitting the limits in less time. Worse, some sites now seem to detect faster connections and deliver more/heavier content over these (cough YouTube in auto quality mode cough), completely ignoring that a faster connection may still have caps. But I have no doubt there are uses for having fiber-like experiences over wireless broadband, especially if the latency is reduced (IMO more important than increasing the speed).
- rcarmo 11y ago
  Re: the rural angle, and considering I'm near Alentejo and only getting 384Kbps right now, allow me to explain that 3/4G at 2.1GHz won't cut it for wide-area coverage, and that it isn't cost effective to upgrade most transmission lines in rural areas to the point where you can have multiple simultaneous users with high bitrates. That said, my current situation is not representative - I'm in a known poor spot (it's tricky to get a decent signal due to lack of line-of-sight to a base station, and the nearest is 5 klicks away as the crow flies) and if I go uphill and bask in the sun with my iPad things improve markedly :) Also, LTE at lower frequencies will fix most of these issues - we already have some of the best mobile broadband connectivity on the planet here in Portugal, and it's only going to get better.

pbowyer 11y ago

5G? I'd be happy with reliable 3G coverage in the UK.

eliaspro 11y ago
3G coverage? I'd be even happy with reliable EDGE coverage. Half of my daily commute has no coverage at all. Location: one of the most economically powerful regions in Europe/West of Stuttgart/Böblingen in southern Germany. The network coverage (with all three major networks) along railroads in Germany is a fucking joke.

mtgx 11y ago

Does 5G bring forward secrecy and strong end-to-end encryption for phone calls and texts? If not, why not? The likes of AT&T don't want to upset their spymasters?

indeyets 11y ago
the good thing is, that it's trivial to use alternative voice-apps over 4g. no one forces us to use the default one with 5g it would be even more so

quonn 11y ago

The article at least mentions latency, which would provide measurable gains. I don't think the bandwidth of 4G is holding the network back in any way. Progress is nice of course, but better 3G coverage, affordable global roaming and higher data caps are more important.

yeldarb 11y ago

One thing I would like is more tower capacity for dense events like sporting events and music festivals. Even with a strong 4g connection I often can't even reliably get a text to go through while tailgating at a football game.

edwhitesell 11y ago
That's usually a result of poor backhaul capacity. A lot of tower sites likely still running on copper (or PtP wireless) instead of fiber, so the capacity just isn't there for locations that only have a lot of connected devices "sometimes" Many sporting venues, universities, college/corporate campuses have on-site cells or wifi offloading already built. But there are lots of them that don't. In the past, it's because the carriers won't pay for the capacity themselves, but want the location to do so. Which doesn't make sense, because if you owned a venue, how would you pick between ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile & Sprint? You're definitely not going to pay all of them to put in cells. Wifi offloading makes it somewhat easier for the location to build-out capacity, but it's still not cheap. 100s of thousands of dollars...

ricardobeat 11y ago

Somehow I made it through the whole article. I'd love to hear why the author thinks increasing bandwidth by 10x will cause such massive changes. Does 5g tech improve concurrency/crowded towers, range, latency? Will radios be simple and cheap enough for IoT? This report is so devoid of content I wonder if there is some marketing agenda behind it.

nugga 11y ago

One thing nobody seems to mention is NAT. When can we have end-to-end connectivity with phones? More bandwidth is nice but if the connection is still crippled what good is it for?

ghshephard 11y ago
IPv6 resolves that.

snorrah 11y ago

Due to line contention / crosstalk, my 4G connection is now faster than my continuously degrading home VDSL2 connection (BT's "super fast broadband" fibre-to-the-cabinet offering). However, it still doesn't mean a huge amount because data caps here in the UK seem pretty restrictive. It costs a small fortune to get a data package that might start to give you a landline-replacement service: A 20GB package is probably going to be £40 a month or more.

matthewmacleod 11y ago
Wow, I had no idea there were caps that low! Virgin's 152Mb cable is costing me around £40/mo and there are no limits on the downstream. I understand they limit upload speeds using some kind of rolling threshold though, but it's still unlimited.
Gracana 11y ago
As bad as that is, that's £25 less and 5GB more than what I've seen available in the US. I've been wanting to switch to wireless internet, but it just doesn't seem practical.
zimbatm 11y ago
Did you have a look at virginmobile's 10GBP/month for "unlimited" data ? Three is around 17GBP/month I believe.
jsingleton 11y ago
I regularly find my 4G is faster than friends' fixed broadband. It's often not worth connecting to the WiFi. The one problem is contention. Mobile networks may give you full signal but they'll have under-provisioned the back-haul and won't connect you. Very annoying when this happens. I used to have unlimited data on 3G but couldn't find a 4G package which offers this. I'm sure it isn't a technical limitation as it's available in the far east.

mdasen 11y ago

More than the speed of 5G, I'm hoping for its capacity. If it offers 40x the capacity of 4G (within the same amount of spectrum), it could become a good contender to replace home broadband (and add a lot of competition). T-Mobile already offers 7GB for $50 and 40x that would be 280GB, plenty for most home users. Fixed broadband prices could be significantly cheaper than mobile broadband and installed antennas could offer better reliability and and speed than mobile devices. It could create a much nicer and more competitive market for home broadband. With AT&T owning DirecTV and Dish owning a bunch of spectrum, there are two companies that could want to do installed, fixed home broadband in the 5G era to support a triple-play of wireless, tv, and home-broadband. Sprint is sitting on over 200MHz of spectrum in most areas with a lot of it being high frequency BRS and EBS spectrum (2.5GHz). Installed, fixed, directional antennas would work a lot nicer with that spectrum than mobile devices and it would offer up a new revenue stream for a company that has lost $50B since 2006. If 5G really has a big boost in capacity, it could make a big impact against home-broadband monopolies. Wired might still offer a better experience for enthusiasts, but given that a lot of people I know want to save $20 a month and drop from 110Mbps to 25Mbps, the competition could have broad appeal for a lot of people.

Gracana 11y ago
> T-Mobile already offers 7GB for $50 Does that include tethering? I've noticed a lot of carriers offer a... well, not a large amount of data, but some amount that's on the better side of terrible, but if you tether, the limit is much lower.
- boredinballard 11y ago
  Includes tethering, for me at least. I use the $30/month prepaid which has a similar data plan structure. As far as I know, T-Mobile let's you do whatever you want with your phone and data.
e12e 11y ago
> T-Mobile already offers 7GB for $50 and 40x that would be 280GB, plenty for most home users. Um, lets say conservatively that an hour of 4k video is 8GB (1080p is ~4.7GB/hour on Netflix). 280GB gives you one hour of video/day in a month - which sounds a little low, considering you may have 3-4 people watching different streams. And that doesn't even include video chat, which surely should be something we expect for the next 10 years?

jccalhoun 11y ago

I skimmed through the article and saw hyperbolic statements like, "Now with the leap to 5G networks, we can start to completely reshape entire industries, and rethink how we run our cities and manage critical national infrastructures." I thought to myself, "Ugh, who is writing this crap?" then scrolled up and saw it was "Hossein Moiin is executive vice president and CTO of Nokia Networks." I never thought I would long for the good old days when Mike Arrington would just write about companies he invested in instead of cutting out the middle man and letting companies write their own articles.

pixelbath 11y ago
Same with the prosthetics story. Increased bandwidth over mobile networks could enable them to print more arms? This is only solvable with 5G?
jsingleton 11y ago
He should have run the post through http://www.hemingwayapp.com http://www.hemingwayapp.com. "adverb. Remove it." Edit: It gets a 13. "17 of 59 sentences are hard to read." "27 of 59 sentences are very hard to read."

AriaMinaei 11y ago

VR websites will need this.

jsingleton 11y ago

5G hardware is still pretty bulky. It requires a motorised trolley. I'm sure that will be miniaturised though. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30224853 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30224853

Joeri 11y ago

For IoT you don't need higher speeds, you need lower power requirements. I am much more interested in things like LoRa networking. It allows upgrading base stations to receive sensor data directly from the sensor, while the sensor can run years on battery power. It allows retroactive upgrades of buildings with sensors without having to put in new cabling or figure out where to put bluetooth networking gear.

ksec 11y ago

We need to hugely increase capacity. 4G Speed is fine, but it wasn't designed for these kind of intensive use we are doing today. We can do 20 - 30Mbps on most 4G network during normal use, when things go bad it stops loading. Dropping to mere 1 - 3 Mbps with high latency. We need even lower latency, best case 4G is around 20 - 30ms. Most of the time it is 50+ to 90ms. That is much better then then 100s to 300ms in 3G. But 5G should bring even the worst case to 10ms max. Latency is important in Webpage / Apps loading speed. And then hopefully 5G can do all these while using even less energy then 4G.