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In the US 5G isn't really too useful for the users, as long as 4G is priced way too expensive. On my US SIM card I pay $10 per GB. On my Austrian SIM card I pay

by gst 10y ago

In the US 5G isn't really too useful for the users, as long as 4G is priced way too expensive. On my US SIM card I pay $10 per GB. On my Austrian SIM card I pay 26 Euros a month for a LTE flatrate (without any hidden caps and with unlimited tethering allowed). Wireless data is so cheap there that many people cancel their wired connection and only use LTE instead. Why would I need 5G on a connection where I can't use more than a few GB because it gets too expensive otherwise?

slashink 10y ago
You're not wrong in the sense that 5G isn't actually that much of value for the users directly, however there are many other reasons that directly benefit the users. Telco's pay 2 big costs for running a cellular data network: Infrastructure and Spectrum licensing. Your cost of data is supposed to cover these two with an added profit for the telco. What 5G brings to the table is faster data, which means you are able to transfer you file quicker, which means the average spectrum usage per "facebook load" is lower since the transmission happens much faster. Instead of you occupying that spectrum for 30 sec while loading over GPRS, you instead fetch all the files in less than a second, making the average potential bandwidth in the network much higher for everyone, thus lowering the price per gigabyte. In addition to that, with 5G the phone can fetch data much more fast which means the radio can enter power-saving mode much faster. If a page on 4G takes 4 seconds to download and on 5G takes 1 second, it might end up being a 4X reduction (i'm stretching it for the sake of the example) due to the radio not having to be powered for that long. So the consumer wins on pricing and battery consumption while the networks can squeeze more out of the already occupied spectrum.
kusmi 10y ago
It depends on which technology is implemented for 5G. In one model, the user's device can become a node to propagate wireless signals. The idea is, in an 'internet of things' where every device is sending and receiving signals concurrently, you get this decentralized virtual network spanning multiple bands, that is dissociated from the physical infrastructure like cell towers. Networks on this 5G 'cloud' become niche based and much cheaper to operate, and there is no single provider bottleneck. In other words, 5G is supposed to be not only orders of magnitude faster than 4G (it's essentially global wifi), it's also orders of magnitude cheaper. After reading this article though, I'm starting to wonder how much of this is pure marketing nonsense.

by gst 10y ago

slashink 10y ago

You're not wrong in the sense that 5G isn't actually that much of value for the users directly, however there are many other reasons that directly benefit the users. Telco's pay 2 big costs for running a cellular data network: Infrastructure and Spectrum licensing. Your cost of data is supposed to cover these two with an added profit for the telco. What 5G brings to the table is faster data, which means you are able to transfer you file quicker, which means the average spectrum usage per "facebook load" is lower since the transmission happens much faster. Instead of you occupying that spectrum for 30 sec while loading over GPRS, you instead fetch all the files in less than a second, making the average potential bandwidth in the network much higher for everyone, thus lowering the price per gigabyte. In addition to that, with 5G the phone can fetch data much more fast which means the radio can enter power-saving mode much faster. If a page on 4G takes 4 seconds to download and on 5G takes 1 second, it might end up being a 4X reduction (i'm stretching it for the sake of the example) due to the radio not having to be powered for that long. So the consumer wins on pricing and battery consumption while the networks can squeeze more out of the already occupied spectrum.

kusmi 10y ago

It depends on which technology is implemented for 5G. In one model, the user's device can become a node to propagate wireless signals. The idea is, in an 'internet of things' where every device is sending and receiving signals concurrently, you get this decentralized virtual network spanning multiple bands, that is dissociated from the physical infrastructure like cell towers. Networks on this 5G 'cloud' become niche based and much cheaper to operate, and there is no single provider bottleneck. In other words, 5G is supposed to be not only orders of magnitude faster than 4G (it's essentially global wifi), it's also orders of magnitude cheaper. After reading this article though, I'm starting to wonder how much of this is pure marketing nonsense.