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From someone who doesn't know anything about wireless technologies. Is there any chance 5g will break the walls that prevent real unlimited data? If not, what

by elboru 8y ago

From someone who doesn't know anything about wireless technologies. Is there any chance 5g will break the walls that prevent real unlimited data? If not, what must happen in order to allow everyone use Netflix on their phones without wifi?

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> Is there any chance 5g will break the walls that prevent real unlimited data? No. For a while, perhaps. But demand will scale to meet supply as new uses for the network are found.
josteink 8y ago
> Is there any chance 5g will break the walls that prevent real unlimited data? For providers to provide true unlimited data, you have to have true unlimited bandwidth. Wireless connectivity is provided through a shared medium. For comparison you have wired networking where every customer has a dedicated medium, the wire, for themselves. This is what makes all the difference between actually unlimited and capped plans. So, no. Not today. Not anytime soon.
- boramalper 8y ago
  > Wireless connectivity is provided through a shared medium. For comparison you have wired networking where every customer has a dedicated medium, the wire, for themselves. Isn’t wire also a shared medium? It’s not that there is an end-to-end circuit when you connect to another machine on the Net; your packets will be send along with others’.
  - signa11 8y ago
    > Isn’t wire also a shared medium? It’s not that there is an end-to-end circuit when you connect to another machine on the Net; your packets will be send along with others’. not since you have had ethernet switches.
    - fulafel 8y ago
      But you can't access the Internet if you don't have an uplink on it - and it's shared.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Technically yes, but the traffic for a whole city fits through a single strand of fiber with room to spare.
    - dx034 8y ago
      It does only because the end user has slow speeds. If anyone could stream 4k, the bandwidth for a whole city during peak hours would probably not fit through that fiber anymore.
      - adrianN 8y ago
        A strand of fiber can carry something like 20 Terabits/s. Streaming 4k takes less than 20 Megabits per second. That's still a million people streaming 4k simultaneously.
  - oasisbob 8y ago
    > Isn’t wire also a shared medium? That's a really tricky question. At some point, the packets are going to share a link with those from other customers, possibly oversubscribed... Cable internet is clearly a shared medium at both the physical and link layers. Fiber like GPON is shared physically-ish, but DWDM isolates individual waves so thoroughly that it's hard to think of that as a shared physical medium unless you're thinking about backhoe fade and the like. With DSL, do you consider the DSLAM? Etc
    - amazon_not 8y ago
      > Fiber like GPON is shared physically-ish, but DWDM isolates individual waves so thoroughly that it's hard to think of that as a shared physical medium unless you're thinking about backhoe fade and the like. This is incorrect. GPON does not use DWDM, or any individual waves per subscriber. GPON is a shared medium with one wavelenght used in the upstream and one wavelenght used in the downstream direction. Each subscriber is allocated bandwidth on the shared medium. Not even next generation PON uses DWDM. Next generation PON still uses on upstream and one downstream wavelenght per PON tree, but there can be multiple PON trees on the same backhaul fiber. It's more like a CWDM overlay of PON trees. The only PON that uses DWDM is WDM-PON, but it isn't deployed commercially at scale yet.
      - oasisbob 8y ago
        Thanks for the correction - easy to forget that the P in PON is for passive.
  - sorenjan 8y ago
    The difference is that if the cable gets full you can put a new cable next to the other one, and double your available bandwidth. If the ether is full, it's full. It's also mixed with all kinds of signals, obstacles, power losses, etc.
- fulafel 8y ago
  But practically, Massive MIMO, small cells and 30+ GHz frequencies effectively mean that it's possible can provide more bandwidth than near-term consumers can use with 5G in most situations, if you just throw enough $$ at it.
  - gsich 8y ago
    30+ GHz require line of sight. It's not feasible to deploy stations, except maybe indoors like shopping mauls. More realistic is the 700 MHz range. 2100 TDD is also pretty much unused, as well as 2600 TDD. Then again you can reuse existing frequencies that were previously used for GSM/UMTS/LTE.
- signa11 8y ago
  > Wireless connectivity is provided through a shared medium. For comparison you have wired networking where every customer has a dedicated medium, the wire, for themselves. This is what makes all the difference between actually unlimited and capped plans. if you are willing to sacrifice on mobility aka fixed-wireless-access, there are companies that are trying to do this e.g. via beamforming, which essentially tries to make wireless a 'switched-media' rather than 'shared'.
- gsich 8y ago
  Networks are usually capable of this. (See examples in Europe). It is a deliberate choice from the ISPs to not offer unlimited data packages. You can make much more money with selling overprized "1 GB packages". It is a business issue, not a technical one.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  > true unlimited data, you have to have true unlimited bandwidth. Semantics: no, you just need to throttle each connection such that ever user can have continuous data flow given the available back-haul. Can your ISPs infrastructure handle everyone saturating their connection? It’s all about QOS vs Contention Ratio. It’s unlikely everyone will want to stream ten 4k videos to their home or smartphone all the time, but so long as telephony and streaming video work most of the time for most people we can probably consider that unlimited in the common parlance.
fulafel 8y ago
Netflix bandwidth usage is pretty predictable and limited, as it's a realtime service that requires a human at the other end to consume the stream. Probably limiting-happy ISPs will sell you a Netflix worth of monthly traffic allowance at a reasonable price. (And to nitpick, nothing really prevents unlimited traffic today with LTE - some places have multiple operators offering it: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/finnish-like-unlimited-mobile-data-model-now-europe-pal-zarandy https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/finnish-like-unlimited-mobile...)
- fleetfox 8y ago
  As data point. You can get "real unlimited data" plan for ~10EUR in baltics
  - gst 8y ago
    Same in Austria (but 20 EUR instead of 10). LTE is a competitor for ADSL and Cable here and LTE providers sell WiFi routers that use LTE instead of ADSL/Cable as uplink. I recently replaced my home ADSL connection with LTE (for 20 EUR a month: https://www.yesss.at/tarifoptionen/unlimited https://www.yesss.at/tarifoptionen/unlimited) and get approx 2x the download bandwidth and 10x the upload bandwidth for the same price as my previous ADSL connection. Even when there's congestion (which doesn't happen a lot) it's still significantly faster than ADSL.
    - NullPrefix 8y ago
      >get approx 2x the download bandwidth What about latency?
      - doikor 8y ago
        In a LTE network that is not over its capacity the latency is a bit under 20ms these days in my experience. With 5G this should go down to 1 to 2ms.
        8y ago
Rjevski 8y ago
Greed is what prevents unlimited data. When greed is not the problem (due to competition, etc) then those markets already have unlimited data.
arrrg 8y ago
Deutsche Telekom is currently offering 24 hours of real unlimited data for free in Germany at every World Cup game of the German soccer team. (Their usual plans offer single-digit GB data per month.) I would expect that to be a near worst case scenario from a bandwidth perspective. Everyone all at once suddenly has unlimited data during roughly the same 24 hour window. Apparently their existing infrastructure is good enough to handle such a spike. This is limited somewhat in that this is a manual process (you have to click a link on a website to get it and then click a link in the confirmation SMS), but still. I think they could offer unlimited data at a price well below what they are currently offering (€80 per month for unlimited data – actually that’s not so bad, only a couple months ago the situation was much worse).
- dx034 8y ago
  It's actually a good test case. They get the marketing benefit and can also stress-test their systems to see how feasible unlimited plans would be.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    I would hope that this is really their goal - But I'm not too sure about it. I expect them to aim to only slightly surpass their competitors. Maybe this is actually to signal to them their capabilities?
  - gsich 8y ago
    you don't need a testcase for that. just ask the daughter company in Austria.
alex_duf 8y ago
I don't think unlimited data is a technical issue, it's a competition issue
gsich 8y ago
Real unlimited data is, well real. At least in Austria. Prices range from 20-50 €. It is only usable in Austria though, but that's not an issue. This has been this way even before LTE.
- baybal2 8y ago
  Zong Pakistan sells 200GB at around $30, with unlimited topups at $0.8 per GB
ksec 8y ago
Define Unlimited. Because there is no such thing as unlimited. The average household uses 250GB per month with broadband. An HEVC 1Mbps stream should offer decent enough quality on a mobile phone. That is only 30GB a month if you watch 2 hours everyday. And if you live in EU that is hardly a problem even with 4G network. It is a problem with high population density such as Tokyo, Hong Kong or Philippines. But 5G will fix all those capacity problem. Most of the problem you read / have are likely from US. In 2016 the data show US has 3 times less cell tower per area when comparing to UK or other EU countries, but US is also much less populated. I have no idea how the business maths works out or if there are any regulation that requires them to cover most part of US.

by elboru 8y ago

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> Is there any chance 5g will break the walls that prevent real unlimited data? No. For a while, perhaps. But demand will scale to meet supply as new uses for the network are found.

josteink 8y ago

> Is there any chance 5g will break the walls that prevent real unlimited data? For providers to provide true unlimited data, you have to have true unlimited bandwidth. Wireless connectivity is provided through a shared medium. For comparison you have wired networking where every customer has a dedicated medium, the wire, for themselves. This is what makes all the difference between actually unlimited and capped plans. So, no. Not today. Not anytime soon.

boramalper 8y ago
> Wireless connectivity is provided through a shared medium. For comparison you have wired networking where every customer has a dedicated medium, the wire, for themselves. Isn’t wire also a shared medium? It’s not that there is an end-to-end circuit when you connect to another machine on the Net; your packets will be send along with others’.
- signa11 8y ago
  > Isn’t wire also a shared medium? It’s not that there is an end-to-end circuit when you connect to another machine on the Net; your packets will be send along with others’. not since you have had ethernet switches.
  - fulafel 8y ago
    But you can't access the Internet if you don't have an uplink on it - and it's shared.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Technically yes, but the traffic for a whole city fits through a single strand of fiber with room to spare.
  - dx034 8y ago
    It does only because the end user has slow speeds. If anyone could stream 4k, the bandwidth for a whole city during peak hours would probably not fit through that fiber anymore.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      A strand of fiber can carry something like 20 Terabits/s. Streaming 4k takes less than 20 Megabits per second. That's still a million people streaming 4k simultaneously.
- oasisbob 8y ago
  > Isn’t wire also a shared medium? That's a really tricky question. At some point, the packets are going to share a link with those from other customers, possibly oversubscribed... Cable internet is clearly a shared medium at both the physical and link layers. Fiber like GPON is shared physically-ish, but DWDM isolates individual waves so thoroughly that it's hard to think of that as a shared physical medium unless you're thinking about backhoe fade and the like. With DSL, do you consider the DSLAM? Etc
  - amazon_not 8y ago
    > Fiber like GPON is shared physically-ish, but DWDM isolates individual waves so thoroughly that it's hard to think of that as a shared physical medium unless you're thinking about backhoe fade and the like. This is incorrect. GPON does not use DWDM, or any individual waves per subscriber. GPON is a shared medium with one wavelenght used in the upstream and one wavelenght used in the downstream direction. Each subscriber is allocated bandwidth on the shared medium. Not even next generation PON uses DWDM. Next generation PON still uses on upstream and one downstream wavelenght per PON tree, but there can be multiple PON trees on the same backhaul fiber. It's more like a CWDM overlay of PON trees. The only PON that uses DWDM is WDM-PON, but it isn't deployed commercially at scale yet.
    - oasisbob 8y ago
      Thanks for the correction - easy to forget that the P in PON is for passive.
- sorenjan 8y ago
  The difference is that if the cable gets full you can put a new cable next to the other one, and double your available bandwidth. If the ether is full, it's full. It's also mixed with all kinds of signals, obstacles, power losses, etc.
fulafel 8y ago
But practically, Massive MIMO, small cells and 30+ GHz frequencies effectively mean that it's possible can provide more bandwidth than near-term consumers can use with 5G in most situations, if you just throw enough $$ at it.
- gsich 8y ago
  30+ GHz require line of sight. It's not feasible to deploy stations, except maybe indoors like shopping mauls. More realistic is the 700 MHz range. 2100 TDD is also pretty much unused, as well as 2600 TDD. Then again you can reuse existing frequencies that were previously used for GSM/UMTS/LTE.
signa11 8y ago
> Wireless connectivity is provided through a shared medium. For comparison you have wired networking where every customer has a dedicated medium, the wire, for themselves. This is what makes all the difference between actually unlimited and capped plans. if you are willing to sacrifice on mobility aka fixed-wireless-access, there are companies that are trying to do this e.g. via beamforming, which essentially tries to make wireless a 'switched-media' rather than 'shared'.
gsich 8y ago
Networks are usually capable of this. (See examples in Europe). It is a deliberate choice from the ISPs to not offer unlimited data packages. You can make much more money with selling overprized "1 GB packages". It is a business issue, not a technical one.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
> true unlimited data, you have to have true unlimited bandwidth. Semantics: no, you just need to throttle each connection such that ever user can have continuous data flow given the available back-haul. Can your ISPs infrastructure handle everyone saturating their connection? It’s all about QOS vs Contention Ratio. It’s unlikely everyone will want to stream ten 4k videos to their home or smartphone all the time, but so long as telephony and streaming video work most of the time for most people we can probably consider that unlimited in the common parlance.

fulafel 8y ago

Netflix bandwidth usage is pretty predictable and limited, as it's a realtime service that requires a human at the other end to consume the stream. Probably limiting-happy ISPs will sell you a Netflix worth of monthly traffic allowance at a reasonable price. (And to nitpick, nothing really prevents unlimited traffic today with LTE - some places have multiple operators offering it: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/finnish-like-unlimited-mobile-data-model-now-europe-pal-zarandy https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/finnish-like-unlimited-mobile...)

fleetfox 8y ago
As data point. You can get "real unlimited data" plan for ~10EUR in baltics
- gst 8y ago
  Same in Austria (but 20 EUR instead of 10). LTE is a competitor for ADSL and Cable here and LTE providers sell WiFi routers that use LTE instead of ADSL/Cable as uplink. I recently replaced my home ADSL connection with LTE (for 20 EUR a month: https://www.yesss.at/tarifoptionen/unlimited https://www.yesss.at/tarifoptionen/unlimited) and get approx 2x the download bandwidth and 10x the upload bandwidth for the same price as my previous ADSL connection. Even when there's congestion (which doesn't happen a lot) it's still significantly faster than ADSL.
  - NullPrefix 8y ago
    >get approx 2x the download bandwidth What about latency?
    - doikor 8y ago
      In a LTE network that is not over its capacity the latency is a bit under 20ms these days in my experience. With 5G this should go down to 1 to 2ms.
      - 8y ago

Rjevski 8y ago

Greed is what prevents unlimited data. When greed is not the problem (due to competition, etc) then those markets already have unlimited data.

arrrg 8y ago

Deutsche Telekom is currently offering 24 hours of real unlimited data for free in Germany at every World Cup game of the German soccer team. (Their usual plans offer single-digit GB data per month.) I would expect that to be a near worst case scenario from a bandwidth perspective. Everyone all at once suddenly has unlimited data during roughly the same 24 hour window. Apparently their existing infrastructure is good enough to handle such a spike. This is limited somewhat in that this is a manual process (you have to click a link on a website to get it and then click a link in the confirmation SMS), but still. I think they could offer unlimited data at a price well below what they are currently offering (€80 per month for unlimited data – actually that’s not so bad, only a couple months ago the situation was much worse).

dx034 8y ago
It's actually a good test case. They get the marketing benefit and can also stress-test their systems to see how feasible unlimited plans would be.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  I would hope that this is really their goal - But I'm not too sure about it. I expect them to aim to only slightly surpass their competitors. Maybe this is actually to signal to them their capabilities?
- gsich 8y ago
  you don't need a testcase for that. just ask the daughter company in Austria.

alex_duf 8y ago

I don't think unlimited data is a technical issue, it's a competition issue

gsich 8y ago

Real unlimited data is, well real. At least in Austria. Prices range from 20-50 €. It is only usable in Austria though, but that's not an issue. This has been this way even before LTE.

baybal2 8y ago
Zong Pakistan sells 200GB at around $30, with unlimited topups at $0.8 per GB

ksec 8y ago

Define Unlimited. Because there is no such thing as unlimited. The average household uses 250GB per month with broadband. An HEVC 1Mbps stream should offer decent enough quality on a mobile phone. That is only 30GB a month if you watch 2 hours everyday. And if you live in EU that is hardly a problem even with 4G network. It is a problem with high population density such as Tokyo, Hong Kong or Philippines. But 5G will fix all those capacity problem. Most of the problem you read / have are likely from US. In 2016 the data show US has 3 times less cell tower per area when comparing to UK or other EU countries, but US is also much less populated. I have no idea how the business maths works out or if there are any regulation that requires them to cover most part of US.