3 ms·

> Mainly because of this new spectrum, mobile 5G speeds in good conditions could be well over 100 megabits/sec and potentially several hundreds megabits/sec (mo

> Mainly because of this new spectrum, mobile 5G speeds in good conditions could be well over 100 megabits/sec and potentially several hundreds megabits/sec (mobile speeds of over a gigabit/sec are technically possible but unlikely in the real world). I already see speeds like 200 Mbit/s on 4G in good conditions, sometimes more. Normal conditions 50-100 Mbit/s. Yeah, your mileage may vary. Those 1.2 Gbit/s 4G cellular modems do deliver. I'd be disappointed if 5G didn't significantly improve on that in real world. > 5G is promised to have much better latency than 4G - perhaps 20-30ms in the real world, down from 50-60ms for LTE (4G). It’s not clear how visible this will be to users. What? HSDPA "3.5G" was about 50-60 ms. 4G is mostly something like 12-20 ms, when I've measured the latency. 5G hopefully at least halves that. Anyways, I do acknowledge 4G performance is very regional. Above just reflects my experience, what I've been measuring.

Narkov 8y ago
Yeah the article is a bit of a miss. On Telstra 4G in Australia, you can regularly get >100Mbit/s and ~15ms latency. We've had this for a few years now.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rjzzleep 8y ago
One of the goals of mmWave is tactile networking with <= 1ms latency[1]. One of the main issues here is that they want to make a lot of money from 5G, that's the main reason why you're always required to have a base station involved. [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7876982 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7876982
grahamburger 8y ago
The primary reason for the upgrade to 5G is more capacity, not necessarily faster speeds. If mobile carriers can get rid of data caps entirely (even while tethering) they can give Comcast a run for their money even at 'only' a few hundred Mbps. There aren't really consumer applications that use more than a few dozen mbps anyway (4K stream is less than 25mbps.)
ksec 8y ago
Benedict is now in Silicon Valley and obviously his audience are US based. So those numbers are based on Real World US Carriers. In many places around the world, latency and bandwidth improvement from 5G would be minimal because we are already getting decent 4G speed. And in your cases I doubt you care about additional 100Mbps when you already gets 100MBps to start with, the likely 5ms latency improvement aren't going to be very noticeable.
- traek 8y ago
  Anecdotally, I just ran a speed test and got 140Mbps up/35Mbps down with 31ms latency on LTE. I’m in SF.
  - semi-extrinsic 8y ago
    Up here in the frozen wastelands of the north, in a city with 100K people, I get 52Mbps down/11 Mbps up/33 ms latency on 4G.
    - dspillett 8y ago
      City centre York UK (the original and best York!) on 4G mid-morning, a quick single unscientific test now shows 25Mbps down, 30Mbps up, 32ms latency, which seems toward the higher end of normal throughput (the best I've seen a test show around here I think was a little over 40Mbps, 15 to 25 is what I'd usually expect) and normal for latency (that is almost always low-to-mid-30s around here). For what most people use their phones for extra bandwidth isn't going to make much difference, which is good because the individual is unlikely to see it: more devices are coming online as the bandwidth improves, and the demands you have increase too (usually outside your control: sites getting heaver, using higher quality video, ...). The latency improvements will be more noticeable I expect, especially in busy cells because latency-centric problems tend to balloon much more than bandwidth-centric ones as the air gets more crowded. As the available throughput nears saturation both bandwidth and latency suffer but for most uses the latency is going to be what causes most problems because for many applications you can wait for the bulk of a block of data to come in as long as the first bits of it arrive in a short amount of time (in a web browsing example you can start reading before the rest arrives, unless the page is badly designed and doesn't render until everything is transferred). Away from "normal" Joe Public mobile network use (web pages, games, some video, maybe maps) the next big thing is workers using VPNs, and again here latency improvements are going to be more beneficial to most people than a bandwidth boost. Despite this the bandwidth improvement is the fact most shouted about. The reason for this is that it is a number people understand (or at least think they understand) because it is how these things are usually touted. It is not dissimilar to the back end of the GHz wars with CPU releases: at a certain point the extra clock ticks were meaningless because of many other factors, but chips kept getting sold that way because that is what the buying public "understood" and marketing didn't want to bamboozle them with other details (cache design factors, multi-core performance, ...).
cpach 8y ago
1.2 Gbit/s 4G cellular modems? Sounds interesting. Do you perhaps ahve any links to such a product?
- vardump 8y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=1.2+gbit+4g+modem https://www.google.com/search?q=1.2+gbit+4g+modem I've had one (Cat 18, 1200/200 Mbps) in my daily driver for almost a year. The best download speed under ideal conditions I've seen have been a bit under 400 Mbps.
  - cpach 8y ago
    The query [1.2 gbit lte modem] seems to yield better results
- ksec 8y ago
  The latest Qualcomm X24 can do 2Gbps, of course that is assuming your carriers and everything else aligned perfectly. In reality I am not aware of any Carriers in the world which has these kind of spectrum ready for 2GBps speed.
  - cpach 8y ago
    Cool!
yaantc 8y ago
Yes, there's hype and confusion around latency and 5G. Already with LTE most of the latency you're seeing comes from the network side, not from the radio link itself. And LTE latency can be low enough for customer application as you're experiencing. "low latency" for 5G is related to a variant called URLLC, for Ultra-reliable and low-latency. 5G is an umbrella for 3 different variants: 1) eMBB: the massive broadband with higher speed, mostly with mmWave. This is associated with the 3GPP "NR" (New Radio) cellular standard; 2) massive IoT: this will actually be done based on LTE CatM and NB-IoT for a long while, with small improvements in release 15. It can be confusing, but the "Gs" are performance requirements defined by the ITU-T, and not a specific technology. Then a tech that meets the 5G requirements can claim (honestly, without marketing hype) to be 5G. It turns out that for massive IoT LTE meets the 5G ITU-T specs. Later on there will be a new tech based on NR, but nobody is in a hurry there, as LTE IoT is ok; 3) URLLC, the optimized for low-latency variant based on NR. URLLC is the less clear of the 3 really. The vision is to use NR for industrial control applications, and maybe VR/AR for consumer too. There are low-level optimizations down to the radio framing layer to reduce latency. Lots of fuzzy visions, but I'm not sure anyone has a clear business case. The work on this at 3GPP (the organization defining the LTE and NR specs) is progressing slowly. In particular there's always a cost to reduced latency, so it won't be for free. Private usage for factory could make sense, but consumer use is less clear. There's a tendency to confuse the "regular 4G/5G" with URLLC, but the later is a different beast and not solid yet.
bad_user 8y ago
As I'm reading these comments, I just did a test on my own 4G connection and I have 105 Mbps download and 17 ms ping and in my city this is the norm and I have seen speeds higher than 150 Mpbs. Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pw86k6tgd9rc5fd/Screenshot%202019-01-18%2015.33.00.jpg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/pw86k6tgd9rc5fd/Screenshot%202019-...
- deathanatos 8y ago
  In certain locations, I too can get those kinds of speeds. But when I actually go to use it over long periods and over more normal work loads (e.g., while travelling along the CalTrain corridor in SV, particularly in the San Antonio/Palo Alto area), I'll routinely get 20 second latencies; it quickly makes 200-300ms latency feel like stuff is "working".
sgt101 8y ago
Ahh. thing is: you are a subscriber, not a 5G procurer. Telcos are concerned with how many people like you they can support at once with how much power and opex and capex. If 5G tech provides n*cell throughput, for 1/n capex and/or opex and you (as a subscriber) see no benefit vs LTE then it will please Telco's much. However, 5G may make a big impact on your experience as well. I don't know how you measured the latency; but remember that these numbers can be very deceptive due to network technology pretending to do things that it isn't really doing. That's fine when you run a speed test, but not if you are being treated at the side of the road.

Narkov 8y ago

Yeah the article is a bit of a miss. On Telstra 4G in Australia, you can regularly get >100Mbit/s and ~15ms latency. We've had this for a few years now.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rjzzleep 8y ago

One of the goals of mmWave is tactile networking with <= 1ms latency[1]. One of the main issues here is that they want to make a lot of money from 5G, that's the main reason why you're always required to have a base station involved. [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7876982 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7876982

grahamburger 8y ago

The primary reason for the upgrade to 5G is more capacity, not necessarily faster speeds. If mobile carriers can get rid of data caps entirely (even while tethering) they can give Comcast a run for their money even at 'only' a few hundred Mbps. There aren't really consumer applications that use more than a few dozen mbps anyway (4K stream is less than 25mbps.)

ksec 8y ago

Benedict is now in Silicon Valley and obviously his audience are US based. So those numbers are based on Real World US Carriers. In many places around the world, latency and bandwidth improvement from 5G would be minimal because we are already getting decent 4G speed. And in your cases I doubt you care about additional 100Mbps when you already gets 100MBps to start with, the likely 5ms latency improvement aren't going to be very noticeable.

traek 8y ago
Anecdotally, I just ran a speed test and got 140Mbps up/35Mbps down with 31ms latency on LTE. I’m in SF.
- semi-extrinsic 8y ago
  Up here in the frozen wastelands of the north, in a city with 100K people, I get 52Mbps down/11 Mbps up/33 ms latency on 4G.
  - dspillett 8y ago
    City centre York UK (the original and best York!) on 4G mid-morning, a quick single unscientific test now shows 25Mbps down, 30Mbps up, 32ms latency, which seems toward the higher end of normal throughput (the best I've seen a test show around here I think was a little over 40Mbps, 15 to 25 is what I'd usually expect) and normal for latency (that is almost always low-to-mid-30s around here). For what most people use their phones for extra bandwidth isn't going to make much difference, which is good because the individual is unlikely to see it: more devices are coming online as the bandwidth improves, and the demands you have increase too (usually outside your control: sites getting heaver, using higher quality video, ...). The latency improvements will be more noticeable I expect, especially in busy cells because latency-centric problems tend to balloon much more than bandwidth-centric ones as the air gets more crowded. As the available throughput nears saturation both bandwidth and latency suffer but for most uses the latency is going to be what causes most problems because for many applications you can wait for the bulk of a block of data to come in as long as the first bits of it arrive in a short amount of time (in a web browsing example you can start reading before the rest arrives, unless the page is badly designed and doesn't render until everything is transferred). Away from "normal" Joe Public mobile network use (web pages, games, some video, maybe maps) the next big thing is workers using VPNs, and again here latency improvements are going to be more beneficial to most people than a bandwidth boost. Despite this the bandwidth improvement is the fact most shouted about. The reason for this is that it is a number people understand (or at least think they understand) because it is how these things are usually touted. It is not dissimilar to the back end of the GHz wars with CPU releases: at a certain point the extra clock ticks were meaningless because of many other factors, but chips kept getting sold that way because that is what the buying public "understood" and marketing didn't want to bamboozle them with other details (cache design factors, multi-core performance, ...).

cpach 8y ago

1.2 Gbit/s 4G cellular modems? Sounds interesting. Do you perhaps ahve any links to such a product?

vardump 8y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=1.2+gbit+4g+modem https://www.google.com/search?q=1.2+gbit+4g+modem I've had one (Cat 18, 1200/200 Mbps) in my daily driver for almost a year. The best download speed under ideal conditions I've seen have been a bit under 400 Mbps.
- cpach 8y ago
  The query [1.2 gbit lte modem] seems to yield better results
ksec 8y ago
The latest Qualcomm X24 can do 2Gbps, of course that is assuming your carriers and everything else aligned perfectly. In reality I am not aware of any Carriers in the world which has these kind of spectrum ready for 2GBps speed.
- cpach 8y ago
  Cool!

yaantc 8y ago

Yes, there's hype and confusion around latency and 5G. Already with LTE most of the latency you're seeing comes from the network side, not from the radio link itself. And LTE latency can be low enough for customer application as you're experiencing. "low latency" for 5G is related to a variant called URLLC, for Ultra-reliable and low-latency. 5G is an umbrella for 3 different variants: 1) eMBB: the massive broadband with higher speed, mostly with mmWave. This is associated with the 3GPP "NR" (New Radio) cellular standard; 2) massive IoT: this will actually be done based on LTE CatM and NB-IoT for a long while, with small improvements in release 15. It can be confusing, but the "Gs" are performance requirements defined by the ITU-T, and not a specific technology. Then a tech that meets the 5G requirements can claim (honestly, without marketing hype) to be 5G. It turns out that for massive IoT LTE meets the 5G ITU-T specs. Later on there will be a new tech based on NR, but nobody is in a hurry there, as LTE IoT is ok; 3) URLLC, the optimized for low-latency variant based on NR. URLLC is the less clear of the 3 really. The vision is to use NR for industrial control applications, and maybe VR/AR for consumer too. There are low-level optimizations down to the radio framing layer to reduce latency. Lots of fuzzy visions, but I'm not sure anyone has a clear business case. The work on this at 3GPP (the organization defining the LTE and NR specs) is progressing slowly. In particular there's always a cost to reduced latency, so it won't be for free. Private usage for factory could make sense, but consumer use is less clear. There's a tendency to confuse the "regular 4G/5G" with URLLC, but the later is a different beast and not solid yet.

bad_user 8y ago

As I'm reading these comments, I just did a test on my own 4G connection and I have 105 Mbps download and 17 ms ping and in my city this is the norm and I have seen speeds higher than 150 Mpbs. Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pw86k6tgd9rc5fd/Screenshot%202019-01-18%2015.33.00.jpg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/pw86k6tgd9rc5fd/Screenshot%202019-...

deathanatos 8y ago
In certain locations, I too can get those kinds of speeds. But when I actually go to use it over long periods and over more normal work loads (e.g., while travelling along the CalTrain corridor in SV, particularly in the San Antonio/Palo Alto area), I'll routinely get 20 second latencies; it quickly makes 200-300ms latency feel like stuff is "working".

sgt101 8y ago

Ahh. thing is: you are a subscriber, not a 5G procurer. Telcos are concerned with how many people like you they can support at once with how much power and opex and capex. If 5G tech provides n*cell throughput, for 1/n capex and/or opex and you (as a subscriber) see no benefit vs LTE then it will please Telco's much. However, 5G may make a big impact on your experience as well. I don't know how you measured the latency; but remember that these numbers can be very deceptive due to network technology pretending to do things that it isn't really doing. That's fine when you run a speed test, but not if you are being treated at the side of the road.