32 ms·

5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk

668 points by szczys 8y ago

macawfish 8y ago
Ajit Pai makes me so angry.
derekp7 8y ago
I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us. For the most part, all the tasks I need to do on a phone (pocket computer / communicator) can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website's loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds). The only thing I can think of is 5G will allow for more overall network bandwidth, so the data caps on "unlimited" plans wouldn't be needed. But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can't do with current 4G/LTE?
- joshmn 8y ago
  > so the data caps on "unlimited" plans wouldn't be needed They're not even needed now. It's all about money.
  - cheerlessbog 8y ago
    Right, I doubt it really costs Verizon $15 to provide me an extra gigabyte..
  - rhino369 8y ago
    It’s somewhat needed. 15 dollars a gb is just to raise revenue. But a truly unlimited 4G hotspot service would crawl to stop during busy periods. Some sort of rationing is needed.
    - Rychard 8y ago
      Seems like this is a pain-point that was self-inflicted by the companies themselves; selling service to many people without the infrastructure to back it up. That said, I'm not suggesting companies deploy 1:1 infrastructure in lock-step with sales. Power/Water companies plan for peak demand periods. What prevents ISPs from being able to do the same?
    - asdff 8y ago
      Most people don't come close to hitting their cap unless they accidentally update their 200mb apps on the data connection.
    - AnssiH 8y ago
      It seems to work just fine here in Finland, it is a very common alternative to wired home connections (seems to be about 50-50 split: https://www.ficom.fi/ict-ala/tilastot/kotitalouksien-laajakaistaliittymät https://www.ficom.fi/ict-ala/tilastot/kotitalouksien-laajaka...). No data caps, so you can use terabytes of data without throttling if you want to.
- tomschlick 8y ago
  > I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us. WISP internet service to the home.
  - derekp7 8y ago
    Again, looking for the advantage -- in this case, I can see WISP being useful for areas that are underserved by the local cable monopoly, and in other areas it provides a third competitor (cable/dsl/wisp). I wonder how 5G home internet will compare to the up and coming LEO satellite constellations (StarLink for example).
    - ryder9 8y ago
      You still need to lay fiber for 5G base stations
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        And if you're going to bring the fiber most of the way, you might as well terminate it at the premises.
        krisrm 8y ago
        This isn't necessarily the case. Bringing that cable an extra ~300m and providing the ONT hardware for each house is quite expensive for the small number of customers that might benefit in a rural area. Terminating at fast wireless and providing radios is much more cost effective from the telco's perspective.
        toomuchtodo 8y ago
        From the telco's perspective, yes. From an end user who is getting fiber from a coop or muni fiber provider, it's about $300-$500, which might be considered reasonable if your ongoing operating costs (and therefore, costs to the end user) are lower. Disclaimer: I have contributed to a muni fiber project, and am familiar with trenching/arial mounting and premises termination costs.
- ronnier 8y ago
  Have a decent connection where there’s a large gathering of people.
  - KJKingJ 8y ago
    Very much so. Sure, the headline speeds of 5G are nice (and indeed currently with the right 4G deployments and equipment, you can certainly get some phenomenal speeds today), but like all major network upgrades the primary benefit for typical users is aggregate capacity. That seemingly pointless headline speed doesn't quite happen when you've got 100s or 1000s of people in an area, what it does result in though is a usable speed for all of those people instead of an unusable one.
    - asdff 8y ago
      You don't need 5G to get that, you can get usable speeds to over 100k people in a roughly 200m x 100m area with wifi and 4G, as OSU has done (1,2). 1 https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2013/08/27/ohio-stadium-cell-service-improved-in.html https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2013/08/27/ohio-st... 2 https://www.dispatch.com/news/20180405/ohio-state-to-spend-nearly-19-million-updating-wi-fi-across-campus-including-ohio-stadium https://www.dispatch.com/news/20180405/ohio-state-to-spend-n...
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    802.11ax ("WiFI 6") supports this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Technical_improvements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Technical_improv...
  - dx034 8y ago
    With the same backbone infrastructure? Wouldn't you need more cell towers for this? From my experience, areas that constantly have large crowds often work well with 4G, just the occasional bursts don't work.
- cobookman 8y ago
  4G offers enough speed to replace my home internet connection, however aggregate bandwidth at the cell towers prevented this. I assume with 5G we're just about at the point where you could ditch the home internet connection and go 100% cellular.
  - pivo 8y ago
    It's not cell phone service, but I get my home internet via 5G from Starry (https://starry.com https://starry.com). Speeds are between 200-300MbS (symmetric upload/download) for $50/mo. It's really been fantastic in the six months or so that I've had it. They've got their own towers and repeaters on buildings here in Boston. Couldn't be happier with them and with being able to ditch Comcast.
    - madengr 8y ago
      Wow, I’m paying $130 for 100/5. Damn cable companies.
    - Unklejoe 8y ago
      Out of curiosity, do they give you a publically accessible IP? Or is the connection NAT-ed?
      - pivo 8y ago
        Yes they do give you a public IP but don't have static IPs.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - c0nducktr 8y ago
      What is the latency like? Could I play CS:GO or another game where latency and jitter matters?
      - 8y ago
- amalcon 8y ago
  Demand for bandwidth has historically expanded to match the bandwidth available. Folks will find some use for it.
  - swamp40 8y ago
    Multiple 8K 90Hz VR streams for the whole family to play Roblox 2025, all running off a personal hotspot.
    - penagwin 8y ago
      I want to see DOOM running on just the network stack, but with raytracing because.
- Chris_Chambers 8y ago
  How are they supposed to discreetly kill problematic slaves from a distance with multiple cancer rays focused on the target’s body if they don’t have the proper equipment in place?
- MrMember 8y ago
  With data caps I don't see much use for it. I still think it's hilarious that carriers advertise download speeds that would blow through most people's monthly data allowance in at most a couple of minutes.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mathieuh 8y ago
    It would blow through your allowance if you downloaded something at that speed, constantly. Maybe other people understand it differently but I’ve always understood those ads as like ads for a top speed on a car. You’ll never go that fast normally, but you can if you need to. People will continue downloading < 1 MB per request, it will just be much faster
    - MrMember 8y ago
      That's just it, though. If 99% of your mobile internet usage consists of <1MB requests it doesn't matter if you're on 3G,4G,or 5G.
      - gsnedders 8y ago
        4G at least in general has lower latency than 3G, but I don't know if that's the protocol or just deployment.
        asdff 8y ago
        You'd still get kicked for high ping even if you sat right under the 4G tower.
        BenjiWiebe 8y ago
        In our rural area with poor 4g (Verizon) signal, the latency is still usually better than our CenturyLink adsl. Something like 40ms vs 60ms.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  I'm thinking it's probably an ingenious marketing move intended to force the people to install equipment from a certain country despite concerns, in order to keep up appearances that investments are being made in the technology. From a consumer perspective, LTE's great in its current form, I've never seen any actual person complain about network speeds in a region where LTE is properly deployed, I don't know of any application that struggles on this infrastructure.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  The most common suggestions I see are mobile applications that benefit from the lower latency afforded by 5G - stuff like VR/AR, gaming, self-driving cars. Aside from that the real reason money is being poured into 5G appears to be to replace the last mile / home internet.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    > the real reason money is being poured into 5G appears to be to replace the last mile / home internet. In order to be a realistic alternative for internet service, the cost would have to come WAY down. Using the cell system for your primary internet feed right now is prohibitively expensive. I have a hard time believing that the cell companies will actually lower their pricing for 5G. It seems more likely that they'll do the exact opposite.
    - kalleboo 8y ago
      I'm in Japan which has a similarly uncompetitive mobile space to the US, and they've been offering unlimited 4G home internet here for a couple years now. Their solution is to IMEI lock the plans to these mains-power wifi routers the size of an old AirPort Extreme, and QoS them to have lower priority than their pay-per-GB mobile customers. That way it can't be abused for people to use it to replace the (still-expensive) mobile plans, and the lower network priority means that they're just taking up unused network capacity anyway.
- szczys 8y ago
  You should listen to Shahriar Shahramian on The Amp Hour Podcast: https://theamphour.com/430-shahriar-discusses-5g/ https://theamphour.com/430-shahriar-discusses-5g/ There's a ton of interesting things, like 5G is for a lot more than cellphones. I've always heard that 5G will have phased array and I wondered how that would work -- he talks about possibility that the array is on the roof of a car and your devices will connect back to that. Lots of issues, like size of antenna and power consumption, to get those blazing fast speeds.
- i_call_solo 8y ago
  You're making the assumption that 5G and future advanced wireless systems are exclusive to phones. In the future this will not be the case at all.
- johnmoberg 8y ago
  One use case could be high resolution, low latency video streaming for remote control of autonomous vehicles, e.g. trucks.
  - Chris_Chambers 8y ago
    Why should someone who doesn’t fear death be allowed to share the road with people who do? They have much less of an incentive to drive safely.
  - Phlarp 8y ago
    Driving a semi-truck remotely? What could possibly go wrong!
    - anticensor 8y ago
      You seem to be ignoring speed of light and time to react.
- posixplz 8y ago
  Nothing, really. The bottleneck for cell data throughout (and latency) is backhaul. Improving backhaul isn’t sexy like changing the “4” to a “5”. Improving backhaul is a very expensive (and slow). And counter to one’a business goals - telecoms in the US want just the right amount of congestion to justify network upgrade subsidies, even if that means they do not adhere to ITU-T requirements. The best “feature” of 5G is that it’s a great opportunity institute rate-hikes.
  - bluedino 8y ago
    >> The best “feature” of 5G is that it’s a great opportunity institute >> rate-hikes. I can see it now. "$100 additional per month" But you can cancel your cable/DSL now!
- neom 8y ago
  Ajit Pai seems to think it's about: Rural Connectivity. Fiber Infrastructure. National Competitiveness: https://youtu.be/jKbAdEVOaDY?t=406 https://youtu.be/jKbAdEVOaDY?t=406 (Ajit starts around the 8 minute mark)
  - munificent 8y ago
    Do his words actually carry any information? My understanding is that he is one of the least credible, least respected humans on the face of the planet.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    Ajit Pai has exactly zero credibility.
  - willio58 8y ago
    He's one of those people the internet is right to hate
- robmiller 8y ago
  5G attempts to market a compelling reason to upgrade a phone and stave off the slowing phone replacement cycle?
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can't do with current 4G/LTE? 5G has the potential to provide throughput and latency that is comparable to a fixed broadband connection. In reasonably competitive markets (i.e. not the US), that's A Big Deal. Latency is a particularly acute issue in many applications; 4G generally adds about 50ms in the best case scenario, but 5G can easily provide sub-millisecond latency. Imagine a near-future where it simply doesn't matter whether you're on WiFi or cellular, because they both provide the same experience.
  - ketzu 8y ago
    But the sub millisecond latency is only for local communication, isn't it? Which is most likely not available for most applications that phones use.
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      From my current location, it's a 13ms round-trip to the nearest Google server via a good fixed broadband connection; over 4G, that would be ~63ms because of the latency overhead of the cellular connection. That's a substantial difference for a lot of real-time applications.
      - ketzu 8y ago
        I do not deny that 4G has worse latency, but 5G will not provide sub millisecond round trip latency for regular internet based applications. Sub millisecond latencies are due to local communication which can replace DSRC/802.11p in car2car communication and similar applications. Your 4G results also seem quite bad, my personal test right now was more around 18ms broadband vs 31ms LTE. Google scholar results (https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=LTE+latency&btnG= https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=LTE+l...) I looked into seemed to suggest LTE is capable of ~20ms latency results, while (http://wirelessone.news/10-r/1007-lte-latency-today-9-ms-down-to-2-ms-2019 http://wirelessone.news/10-r/1007-lte-latency-today-9-ms-dow...) suggests that LTE-A (3gpp release 13) is capable of 14ms latency.
  - 8y ago
- drdaeman 8y ago
  I think I've read something about significant improvements to latency. Don't know if true or not. Latency-sensitive applications over 4G/LTE, like SSH or games feel sort of sluggish.
- module0000 8y ago
  Human(individual) customers won't reap the huge benefit IMO. This is a big step up for commercial sites though, where cellular modems serve as fail-over for fiber/commodity service. These customers typically have unlimited data plans, and are more than happy to pay any outrageous data fees that keeps their network operating.
- kllrnohj 8y ago
  > can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website's loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds). I think you forgot how slow 3G was/is. It's around 512KBps. You can stream music on that, but streaming video is a straight nope (480p on youtube wouldn't even be happy with 3G) and even just browsing the web will be a frustratingly slow experience. 4G LTE definitely has the bandwidth to do all those things are reasonable quality/throughput particularly for the resolution & form factor of the device in question, though.
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    "3G" also encompasses HSPA which supports real-world speeds in the 10s of megabits. The original 3G UMTS (384kbps) was indeed dreadfully slow by today's standards.
    - kllrnohj 8y ago
      HSPA+ will hit real-world speeds in the 10s of megabits, but HSPA won't. Both are technically in the "3G" spec, though, you're right about that. But they were marketed/branded as 4G almost immediately.
      - kalleboo 8y ago
        > But they were marketed/branded as 4G almost immediately That was just a US thing though, right? Where I lived it was branded "Turbo 3G". Isn't LTE already being branded as 5G in the US as well?
- JohnFen 8y ago
  As near as I can tell, the only benefit that consumers will see from 5G is that it will resolve a real problem with the cell system right now: capacity. In very congested areas, the total supportable capacity is already being completely utilized. This is why people in very congested areas experience call drops or problems with network availability. 5G would go far to resolve this. However, that's the only consumer-level benefit that seems realistic to me, and it would only be noticed by the people in dense areas. All the other stuff, such as increased speeds, etc., appears to be nonsense.
Jeff_Brown 8y ago
So how hard is it to limit the 5G signal to bandwidths that don't interfere with weather forecasting, and how hard is it to detect and enforce laws against such bandwidth spillover?
- wyldfire 8y ago
  > detect and enforce laws against such bandwidth spillover? This phenomenon is called adjacent-channel interference and violations can and would be enforced by the FCC. The challenge isn't detection or enforcement, it's the challenge of the different government agencies to balance the people's needs properly. FCC wants to auction off the spectrum to benefit telcos and their customers. NOAA wants to protect people with accurate predictions of hazardous weather. Your question presumes that the weather prediction function is more valuable, but the government may not reach that same conclusion.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Easy to detect, hard to overcome cellular network lobbyists.
woliveirajr 8y ago
> Does this also mean that 5G will suck, when it’s raining? [from a comment below the article] If 5G uses almost the same frequency where microwaves detect water vapour (around 24 GHz), won't the weather have a great impact on it? Also, I always thought that such small waves would have problems with obstacles, with good signal just when your phone is in line-of-sight with antennas.
- chrisswanda 8y ago
  It's called Rain Fade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_fade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_fade
- penagwin 8y ago
  That's all correct, the higher frequency suffers from worse object penetration. Solutions I've heard was that 5G would likely involve neighborhood or even building repeaters. IMO 5G is massively overhyped. My iPhone 7+ isn't limited by 4G LTE, it's limited by Verizon deciding to only allow it 10mbps down (with great signal). 5G won't matter one bit if the current bottleneck isn't 4G LTE in the first place.
  - opencl 8y ago
    Is Verizon really that bad? I usually get around 100mbps on TMobile LTE.
    - penagwin 8y ago
      That's with their rate limiting to fast.com (Netflix). Speedtest.net (with Verizon hosted servers) was at a very consistent 50mbps/4.5mbps which would make sense for my unlimited plan. Please note that speedtest.net is REALLY not a good representation of real world network usage, and I don't just mean like how they throttle netflix. They get to host the server in-network as well as full traffic shaping to get those juicy benchmark numbers.
      - deleted 8y ago
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qwerty456127 8y ago
A network of well-calibrated surface and marine weather stations and atmospheric probes is probably enough to produce reliable and precise weather forecasts in the today age of ML.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- plopz 8y ago
  Panasonic was developing a weather model incorporating data from airplanes that was supposed to be really good. But I think most models are based on physics rather than ML.
- wyldfire 8y ago
  You can't calibrate away the RF noise introduced by transmitters that change frequently in time and space. That's not to suggest that you cannot find a way to discriminate between the water vapor and the 5G transmissions, but you can't just take a sample on a low-humidity day and subtract that from new samples. If the metrics are below the new noise floor, merely throwing machine learning at the problem will not solve it.
  - qwerty456127 8y ago
    I don't mean taking RF data in account at all. I mean just collecting temperature, air pressure, humidity and wind speed data from many points in time-space.
cdaringe 8y ago
Rejecting on the grounds of no technical basis? I'd like to see more on that. I would hope when NASA raises a flag with the FCC it's taken with sincerity.
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  There are a lot of things one would hope the FCC would do that have not been happening under Ajit Pai. He's an industry shill, plain and simple.
oceliker 8y ago
I’m somewhat confused. I’ll admit that I’m not very familiar with super high frequency radio, but isn’t the difference at least 200 MHz, approximately 10 times larger than the entire FM radio spectrum? Doesn’t out-of-band emission stop being a problem at that much separation? Or should we look at it relative to the base frequency? edit: For what it's worth, I found this paragraph from the FCC last year: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2018-14806/p-20 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2018-14806/p-20 It sounds like they're saying "we don't know if this will be a problem yet, but be prepared to limit emissions in 23.6-24ghz range because we might require it at some point". Also, paragraph 9 of the same document has the actual band limits (with a special requirement) if anybody is interested: > The 24 GHz band consists of two band segments: The lower segment, from 24.25-24.45 GHz, and the upper segment, from 24.75-25.25 GHz > any mobile or transportable equipment capable of operating in any portion of the 24 GHz band must be capable of operating at all frequencies within the 24 GHz band, in both band segments
- borkt 8y ago
  "At the high end of the electromagnetic spectrum, signals travel over a band of 10 million trillion Hz (that is, 10^22Hz). This end of the spectrum has phenomenal bandwidth, but it has its own set of problems. The wave forms are so miniscule that they're highly distorted by any type of interference, particularly environmental interference such as precipitation. Furthermore, higher-frequency wave forms such as x-rays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays are not very good to human physiology and therefore aren't available for us to use for communication at this point." Not the best analysis but I'm working. Basically like any other metric, as the frequency increases the space between peaks and valleys decreases and it becomes harder to determine/separate from others 30hz to 230hz is much easier to tell the difference than 15khz to 15.2khz if you want to listen to audio tones. Once you get to microwaves this becomes of course much more difficult. http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=24687&seqNum=4 http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=24687&seqNum...
  - oceliker 8y ago
    To me, this analysis sounds more about the interference with physical objects (like how 2.4ghz can pass through walls easier than 5ghz). It doesn't seem to be about interference with other radio emissions? > 30hz to 230hz is much easier to tell the difference than 15khz to 15.2khz if you want to listen to audio tones That's definitely true for humans, but I don't think it necessarily applies to radio signals in general (though it does make sense at first glance).
mholt 8y ago
Can someone help me understand this better? What is "very close" to 23.8-GHz frequencies? I don't know which bands 5G operates on, but it seems [1] that the closest they get, at least in the US, is ~27 GHz. If the FCC is auctioning 3000 licenses for the 24 GHz space, is that the space that can potentially interfere more? Can 5G operate on just any frequencies, then? [1]: https://www.cablefree.net/wirelesstechnology/4glte/5g-frequency-bands-lte/ https://www.cablefree.net/wirelesstechnology/4glte/5g-freque...
- TrueDuality 8y ago
  The carrier signal of a new technology could potentially use any frequency that isn't already in use. A lot of the frequency spectrum is already accounted for and generally parts of the spectrum that are important to scientific research are internationally protected (Such as the resonant frequency of hydrogen which is used extensively in radio astronomy). That being said it is more technically difficult to go "up" in frequency. Lower frequencies have less bandwidth, but are easier to generate, can go through physical objects better and for longer distances. This fight to me looks like the industry wants to use a cheaper frequency that meets their minimum technical goals (in terms of development costs not necessarily licensing costs) science and other applications be damned.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  Europe, at least the EU has settled on 24GHz, that's pretty close to the 23.8GHz.
spaceheretostay 8y ago
That's interesting - I'm working on using cell signal strength as an indicator for live weather features! There's a simple relationship between signal strength and clearness of weather - light rain has a distortion signal, heavier rain a heavier distortion, etc. I'm betting that when all is said and done, the cell phones will help the weather forecast more than hurt it - but this may take some years if the cell companies are too greedy about it. I'm working on detecting weather using all kinds of phone sensors like barometers and cameras in All Clear if you're interested: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearweather.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe... and the open source sensor package: https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary
- JohnFen 8y ago
  But that approach, at best, only tells you about the weather near the ground. That can be useful, but is woefully incomplete. You also need to be able to see weather high in the atmosphere.
  - spaceheretostay 8y ago
    Well, signal strength yes - it does have those limits. But pressure data from the barometers can describe some higher altitude conditions (if you can map pressure at the surface over a large geography with decent density, you can infer metrics about the higher atmosphere). And I do agree that other instruments are required for a complete picture of the weather, not just phones! But a remarkable amount can be done from phones. GPS attenuation for example, can also be read from some Android phones and can inform about high-altitude conditions.
    - lgeorget 8y ago
      But surely you miss the anomalies that might exist high in the atmosphere and which are actually responsible for the violent meteorological events (such as temperature inversions).
xenonite 8y ago
Wouldn't it be possible to reuse the 3G frequencies with an updated technology in order to obtain higher bandwidths?
- OrgNet 8y ago
  If it is possible, and those frequencies are worth using for this purpose, maybe they should give free 4G/5G-phones to anyone still on 3G to be able to do it as soon as possible.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  It is. Denmark is allowing the phone companies to use their existing 2G/3G and 4G frequencies for 5G. The 700MHz spectrum is also being opened up for use with 5G. I'm not sure if it will result in dramatically more bandwidth though.
deleted 8y ago
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jak92 8y ago
They are putting up "DAS" nodes all over my city. Nearly every block. Wonder if these will be hooked up with UHF 5G and what the ramifications may be.
roomey 8y ago
I think the main point of 5g keeps getting missed when people are asking about cell phones and their broadband speed vs capacity etc etc. The only reason telcos are going to put in 5g is for IOT coverage. Low powered trickle data from billions of devices. Stuff for your personal cellular use would never come close to covering the costs involved. And 4g will still be used for many years to come for that.
- yaantc 8y ago
  The focus today for 5G is fixed wireless access and smartphones, not IoT. 5G covers 3 variants: 1) massive broadband (with mmWave in particular); 2) URLLC - Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communications; 3) massive IoT. The current focus is on (1). Lot's of talk on (2), but nothing much concrete yet. (3) is moving along, but it's actually based on... LTE. Strictly speaking, 5G is a set of requirements defined by the ITU-T, not a technology. The actual technologies are developed by another organization, 3GPP. And there are 2 technologies to cover 5G: 1) NR, or "New Radio". This is what most people mean by 5G. It's for massive broadband and URLLC; 2) LTE (release 15 and later) for massive IoT! Yes, the IoT variant of LTE (LTE-M and NB-IoT) will be the 5G implementations for a while. Eventually there will be new NR versions for IoT, but nobody is in a hurry there. LTE-M and NB-IoT evolutions will be just fine for a long time, as far as massive IoT is concerned. When you hear about 5G deployment today, it really mean "NR" and not LTE based IoT. The concern for smartphone is really capacity during peak time in the busiest cells. I work in the field BTW, as you may have guessed ;)
  - bdamm 8y ago
    I work in the mesh network IoT space, primarily Wi-SUN. Since we view NB-IoT and LTE-M as competition, I encourage you cellular guys to really take your time :) we're happy for the head start while we keep deploying our networks in the millions.
  - stefan_ 8y ago
    Isn't this fantastic? It is the measure of any great buzzword that it means something entirely different to every single person. I personally think the entire mmWave part of 5G is at least another 10 years away. Like, that's just going nowhere. Massive bandwidth? Great, what for? WiFi will be mmWave before we have an application for that in cellular. Presumably what is actually being deployed is the incremental LTE revision on the same old bands, some extra thrown in that were yoinked from other applications.
autocorr 8y ago
While 5G Will be a great boon, especially the beam-forming satellite version, another unintended consequence besides weather remote sensing is nuking the extremely important 24 GHz range (K Band) for radio astronomy. There are a few narrow protected windows for absolutely critical spectral lines, but the truth is that nature doesn't play by the spectrum allocations rules, and there are hundreds if not thousands of lines that are observed routinely outside of the protected bands. It is also remarkably free and clear of radio frequency interference (RFI), in part because industry has chosen other frequencies not attenuated by atmospheric water vapor. This isn't to say we should halt global human progress to save a local river bait fish, but that threat to forecasting is only one of the serious consequences major spectrum reallocation can have. This is especially true for passive use in the sciences, which has a weaker lobby than the private sector.
- N_trglctc_joe 8y ago
  > While 5G Will be a great boon This is something I've been having trouble with. Lately I've become more aware of the secondary effects of 5G- on weather forecasting, on the radio spectrum, possibly on bees- and it's got me wondering why we need it for telecom. I just don't see the value added. I can already communicate with anyone in the world, access any information, and find my way anywhere with 4G. A significantly higher rate of data transfer just doesn't seem to add any new functionality to my phone. Can anyone give me a good rationale for 5G? Entertainment doesn't count. I'll grant right-off-the-bat that it'll have some fantastic industrial applications; my issue is with personal telecom. It just feels like a new planned obsolescence vector.
  - ashleyn 8y ago
    Except entertainment does count according to customer use metrics.
    - jolmg 8y ago
      Does anyone feel 4G is lacking in any way? I don't think I'd notice if my phone's network was any faster.
cm2187 8y ago
Stupid question. I was under the impression that one of the limits of 5g was that it was a short-distance signal, easily blocked by a wall or any obstacle. Is it really going to create interferences all the way to space? I thought satellites measured the temperature of the top of the atmosphere, not of stuff on the ground.
- lgeorget 8y ago
  They actually measure a lot of parameters, not only temperatures, and in all the layers of the atmosphere. And they're _very_ sensitive. For some forecast needs (short term forecast, storms, etc.), the conditions under the atmospheric boundary layer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundary_layer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundary_layer) is what matters most, so the microwave noise near the ground is definitely an issue.
- pas 8y ago
  Typical signal transmission uses a a signal to noise floor of something like 20-40 dB ( https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/Signal-to-Noise_Ratio_(SNR)_and_Wireless_Signal_Strength https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Pra... ) for high speed data transmission, but if you want to just get a big fat one or zero across, then you don't need that much. And antennas are really good at picking up resonant EM radiation, even if it's not the "full signal". But these very sensitive weather sensors. And they already work by detecting a trend and then detecting a big blip over that. (So rain currently looks like some sort of interesting blip in the noise.) So, it might be possible to have cities mapped with a differing trend, but it would further complicate models. And currently over land there's not much noise, because humans don't use this part of the EM spectrum. Mostly because it's not great at long range, because attenuates very fast exactly due to water vapor in the air. So it was "easy" to exploit this for getting weather data, because it was reasonable to assume close to constant natural emissions. (Probably only a simple daily and seasonal trend. Though it might be already necessary to handle differences between woodlands and urban areas.) (See also, why it's hard to do the same over water: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252663726_The_Effect_of_Signal-to-Noise_Ratio_on_the_Study_of_Sea_Level_Trends https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252663726_The_Effec... )
Causality1 8y ago
This seems like a failure on the FCC's part. If it was going to be a problem these frequencies should never have been licensed out to cell companies.
ryanmarsh 8y ago
Slightly OT or meta. I keep bumping up against these nutty conspiracy theories about 5G being dangerous in various forums. Has anyone done a study of the effects of certain frequencies and energy levels on the human body that I can use to refute these fools? Also, what is the canonical source on 5g spectrum and power levels?
- pas 8y ago
  https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1503/1503.05944.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1503/1503.05944.pdf this basically found that 90% of the energy is absorbed on/at/around the skin. if neurons were directly exposed they would heat up and their firing rate would be altered significantly [look at fig2 / D ] ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4233276/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4233276/ ) this study did a direct exposure testing on a human's arm (and on rats and monkeys) at 94GHz for 3s at 1W/cm^2: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a628296.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a628296.pdf this did 24h low power 1mW/cm^2 exposure of human eye like cells and detected no significant difference in micronucleus expression, DNA strand breaks, and heat stress protein expression: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997488/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997488/ this used 42GHz on rats for 30min/day for 3 days, and tried to look for tumors/cancer and found no significant difference: https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3121 https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3121 so. it seems there's no immediate and known adverse effect (other than the heating and maybe some interference with the electro-biochemistry of cells, particularly with neurons). and luckily people usually don't use phones near their heads anymore (when doing large data transfers), so we don't really have to worry about concentrated absorption on the head due to being at best a centimeter from the emitter. > Also, what is the canonical source on 5g spectrum and power levels? maximum permissible exposure is defined as 10W/m^2 power density (for 6GHz between 100GHz) by the FCC.
nilskidoo 8y ago
As if mainstreaming weaponized radiation poisoning weren't enough, let's unemploy weather-girls in the same swing. It's like Rod Serling took the brown acid.
pkghost 8y ago
Has anyone done a deep dive on 5g health concerns? E.g., 240-some scientists and 40 doctors signed a letter of discouragement (or something), claims research indicates 5g interacts with human biology in poorly understood ways: https://ehtrust.org/key-issues/cell-phoneswireless/5g-networks-iot-scientific-overview-human-health-risks/ https://ehtrust.org/key-issues/cell-phoneswireless/5g-networ...
- leroy_masochist 8y ago
  Paging Dr. Allcome.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOovtZXYqj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOovtZXYqj4
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  Some of those items on the list are sending up red flags to me. The weapon use is purely because it heats skin; if you apply a million times less energy for a million times as long, the danger level from heat is zero. When it can't penetrate skin, it does make sense to classify head skin exposure the same as foot skin exposure. The thing about sweat glands is interesting. And sadly I have no idea how to evaluate the quality of the studies linked.
- xxpor 8y ago
  It's all nonsense. The higher frequencies are non-ionizing and in common use today. See all of those microwave antennas on buildings and towers? A lot of them transmit around there. Your neighbor can blast 24 ghz right at your house with a free licence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.2-centimeter_band https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.2-centimeter_band The reason microwaves (like from a microwave oven) are dangerous are because of their power levels. Like, they'd cook you if they leaked out. Not because of ionizing radiation.
  - throwaway995669 8y ago
    Non-ionizing radiation does have potential biological effects on Voltage-Gated Calcium Channels (VGCCs) which our cells have plenty of: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780531/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780531/
codelitt 8y ago
Pilot here - they used the example of a hurricane, however, I think it would have a daily impact on thousands of flights (general aviation and commercial) which all rely on on accurate weather forecasting. Weather is no joke in aviation; even if you're flying a 747.
ReptileMan 8y ago
Why do we actually need 5g? Wired with last meter wifi is a lot better option imo for high bandwidth transfer
tus87 8y ago
And nothing of great value was lost.
- pas 8y ago
  Hurricane path prediction seems truly a "killer app", or do you think it's not?
  - tus87 8y ago
    Predicting weather it will rain or not today would be a killer app, and I'm still waiting.
    - pas 8y ago
      Agreed. It turns out storm system movements are easier to predict than local precipitation. Aggregates of a system are easier to predict than localized/point values. https://www.precisionag.com/systems-management/data/betting-on-rain-the-accuracy-and-reliability-of-precipitation-forecasts/ https://www.precisionag.com/systems-management/data/betting-... - this is about how effective and useful forecasts are (the are useful, because we have calibrated forecasts, so we can use them for objective decision support for agriculture) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/problem-solving/ken-thompson-forecasts-rain-likely-wrong/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/problem-solving/ken-th... - this is about how relatively dry places (like the US or UK) usually get a lot of misprediction, even if the accuracy is 90%. (But it's not, it's more like 80-85%.)
mattrp 8y ago
While most of the promise of 5g feels like overhype, this article has a bit of flat earth feel to it. For example, we’ve been trying to convert obsolete UHF frequencies to usable bandwidth for years only to find all sorts of reasons why it can’t be killed off. If 5g really threatened weather forecasting and radio astronomy I would think at minimum there would some sort of initiative to address it prior to a cutover - and yet, this article doesn’t seem to acknowledge such a thing exists so I’m left to conclude maybe the article is nothing more than a hypothetical what if that likely won’t have much impact in the real world. This is just my gut feel...
NicoJuicy 8y ago
Human fallacy, we all want it faster and more. Bur for 99% of the cases, why would we need it? IoT doesn't need 5G, it needs LiRa. Streaming applications, I can stream with 4G. 50 ms latency with 4G, so what. Except for competitive multiplayer gaming perhaps, I don't see the issue. But I think they want everything wired ;) Industrial applications, outside of IoT? Give me a valid example that needs countrywide coverage. I hardly notice difference with 4G and my WiFi. Increase coverage for 4G, before implementing 5G. Fyi: 4G offers maximum real-world download speeds up to 60Mbps. Currently, that is more than enough.
- cloakandswagger 8y ago
  > Industrial applications, outside of IoT? Give me a valid example that needs countrywide coverage. Police CAD systems, streaming video from body cameras, oil well monitoring. Just because you can't imagine an application of 5G for your consumer needs doesn't mean it isn't needed.
  - pas 8y ago
    Oil well monitoring can work with the crappiest of GSM (a simple SMS every few minutes), no?
  - NicoJuicy 8y ago
    - Police CAD systems Why would a CAD system need > 60 Mbps? Why would it even need more than 30 kbs? I doubt it would need more than a MQTT channel and an app. - streaming video from body cameras Low quality over 4G and store the video in HD. Syncing on secure access-points ( the devices need to charge, sync there) Nothing more is required, since body cams are used as evidence. Also, live stream body cams already exist over 4G ( 1920 x 1080, 30FPS) - oil well monitoring IoT... Jeez... > Just because you can't imagine an application of 5G for your consumer needs doesn't mean it isn't needed. Like i said. You want more and faster. I already mentioned some applications, that also don't require it. Just like your examples, also don't require it. Again, human fallacy and you are providing excellent examples. Thanks.
- newusertoday 8y ago
acchow 8y ago
tl;dr We get Water vapour readings (which feed into our weather forecasting models) from the ~24ghz range which 5G is going to blast away.
pujan28 8y ago
5G will be a great help.
keepmesmall 8y ago
Any assurances that this won't seriously disturb the earth's ecology and human health, or do we no longer bother with that when manipulating the whole planet?
- joncrane 8y ago
  Given the whole thing with Global Warming, I think this question already has an answer.
once-in-a-while 8y ago
If you are "woke", and have been following several "conspiracy theories" (as I did), you're simply aware that most so-called "conspiracy theories" are in fact truths they want to hide from us. "5G will destroy our DNA." is one of them. It's much more likely to be true than false...
Reelin 8y ago
> ... a letter from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross requesting that it be delayed. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rejected the request ... Ajit Pai strikes again!
ngcc_hk 8y ago
Seems striking especially topic not touched like radio astronomy.
seeker_ 8y ago
Equally important but often overlooked concern is the risks it will pose to our health given 5G relies on much higher energy radio signals than 4G.
hutzlibu 8y ago
I also do not really see the benefits of 5G. I would be much more happy to have reliable 4G or 3G at least, first. I suppose quite some support comes from people who have connection issues with weak 4G and assumes 5G will solve them. But since 5G will consume apparently 3G towers and has much less range, quite the opposite could happen. Even less connection for people not in the city.

668 points by szczys 8y ago

Ajit Pai makes me so angry.

I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us. For the most part, all the tasks I need to do on a phone (pocket computer / communicator) can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website's loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds). The only thing I can think of is 5G will allow for more overall network bandwidth, so the data caps on "unlimited" plans wouldn't be needed. But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can't do with current 4G/LTE?

joshmn 8y ago
> so the data caps on "unlimited" plans wouldn't be needed They're not even needed now. It's all about money.
- cheerlessbog 8y ago
  Right, I doubt it really costs Verizon $15 to provide me an extra gigabyte..
- rhino369 8y ago
  It’s somewhat needed. 15 dollars a gb is just to raise revenue. But a truly unlimited 4G hotspot service would crawl to stop during busy periods. Some sort of rationing is needed.
  - Rychard 8y ago
    Seems like this is a pain-point that was self-inflicted by the companies themselves; selling service to many people without the infrastructure to back it up. That said, I'm not suggesting companies deploy 1:1 infrastructure in lock-step with sales. Power/Water companies plan for peak demand periods. What prevents ISPs from being able to do the same?
  - asdff 8y ago
    Most people don't come close to hitting their cap unless they accidentally update their 200mb apps on the data connection.
  - AnssiH 8y ago
    It seems to work just fine here in Finland, it is a very common alternative to wired home connections (seems to be about 50-50 split: https://www.ficom.fi/ict-ala/tilastot/kotitalouksien-laajakaistaliittymät https://www.ficom.fi/ict-ala/tilastot/kotitalouksien-laajaka...). No data caps, so you can use terabytes of data without throttling if you want to.
tomschlick 8y ago
> I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us. WISP internet service to the home.
- derekp7 8y ago
  Again, looking for the advantage -- in this case, I can see WISP being useful for areas that are underserved by the local cable monopoly, and in other areas it provides a third competitor (cable/dsl/wisp). I wonder how 5G home internet will compare to the up and coming LEO satellite constellations (StarLink for example).
  - ryder9 8y ago
    You still need to lay fiber for 5G base stations
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      And if you're going to bring the fiber most of the way, you might as well terminate it at the premises.
      - krisrm 8y ago
        This isn't necessarily the case. Bringing that cable an extra ~300m and providing the ONT hardware for each house is quite expensive for the small number of customers that might benefit in a rural area. Terminating at fast wireless and providing radios is much more cost effective from the telco's perspective.
        toomuchtodo 8y ago
        From the telco's perspective, yes. From an end user who is getting fiber from a coop or muni fiber provider, it's about $300-$500, which might be considered reasonable if your ongoing operating costs (and therefore, costs to the end user) are lower. Disclaimer: I have contributed to a muni fiber project, and am familiar with trenching/arial mounting and premises termination costs.
ronnier 8y ago
Have a decent connection where there’s a large gathering of people.
- KJKingJ 8y ago
  Very much so. Sure, the headline speeds of 5G are nice (and indeed currently with the right 4G deployments and equipment, you can certainly get some phenomenal speeds today), but like all major network upgrades the primary benefit for typical users is aggregate capacity. That seemingly pointless headline speed doesn't quite happen when you've got 100s or 1000s of people in an area, what it does result in though is a usable speed for all of those people instead of an unusable one.
  - asdff 8y ago
    You don't need 5G to get that, you can get usable speeds to over 100k people in a roughly 200m x 100m area with wifi and 4G, as OSU has done (1,2). 1 https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2013/08/27/ohio-stadium-cell-service-improved-in.html https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2013/08/27/ohio-st... 2 https://www.dispatch.com/news/20180405/ohio-state-to-spend-nearly-19-million-updating-wi-fi-across-campus-including-ohio-stadium https://www.dispatch.com/news/20180405/ohio-state-to-spend-n...
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  802.11ax ("WiFI 6") supports this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Technical_improvements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Technical_improv...
- dx034 8y ago
  With the same backbone infrastructure? Wouldn't you need more cell towers for this? From my experience, areas that constantly have large crowds often work well with 4G, just the occasional bursts don't work.
cobookman 8y ago
4G offers enough speed to replace my home internet connection, however aggregate bandwidth at the cell towers prevented this. I assume with 5G we're just about at the point where you could ditch the home internet connection and go 100% cellular.
- pivo 8y ago
  It's not cell phone service, but I get my home internet via 5G from Starry (https://starry.com https://starry.com). Speeds are between 200-300MbS (symmetric upload/download) for $50/mo. It's really been fantastic in the six months or so that I've had it. They've got their own towers and repeaters on buildings here in Boston. Couldn't be happier with them and with being able to ditch Comcast.
  - madengr 8y ago
    Wow, I’m paying $130 for 100/5. Damn cable companies.
  - Unklejoe 8y ago
    Out of curiosity, do they give you a publically accessible IP? Or is the connection NAT-ed?
    - pivo 8y ago
      Yes they do give you a public IP but don't have static IPs.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - c0nducktr 8y ago
    What is the latency like? Could I play CS:GO or another game where latency and jitter matters?
    - 8y ago
amalcon 8y ago
Demand for bandwidth has historically expanded to match the bandwidth available. Folks will find some use for it.
- swamp40 8y ago
  Multiple 8K 90Hz VR streams for the whole family to play Roblox 2025, all running off a personal hotspot.
  - penagwin 8y ago
    I want to see DOOM running on just the network stack, but with raytracing because.
Chris_Chambers 8y ago
How are they supposed to discreetly kill problematic slaves from a distance with multiple cancer rays focused on the target’s body if they don’t have the proper equipment in place?
MrMember 8y ago
With data caps I don't see much use for it. I still think it's hilarious that carriers advertise download speeds that would blow through most people's monthly data allowance in at most a couple of minutes.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mathieuh 8y ago
  It would blow through your allowance if you downloaded something at that speed, constantly. Maybe other people understand it differently but I’ve always understood those ads as like ads for a top speed on a car. You’ll never go that fast normally, but you can if you need to. People will continue downloading < 1 MB per request, it will just be much faster
  - MrMember 8y ago
    That's just it, though. If 99% of your mobile internet usage consists of <1MB requests it doesn't matter if you're on 3G,4G,or 5G.
    - gsnedders 8y ago
      4G at least in general has lower latency than 3G, but I don't know if that's the protocol or just deployment.
      - asdff 8y ago
        You'd still get kicked for high ping even if you sat right under the 4G tower.
        BenjiWiebe 8y ago
        In our rural area with poor 4g (Verizon) signal, the latency is still usually better than our CenturyLink adsl. Something like 40ms vs 60ms.
microcolonel 8y ago
I'm thinking it's probably an ingenious marketing move intended to force the people to install equipment from a certain country despite concerns, in order to keep up appearances that investments are being made in the technology. From a consumer perspective, LTE's great in its current form, I've never seen any actual person complain about network speeds in a region where LTE is properly deployed, I don't know of any application that struggles on this infrastructure.
kalleboo 8y ago
The most common suggestions I see are mobile applications that benefit from the lower latency afforded by 5G - stuff like VR/AR, gaming, self-driving cars. Aside from that the real reason money is being poured into 5G appears to be to replace the last mile / home internet.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > the real reason money is being poured into 5G appears to be to replace the last mile / home internet. In order to be a realistic alternative for internet service, the cost would have to come WAY down. Using the cell system for your primary internet feed right now is prohibitively expensive. I have a hard time believing that the cell companies will actually lower their pricing for 5G. It seems more likely that they'll do the exact opposite.
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    I'm in Japan which has a similarly uncompetitive mobile space to the US, and they've been offering unlimited 4G home internet here for a couple years now. Their solution is to IMEI lock the plans to these mains-power wifi routers the size of an old AirPort Extreme, and QoS them to have lower priority than their pay-per-GB mobile customers. That way it can't be abused for people to use it to replace the (still-expensive) mobile plans, and the lower network priority means that they're just taking up unused network capacity anyway.
szczys 8y ago
You should listen to Shahriar Shahramian on The Amp Hour Podcast: https://theamphour.com/430-shahriar-discusses-5g/ https://theamphour.com/430-shahriar-discusses-5g/ There's a ton of interesting things, like 5G is for a lot more than cellphones. I've always heard that 5G will have phased array and I wondered how that would work -- he talks about possibility that the array is on the roof of a car and your devices will connect back to that. Lots of issues, like size of antenna and power consumption, to get those blazing fast speeds.
i_call_solo 8y ago
You're making the assumption that 5G and future advanced wireless systems are exclusive to phones. In the future this will not be the case at all.
johnmoberg 8y ago
One use case could be high resolution, low latency video streaming for remote control of autonomous vehicles, e.g. trucks.
- Chris_Chambers 8y ago
  Why should someone who doesn’t fear death be allowed to share the road with people who do? They have much less of an incentive to drive safely.
- Phlarp 8y ago
  Driving a semi-truck remotely? What could possibly go wrong!
  - anticensor 8y ago
    You seem to be ignoring speed of light and time to react.
posixplz 8y ago
Nothing, really. The bottleneck for cell data throughout (and latency) is backhaul. Improving backhaul isn’t sexy like changing the “4” to a “5”. Improving backhaul is a very expensive (and slow). And counter to one’a business goals - telecoms in the US want just the right amount of congestion to justify network upgrade subsidies, even if that means they do not adhere to ITU-T requirements. The best “feature” of 5G is that it’s a great opportunity institute rate-hikes.
- bluedino 8y ago
  >> The best “feature” of 5G is that it’s a great opportunity institute >> rate-hikes. I can see it now. "$100 additional per month" But you can cancel your cable/DSL now!
neom 8y ago
Ajit Pai seems to think it's about: Rural Connectivity. Fiber Infrastructure. National Competitiveness: https://youtu.be/jKbAdEVOaDY?t=406 https://youtu.be/jKbAdEVOaDY?t=406 (Ajit starts around the 8 minute mark)
- munificent 8y ago
  Do his words actually carry any information? My understanding is that he is one of the least credible, least respected humans on the face of the planet.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  Ajit Pai has exactly zero credibility.
- willio58 8y ago
  He's one of those people the internet is right to hate
robmiller 8y ago
5G attempts to market a compelling reason to upgrade a phone and stave off the slowing phone replacement cycle?
jdietrich 8y ago
>But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can't do with current 4G/LTE? 5G has the potential to provide throughput and latency that is comparable to a fixed broadband connection. In reasonably competitive markets (i.e. not the US), that's A Big Deal. Latency is a particularly acute issue in many applications; 4G generally adds about 50ms in the best case scenario, but 5G can easily provide sub-millisecond latency. Imagine a near-future where it simply doesn't matter whether you're on WiFi or cellular, because they both provide the same experience.
- ketzu 8y ago
  But the sub millisecond latency is only for local communication, isn't it? Which is most likely not available for most applications that phones use.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    From my current location, it's a 13ms round-trip to the nearest Google server via a good fixed broadband connection; over 4G, that would be ~63ms because of the latency overhead of the cellular connection. That's a substantial difference for a lot of real-time applications.
    - ketzu 8y ago
      I do not deny that 4G has worse latency, but 5G will not provide sub millisecond round trip latency for regular internet based applications. Sub millisecond latencies are due to local communication which can replace DSRC/802.11p in car2car communication and similar applications. Your 4G results also seem quite bad, my personal test right now was more around 18ms broadband vs 31ms LTE. Google scholar results (https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=LTE+latency&btnG= https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=LTE+l...) I looked into seemed to suggest LTE is capable of ~20ms latency results, while (http://wirelessone.news/10-r/1007-lte-latency-today-9-ms-down-to-2-ms-2019 http://wirelessone.news/10-r/1007-lte-latency-today-9-ms-dow...) suggests that LTE-A (3gpp release 13) is capable of 14ms latency.
- 8y ago
drdaeman 8y ago
I think I've read something about significant improvements to latency. Don't know if true or not. Latency-sensitive applications over 4G/LTE, like SSH or games feel sort of sluggish.
module0000 8y ago
Human(individual) customers won't reap the huge benefit IMO. This is a big step up for commercial sites though, where cellular modems serve as fail-over for fiber/commodity service. These customers typically have unlimited data plans, and are more than happy to pay any outrageous data fees that keeps their network operating.
kllrnohj 8y ago
> can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website's loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds). I think you forgot how slow 3G was/is. It's around 512KBps. You can stream music on that, but streaming video is a straight nope (480p on youtube wouldn't even be happy with 3G) and even just browsing the web will be a frustratingly slow experience. 4G LTE definitely has the bandwidth to do all those things are reasonable quality/throughput particularly for the resolution & form factor of the device in question, though.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  "3G" also encompasses HSPA which supports real-world speeds in the 10s of megabits. The original 3G UMTS (384kbps) was indeed dreadfully slow by today's standards.
  - kllrnohj 8y ago
    HSPA+ will hit real-world speeds in the 10s of megabits, but HSPA won't. Both are technically in the "3G" spec, though, you're right about that. But they were marketed/branded as 4G almost immediately.
    - kalleboo 8y ago
      > But they were marketed/branded as 4G almost immediately That was just a US thing though, right? Where I lived it was branded "Turbo 3G". Isn't LTE already being branded as 5G in the US as well?
JohnFen 8y ago
As near as I can tell, the only benefit that consumers will see from 5G is that it will resolve a real problem with the cell system right now: capacity. In very congested areas, the total supportable capacity is already being completely utilized. This is why people in very congested areas experience call drops or problems with network availability. 5G would go far to resolve this. However, that's the only consumer-level benefit that seems realistic to me, and it would only be noticed by the people in dense areas. All the other stuff, such as increased speeds, etc., appears to be nonsense.

Jeff_Brown 8y ago

So how hard is it to limit the 5G signal to bandwidths that don't interfere with weather forecasting, and how hard is it to detect and enforce laws against such bandwidth spillover?

wyldfire 8y ago
> detect and enforce laws against such bandwidth spillover? This phenomenon is called adjacent-channel interference and violations can and would be enforced by the FCC. The challenge isn't detection or enforcement, it's the challenge of the different government agencies to balance the people's needs properly. FCC wants to auction off the spectrum to benefit telcos and their customers. NOAA wants to protect people with accurate predictions of hazardous weather. Your question presumes that the weather prediction function is more valuable, but the government may not reach that same conclusion.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
Easy to detect, hard to overcome cellular network lobbyists.

woliveirajr 8y ago

> Does this also mean that 5G will suck, when it’s raining? [from a comment below the article] If 5G uses almost the same frequency where microwaves detect water vapour (around 24 GHz), won't the weather have a great impact on it? Also, I always thought that such small waves would have problems with obstacles, with good signal just when your phone is in line-of-sight with antennas.

chrisswanda 8y ago
It's called Rain Fade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_fade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_fade
penagwin 8y ago
That's all correct, the higher frequency suffers from worse object penetration. Solutions I've heard was that 5G would likely involve neighborhood or even building repeaters. IMO 5G is massively overhyped. My iPhone 7+ isn't limited by 4G LTE, it's limited by Verizon deciding to only allow it 10mbps down (with great signal). 5G won't matter one bit if the current bottleneck isn't 4G LTE in the first place.
- opencl 8y ago
  Is Verizon really that bad? I usually get around 100mbps on TMobile LTE.
  - penagwin 8y ago
    That's with their rate limiting to fast.com (Netflix). Speedtest.net (with Verizon hosted servers) was at a very consistent 50mbps/4.5mbps which would make sense for my unlimited plan. Please note that speedtest.net is REALLY not a good representation of real world network usage, and I don't just mean like how they throttle netflix. They get to host the server in-network as well as full traffic shaping to get those juicy benchmark numbers.
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qwerty456127 8y ago

A network of well-calibrated surface and marine weather stations and atmospheric probes is probably enough to produce reliable and precise weather forecasts in the today age of ML.

deleted 8y ago
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plopz 8y ago
Panasonic was developing a weather model incorporating data from airplanes that was supposed to be really good. But I think most models are based on physics rather than ML.
wyldfire 8y ago
You can't calibrate away the RF noise introduced by transmitters that change frequently in time and space. That's not to suggest that you cannot find a way to discriminate between the water vapor and the 5G transmissions, but you can't just take a sample on a low-humidity day and subtract that from new samples. If the metrics are below the new noise floor, merely throwing machine learning at the problem will not solve it.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  I don't mean taking RF data in account at all. I mean just collecting temperature, air pressure, humidity and wind speed data from many points in time-space.

cdaringe 8y ago

Rejecting on the grounds of no technical basis? I'd like to see more on that. I would hope when NASA raises a flag with the FCC it's taken with sincerity.

ghostly_s 8y ago
There are a lot of things one would hope the FCC would do that have not been happening under Ajit Pai. He's an industry shill, plain and simple.

oceliker 8y ago

I’m somewhat confused. I’ll admit that I’m not very familiar with super high frequency radio, but isn’t the difference at least 200 MHz, approximately 10 times larger than the entire FM radio spectrum? Doesn’t out-of-band emission stop being a problem at that much separation? Or should we look at it relative to the base frequency? edit: For what it's worth, I found this paragraph from the FCC last year: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2018-14806/p-20 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2018-14806/p-20 It sounds like they're saying "we don't know if this will be a problem yet, but be prepared to limit emissions in 23.6-24ghz range because we might require it at some point". Also, paragraph 9 of the same document has the actual band limits (with a special requirement) if anybody is interested: > The 24 GHz band consists of two band segments: The lower segment, from 24.25-24.45 GHz, and the upper segment, from 24.75-25.25 GHz > any mobile or transportable equipment capable of operating in any portion of the 24 GHz band must be capable of operating at all frequencies within the 24 GHz band, in both band segments

borkt 8y ago
"At the high end of the electromagnetic spectrum, signals travel over a band of 10 million trillion Hz (that is, 10^22Hz). This end of the spectrum has phenomenal bandwidth, but it has its own set of problems. The wave forms are so miniscule that they're highly distorted by any type of interference, particularly environmental interference such as precipitation. Furthermore, higher-frequency wave forms such as x-rays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays are not very good to human physiology and therefore aren't available for us to use for communication at this point." Not the best analysis but I'm working. Basically like any other metric, as the frequency increases the space between peaks and valleys decreases and it becomes harder to determine/separate from others 30hz to 230hz is much easier to tell the difference than 15khz to 15.2khz if you want to listen to audio tones. Once you get to microwaves this becomes of course much more difficult. http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=24687&seqNum=4 http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=24687&seqNum...
- oceliker 8y ago
  To me, this analysis sounds more about the interference with physical objects (like how 2.4ghz can pass through walls easier than 5ghz). It doesn't seem to be about interference with other radio emissions? > 30hz to 230hz is much easier to tell the difference than 15khz to 15.2khz if you want to listen to audio tones That's definitely true for humans, but I don't think it necessarily applies to radio signals in general (though it does make sense at first glance).

mholt 8y ago

Can someone help me understand this better? What is "very close" to 23.8-GHz frequencies? I don't know which bands 5G operates on, but it seems [1] that the closest they get, at least in the US, is ~27 GHz. If the FCC is auctioning 3000 licenses for the 24 GHz space, is that the space that can potentially interfere more? Can 5G operate on just any frequencies, then? [1]: https://www.cablefree.net/wirelesstechnology/4glte/5g-frequency-bands-lte/ https://www.cablefree.net/wirelesstechnology/4glte/5g-freque...

TrueDuality 8y ago
The carrier signal of a new technology could potentially use any frequency that isn't already in use. A lot of the frequency spectrum is already accounted for and generally parts of the spectrum that are important to scientific research are internationally protected (Such as the resonant frequency of hydrogen which is used extensively in radio astronomy). That being said it is more technically difficult to go "up" in frequency. Lower frequencies have less bandwidth, but are easier to generate, can go through physical objects better and for longer distances. This fight to me looks like the industry wants to use a cheaper frequency that meets their minimum technical goals (in terms of development costs not necessarily licensing costs) science and other applications be damned.
mrweasel 8y ago
Europe, at least the EU has settled on 24GHz, that's pretty close to the 23.8GHz.

spaceheretostay 8y ago

That's interesting - I'm working on using cell signal strength as an indicator for live weather features! There's a simple relationship between signal strength and clearness of weather - light rain has a distortion signal, heavier rain a heavier distortion, etc. I'm betting that when all is said and done, the cell phones will help the weather forecast more than hurt it - but this may take some years if the cell companies are too greedy about it. I'm working on detecting weather using all kinds of phone sensors like barometers and cameras in All Clear if you're interested: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearweather.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe... and the open source sensor package: https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary

JohnFen 8y ago
But that approach, at best, only tells you about the weather near the ground. That can be useful, but is woefully incomplete. You also need to be able to see weather high in the atmosphere.
- spaceheretostay 8y ago
  Well, signal strength yes - it does have those limits. But pressure data from the barometers can describe some higher altitude conditions (if you can map pressure at the surface over a large geography with decent density, you can infer metrics about the higher atmosphere). And I do agree that other instruments are required for a complete picture of the weather, not just phones! But a remarkable amount can be done from phones. GPS attenuation for example, can also be read from some Android phones and can inform about high-altitude conditions.
  - lgeorget 8y ago
    But surely you miss the anomalies that might exist high in the atmosphere and which are actually responsible for the violent meteorological events (such as temperature inversions).

xenonite 8y ago

Wouldn't it be possible to reuse the 3G frequencies with an updated technology in order to obtain higher bandwidths?

OrgNet 8y ago
If it is possible, and those frequencies are worth using for this purpose, maybe they should give free 4G/5G-phones to anyone still on 3G to be able to do it as soon as possible.
mrweasel 8y ago
It is. Denmark is allowing the phone companies to use their existing 2G/3G and 4G frequencies for 5G. The 700MHz spectrum is also being opened up for use with 5G. I'm not sure if it will result in dramatically more bandwidth though.

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jak92 8y ago

They are putting up "DAS" nodes all over my city. Nearly every block. Wonder if these will be hooked up with UHF 5G and what the ramifications may be.

roomey 8y ago

I think the main point of 5g keeps getting missed when people are asking about cell phones and their broadband speed vs capacity etc etc. The only reason telcos are going to put in 5g is for IOT coverage. Low powered trickle data from billions of devices. Stuff for your personal cellular use would never come close to covering the costs involved. And 4g will still be used for many years to come for that.

yaantc 8y ago
The focus today for 5G is fixed wireless access and smartphones, not IoT. 5G covers 3 variants: 1) massive broadband (with mmWave in particular); 2) URLLC - Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communications; 3) massive IoT. The current focus is on (1). Lot's of talk on (2), but nothing much concrete yet. (3) is moving along, but it's actually based on... LTE. Strictly speaking, 5G is a set of requirements defined by the ITU-T, not a technology. The actual technologies are developed by another organization, 3GPP. And there are 2 technologies to cover 5G: 1) NR, or "New Radio". This is what most people mean by 5G. It's for massive broadband and URLLC; 2) LTE (release 15 and later) for massive IoT! Yes, the IoT variant of LTE (LTE-M and NB-IoT) will be the 5G implementations for a while. Eventually there will be new NR versions for IoT, but nobody is in a hurry there. LTE-M and NB-IoT evolutions will be just fine for a long time, as far as massive IoT is concerned. When you hear about 5G deployment today, it really mean "NR" and not LTE based IoT. The concern for smartphone is really capacity during peak time in the busiest cells. I work in the field BTW, as you may have guessed ;)
- bdamm 8y ago
  I work in the mesh network IoT space, primarily Wi-SUN. Since we view NB-IoT and LTE-M as competition, I encourage you cellular guys to really take your time :) we're happy for the head start while we keep deploying our networks in the millions.
- stefan_ 8y ago
  Isn't this fantastic? It is the measure of any great buzzword that it means something entirely different to every single person. I personally think the entire mmWave part of 5G is at least another 10 years away. Like, that's just going nowhere. Massive bandwidth? Great, what for? WiFi will be mmWave before we have an application for that in cellular. Presumably what is actually being deployed is the incremental LTE revision on the same old bands, some extra thrown in that were yoinked from other applications.

autocorr 8y ago

While 5G Will be a great boon, especially the beam-forming satellite version, another unintended consequence besides weather remote sensing is nuking the extremely important 24 GHz range (K Band) for radio astronomy. There are a few narrow protected windows for absolutely critical spectral lines, but the truth is that nature doesn't play by the spectrum allocations rules, and there are hundreds if not thousands of lines that are observed routinely outside of the protected bands. It is also remarkably free and clear of radio frequency interference (RFI), in part because industry has chosen other frequencies not attenuated by atmospheric water vapor. This isn't to say we should halt global human progress to save a local river bait fish, but that threat to forecasting is only one of the serious consequences major spectrum reallocation can have. This is especially true for passive use in the sciences, which has a weaker lobby than the private sector.

N_trglctc_joe 8y ago
> While 5G Will be a great boon This is something I've been having trouble with. Lately I've become more aware of the secondary effects of 5G- on weather forecasting, on the radio spectrum, possibly on bees- and it's got me wondering why we need it for telecom. I just don't see the value added. I can already communicate with anyone in the world, access any information, and find my way anywhere with 4G. A significantly higher rate of data transfer just doesn't seem to add any new functionality to my phone. Can anyone give me a good rationale for 5G? Entertainment doesn't count. I'll grant right-off-the-bat that it'll have some fantastic industrial applications; my issue is with personal telecom. It just feels like a new planned obsolescence vector.
- ashleyn 8y ago
  Except entertainment does count according to customer use metrics.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    Does anyone feel 4G is lacking in any way? I don't think I'd notice if my phone's network was any faster.

cm2187 8y ago

Stupid question. I was under the impression that one of the limits of 5g was that it was a short-distance signal, easily blocked by a wall or any obstacle. Is it really going to create interferences all the way to space? I thought satellites measured the temperature of the top of the atmosphere, not of stuff on the ground.

lgeorget 8y ago
They actually measure a lot of parameters, not only temperatures, and in all the layers of the atmosphere. And they're _very_ sensitive. For some forecast needs (short term forecast, storms, etc.), the conditions under the atmospheric boundary layer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundary_layer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundary_layer) is what matters most, so the microwave noise near the ground is definitely an issue.
pas 8y ago
Typical signal transmission uses a a signal to noise floor of something like 20-40 dB ( https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/Signal-to-Noise_Ratio_(SNR)_and_Wireless_Signal_Strength https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Pra... ) for high speed data transmission, but if you want to just get a big fat one or zero across, then you don't need that much. And antennas are really good at picking up resonant EM radiation, even if it's not the "full signal". But these very sensitive weather sensors. And they already work by detecting a trend and then detecting a big blip over that. (So rain currently looks like some sort of interesting blip in the noise.) So, it might be possible to have cities mapped with a differing trend, but it would further complicate models. And currently over land there's not much noise, because humans don't use this part of the EM spectrum. Mostly because it's not great at long range, because attenuates very fast exactly due to water vapor in the air. So it was "easy" to exploit this for getting weather data, because it was reasonable to assume close to constant natural emissions. (Probably only a simple daily and seasonal trend. Though it might be already necessary to handle differences between woodlands and urban areas.) (See also, why it's hard to do the same over water: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252663726_The_Effect_of_Signal-to-Noise_Ratio_on_the_Study_of_Sea_Level_Trends https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252663726_The_Effec... )

Causality1 8y ago

This seems like a failure on the FCC's part. If it was going to be a problem these frequencies should never have been licensed out to cell companies.

ryanmarsh 8y ago

Slightly OT or meta. I keep bumping up against these nutty conspiracy theories about 5G being dangerous in various forums. Has anyone done a study of the effects of certain frequencies and energy levels on the human body that I can use to refute these fools? Also, what is the canonical source on 5g spectrum and power levels?

pas 8y ago
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1503/1503.05944.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1503/1503.05944.pdf this basically found that 90% of the energy is absorbed on/at/around the skin. if neurons were directly exposed they would heat up and their firing rate would be altered significantly [look at fig2 / D ] ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4233276/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4233276/ ) this study did a direct exposure testing on a human's arm (and on rats and monkeys) at 94GHz for 3s at 1W/cm^2: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a628296.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a628296.pdf this did 24h low power 1mW/cm^2 exposure of human eye like cells and detected no significant difference in micronucleus expression, DNA strand breaks, and heat stress protein expression: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997488/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997488/ this used 42GHz on rats for 30min/day for 3 days, and tried to look for tumors/cancer and found no significant difference: https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3121 https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3121 so. it seems there's no immediate and known adverse effect (other than the heating and maybe some interference with the electro-biochemistry of cells, particularly with neurons). and luckily people usually don't use phones near their heads anymore (when doing large data transfers), so we don't really have to worry about concentrated absorption on the head due to being at best a centimeter from the emitter. > Also, what is the canonical source on 5g spectrum and power levels? maximum permissible exposure is defined as 10W/m^2 power density (for 6GHz between 100GHz) by the FCC.

nilskidoo 8y ago

As if mainstreaming weaponized radiation poisoning weren't enough, let's unemploy weather-girls in the same swing. It's like Rod Serling took the brown acid.

pkghost 8y ago

Has anyone done a deep dive on 5g health concerns? E.g., 240-some scientists and 40 doctors signed a letter of discouragement (or something), claims research indicates 5g interacts with human biology in poorly understood ways: https://ehtrust.org/key-issues/cell-phoneswireless/5g-networks-iot-scientific-overview-human-health-risks/ https://ehtrust.org/key-issues/cell-phoneswireless/5g-networ...

leroy_masochist 8y ago
Paging Dr. Allcome.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOovtZXYqj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOovtZXYqj4
Dylan16807 8y ago
Some of those items on the list are sending up red flags to me. The weapon use is purely because it heats skin; if you apply a million times less energy for a million times as long, the danger level from heat is zero. When it can't penetrate skin, it does make sense to classify head skin exposure the same as foot skin exposure. The thing about sweat glands is interesting. And sadly I have no idea how to evaluate the quality of the studies linked.
xxpor 8y ago
It's all nonsense. The higher frequencies are non-ionizing and in common use today. See all of those microwave antennas on buildings and towers? A lot of them transmit around there. Your neighbor can blast 24 ghz right at your house with a free licence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.2-centimeter_band https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.2-centimeter_band The reason microwaves (like from a microwave oven) are dangerous are because of their power levels. Like, they'd cook you if they leaked out. Not because of ionizing radiation.
- throwaway995669 8y ago
  Non-ionizing radiation does have potential biological effects on Voltage-Gated Calcium Channels (VGCCs) which our cells have plenty of: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780531/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780531/

codelitt 8y ago

Pilot here - they used the example of a hurricane, however, I think it would have a daily impact on thousands of flights (general aviation and commercial) which all rely on on accurate weather forecasting. Weather is no joke in aviation; even if you're flying a 747.

ReptileMan 8y ago

Why do we actually need 5g? Wired with last meter wifi is a lot better option imo for high bandwidth transfer

tus87 8y ago

And nothing of great value was lost.

pas 8y ago
Hurricane path prediction seems truly a "killer app", or do you think it's not?
- tus87 8y ago
  Predicting weather it will rain or not today would be a killer app, and I'm still waiting.
  - pas 8y ago
    Agreed. It turns out storm system movements are easier to predict than local precipitation. Aggregates of a system are easier to predict than localized/point values. https://www.precisionag.com/systems-management/data/betting-on-rain-the-accuracy-and-reliability-of-precipitation-forecasts/ https://www.precisionag.com/systems-management/data/betting-... - this is about how effective and useful forecasts are (the are useful, because we have calibrated forecasts, so we can use them for objective decision support for agriculture) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/problem-solving/ken-thompson-forecasts-rain-likely-wrong/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/problem-solving/ken-th... - this is about how relatively dry places (like the US or UK) usually get a lot of misprediction, even if the accuracy is 90%. (But it's not, it's more like 80-85%.)

mattrp 8y ago

While most of the promise of 5g feels like overhype, this article has a bit of flat earth feel to it. For example, we’ve been trying to convert obsolete UHF frequencies to usable bandwidth for years only to find all sorts of reasons why it can’t be killed off. If 5g really threatened weather forecasting and radio astronomy I would think at minimum there would some sort of initiative to address it prior to a cutover - and yet, this article doesn’t seem to acknowledge such a thing exists so I’m left to conclude maybe the article is nothing more than a hypothetical what if that likely won’t have much impact in the real world. This is just my gut feel...

NicoJuicy 8y ago

Human fallacy, we all want it faster and more. Bur for 99% of the cases, why would we need it? IoT doesn't need 5G, it needs LiRa. Streaming applications, I can stream with 4G. 50 ms latency with 4G, so what. Except for competitive multiplayer gaming perhaps, I don't see the issue. But I think they want everything wired ;) Industrial applications, outside of IoT? Give me a valid example that needs countrywide coverage. I hardly notice difference with 4G and my WiFi. Increase coverage for 4G, before implementing 5G. Fyi: 4G offers maximum real-world download speeds up to 60Mbps. Currently, that is more than enough.

cloakandswagger 8y ago
> Industrial applications, outside of IoT? Give me a valid example that needs countrywide coverage. Police CAD systems, streaming video from body cameras, oil well monitoring. Just because you can't imagine an application of 5G for your consumer needs doesn't mean it isn't needed.
- pas 8y ago
  Oil well monitoring can work with the crappiest of GSM (a simple SMS every few minutes), no?
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  - Police CAD systems Why would a CAD system need > 60 Mbps? Why would it even need more than 30 kbs? I doubt it would need more than a MQTT channel and an app. - streaming video from body cameras Low quality over 4G and store the video in HD. Syncing on secure access-points ( the devices need to charge, sync there) Nothing more is required, since body cams are used as evidence. Also, live stream body cams already exist over 4G ( 1920 x 1080, 30FPS) - oil well monitoring IoT... Jeez... > Just because you can't imagine an application of 5G for your consumer needs doesn't mean it isn't needed. Like i said. You want more and faster. I already mentioned some applications, that also don't require it. Just like your examples, also don't require it. Again, human fallacy and you are providing excellent examples. Thanks.
newusertoday 8y ago

acchow 8y ago

tl;dr We get Water vapour readings (which feed into our weather forecasting models) from the ~24ghz range which 5G is going to blast away.

pujan28 8y ago

5G will be a great help.

keepmesmall 8y ago

Any assurances that this won't seriously disturb the earth's ecology and human health, or do we no longer bother with that when manipulating the whole planet?

joncrane 8y ago
Given the whole thing with Global Warming, I think this question already has an answer.

once-in-a-while 8y ago

If you are "woke", and have been following several "conspiracy theories" (as I did), you're simply aware that most so-called "conspiracy theories" are in fact truths they want to hide from us. "5G will destroy our DNA." is one of them. It's much more likely to be true than false...

Reelin 8y ago

> ... a letter from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross requesting that it be delayed. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rejected the request ... Ajit Pai strikes again!

ngcc_hk 8y ago

Seems striking especially topic not touched like radio astronomy.

seeker_ 8y ago

Equally important but often overlooked concern is the risks it will pose to our health given 5G relies on much higher energy radio signals than 4G.

hutzlibu 8y ago

I also do not really see the benefits of 5G. I would be much more happy to have reliable 4G or 3G at least, first. I suppose quite some support comes from people who have connection issues with weak 4G and assumes 5G will solve them. But since 5G will consume apparently 3G towers and has much less range, quite the opposite could happen. Even less connection for people not in the city.