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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
by 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 agoRight, I doubt it really costs Verizon $15 to provide me an extra gigabyte..
- rhino369 8y agoIt’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 agoSeems 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 agoMost people don't come close to hitting their cap unless they accidentally update their 200mb apps on the data connection.
- AnssiH 8y agoIt 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 agoAgain, 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 agoYou still need to lay fiber for 5G base stations
- toomuchtodo 8y agoAnd if you're going to bring the fiber most of the way, you might as well terminate it at the premises.
- krisrm 8y agoThis 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 agoFrom 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 agoHave a decent connection where there’s a large gathering of people.
- KJKingJ 8y agoVery 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 agoYou 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 ago802.11ax ("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 agoWith 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 ago4G 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 agoIt'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 agoWow, I’m paying $130 for 100/5. Damn cable companies.
- Unklejoe 8y agoOut of curiosity, do they give you a publically accessible IP? Or is the connection NAT-ed?
- pivo 8y agoYes they do give you a public IP but don't have static IPs.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- c0nducktr 8y agoWhat is the latency like? Could I play CS:GO or another game where latency and jitter matters?
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- amalcon 8y agoDemand for bandwidth has historically expanded to match the bandwidth available. Folks will find some use for it.
- Chris_Chambers 8y agoHow 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 agoWith 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 agoIt 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 agoThat'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 ago4G at least in general has lower latency than 3G, but I don't know if that's the protocol or just deployment.
- asdff 8y agoYou'd still get kicked for high ping even if you sat right under the 4G tower.
- BenjiWiebe 8y agoIn 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 agoI'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 agoThe 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 agoI'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 agoYou 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 agoYou'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 agoOne use case could be high resolution, low latency video streaming for remote control of autonomous vehicles, e.g. trucks.
- Chris_Chambers 8y agoWhy 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 agoDriving a semi-truck remotely? What could possibly go wrong!
- anticensor 8y agoYou seem to be ignoring speed of light and time to react.
- posixplz 8y agoNothing, 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 agoAjit 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 agoDo 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 agoAjit Pai has exactly zero credibility.
- willio58 8y agoHe's one of those people the internet is right to hate
- robmiller 8y ago5G 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 agoBut 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 agoFrom 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 agoI 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.
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- drdaeman 8y agoI 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 agoHuman(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 agoHSPA+ 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 agoAs 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.