9 ms·

U.S. is behind on 5G rules and deployment

60 points by jseliger 7y ago

jseliger 7y ago
The original headline is extremely click-baity, but the content itself is much deeper than the headline implies.
adrenalinelol 7y ago
Most people have bandwidth caps AT HOME w/landlines. Large swathes of the country don't have 4G. Is 4K content on our phones really going to matter?
donutdan4114 7y ago
Anyone else concerned about placing these on every block? How do they affect birds? Bees? Or the local level tracking they can do on your phones now... Ain't no hiding.
- overlordalex 7y ago
  How about reducing our weather forecasting ability? The downlink for satellite data is using the same frequency ranges, leading to concerns about local noise overwhelming satellite signals. > The Federal Communications Commission has proposed policy that could jeopardize the collection of vital information for weather prediction, the heads of the Commerce Department and NASA say. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48772008 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48772008 https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/03/08/critical-weather-data-threatened-by-fcc-spectrum-proposal-say-department-commerce-nasa/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/03/08/critical-w...
- sambull 7y ago
  Sounds like everything will be visible always now. https://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/ https://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/
- gruez 7y ago
  >Or the local level tracking they can do on your phones now... Ain't no hiding. Don't bring your phone, put it in airplane mode, use a burner, use a pager. Just a few ways of "hiding".
- Dove 7y ago
  Birds and bees, heck. I'm concerned about the effects they may have on HUMANS.
  - dvtrn 7y ago
    Well if bees go, we wont be far behind them-failing significant haste in artificial pollination solutions, so...porque no los tres (why not all three)?
jMyles 7y ago
I'm not at all convinced that the model of 5G and the model of Amazon satellites providing "internet" access from above is consistent with a serious decentralized network to serve humanity's needs. Where are we on mesh technology at this point? I haven't caught up in like 3 years, but I hear it is coming along?
YeahSureWhyNot 7y ago
I don't think americans need the 'couple of hundred mbps' on their cellphones in metro areas as much as they need decent 3g coverage in other parts of the country, especially in seasonal touristy places where visitors don't know where things are or where to go. In my personal experience, almost all of ski resorts and beach towns on the east coast as well as small coastal towns and wineries in California have this problem.
- tomohawk 7y ago
  The telcos have been fibbing about their coverage of rural areas. They do that to attract customers, but they also get subsidies for coverage. There is no independent verification of their claims. Yet another example of government not being competent when handing out money. They're in the process of pulling out 3G in some rural areas I've been to. There's even less coverage than before.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. It's true that wireless carriers lie about rural coverage because they don't think anyone will call them on it. The State of Vermont did, though: https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/vermont/2019/01/24/vermont-cell-phone-coverage-maps-dead-zone-verizon-att/2467205002/ https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/vermont...
    - ianai 7y ago
      OP twisted it against government. I’d say it’s more a symptom of needing more government. The US has had many decades of turning government back away from market oversight to many disastrous effects. (I still upvoted them though. )
      - tomohawk 7y ago
        If we're going to have these large regulated monopolies, then the regulator had better be competent. Either set the rules to allow market forces to work or suspend market forces and regulate the monopoly/oligopoly. In the AT&T days, you couldn't own any telco equipment (not even a phone) - you had to rent it. The inventor of the answering machine was not AT&T, so you could buy one but not legally hook it up. Long distance was next town over and cost north of $2 / minute. On the flip side, we had Bell Labs and lots of redundancy and everyone had the same service.
Causality1 7y ago
What's the point? So instead of hitting the 22GB shadowcap on my "unlimited" plan in 70 minutes at my usual 40mb/s I can do it in four minutes and eleven seconds at 700mb/s 5G speeds. Meanwhile I still can't even check e-mail or send a Whatsapp message when I visit my grandmother out in the boonies. 5G is breathtakingly unnecessary.
- rhexs 7y ago
  I have the same reservations. What impetus is there to compete against entrenched cartels/monopolies? Inevitably 5G will have the same 1TB cap Comcast invented in order to juice profits off the death of cable television. LTE had the same promise. Best case 5G takes off, media conglomerates attempt to purchase/merge with new ISPS/old telecoms rolling out 5G, the government inevitably doesn't enforce antitrust, and we're in the exact same place we're at now.
corodra 7y ago
Um, but in all seriousness, do we really need even faster speeds on our phones? 5g requires even more fiber junctioned off to boxes that only have, what was it, 500ft radius? So I can do what "faster" on my phone? I get as a home internet replacement. Sure. Maybe offices, as long as it's nothing crazy. But I've seen people argue for it by using Fortnite mobile. Itd take like 30seconds instead of 2 minutes to download. And? Not being an ass, other than the occasional app updates and music sync, what all do you need fiber fast connections on your phone or you might die waiting? Problem I see is the same argument for 6g. Suddenly 5g isn't enough. Suddenly all that infrastructure is going to be a waste. Makes me think that people imagine setting up this stuff is magic and free. New fiber lines. Crews to trench and pull cable. Line crews to go on hundreds of thousands of poles. This isn't cheap both materials and labor. Hell, my buddy and I got a quote about 2 years ago to run a fiber trunk line about 1.5 miles from the interstate to an office we had in Colorado. It roughed out to about 750k. That was with a friend who would do the boring. Easements, code, general feasibility due to existing infrastructure. Shit ain't easy or cheap. And we were in a rural area. I'd imagine an actual city is about two nightmares and a trip to a suicide booth.
- pcr910303 7y ago
  As for why you need faster connections, I have seen live streams or youtube videos lagging on the 4G network. In South Korea, many people are very excited in 5G as our current 4G LTE-A speed (about 50 ~ 80 Mbps) is considered 'not-enough'. Generally, 4G networks are (at least in Korea) about 1/10 ~ 1/2 of the general WLAN speeds (100Mbps ~ 1Gbps), and I believe that cellular networks have a long way to go to be as fast as WLANs.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    As for why you need faster connections, I have seen live streams or youtube videos lagging on the 4G network. Here's something that people never say anymore: So what? Who cares if YouTube lags on 4G? So what if you have to wait eight seconds for buffering. Does it really matter if you see SD or HD video instead of 4K video on a three-inch cell phone screen? No, it doesn't.
orev 7y ago
I’m not opposed to progress, but LTE serves my needs just fine so I don’t see the urgency that it being pushed. I don’t see why this needs to be a “race”, except that telcos seem to be driving urgency in the public mind potentially to further their goal of removing the local approval process and associated fees [1], saving them money. Without that incentive, this would be a regular upgrade to keep up with the competition, instead of some national emergency some are making it out to be. [1] https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/04/fcc-will-vote-on-5g-plan-for-faster-local-deployments-and-reduced-fees/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/04/fcc-will-vote-on-5g-plan-...
ta30149 7y ago
The U.S. is woefully, even disgracefully, behind on so many many things. Feels like we're all holding our breath until the current conundrum resolves itself.
oceanghost 7y ago
There's no point in having fast internet when Verizon is still charging me per GB.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  The infrastructure could lead to 5G becoming a replacement/competitor for cable internet.
- freyr 7y ago
  Conceivably, if 5G increased network capacity and lowered operating costs, Verizon could charge consumers less per GB. Usage costs are tied, at least somewhat, to their operating costs and their supply of network capacity. And even if the cost were the same, why would you rather pay for a slow GB than a fast GB? Why don't you switch to a company with an unlimited plan, if you don't like paying per GB? Sure, they'll throttle you after you use some number of GBs, but it's still probably a better alternative if you don't like paying per GB.
  - kylec 7y ago
    I pay for a slow GB. I’m on the AT&T “Unlimited Choice” plan, which is capped at 3Mbps, because slower internet the whole month is better than fast internet for part of the month, then hitting the cap and getting throttled to 128Kbps. 3Mbps is perfectly usable, 128Kbps is not.
  - oceanghost 7y ago
    The reason that I don't switch is because, Verizon is the only provider I have used that works all the time, everywhere I go, and that's important to me. The only time I can remember it not working was on the California coast near Big Sur, even then, I was able to get a text out.
jorblumesea 7y ago
The article is far more interesting than the title indicates. tl;dr, US govt dysfunction is largely responsible for the lack of innovation in the area, as the military "owns" the prime 5g wireless spectrum. No US competitor exists because there's no competitive market that is allowed to exist. People that are saying "we don't need 5g" are missing the point. These problems could be applied to many future technologies.
duxup 7y ago
I'm in the "I don't think I 'need' this" category in the US. 4G is pretty fast for my use cases, I'm often on Wi-Fi... I feel like we're looking at diminishing returns here.
londons_explore 7y ago
Simply legislate that no phone shall be allowed to be operated with less than two carriers. If everyone had two SIM cards and two carriers at all times, people would soon switch to the one with best coverage/price/speed, and suddenly there would be real competition again. A bit like "project Fi" is backed into two networks.
heisenbit 7y ago
The US may be behind at the moment but they are catching up.Not because the US is moving faster but by having thrown a spanner in the deployments across the globe which were relying on Huawei delivering as agreed.
reggieband 7y ago
I'm actually amazed at the amount of "we don't need this" attitude in this thread. Is this really just sour grapes [1]? It feels a bit like moving back to Canada where contactless payments is standard for most transactions, while in US I had to sign a piece of paper for $5 coffee at Starbucks. People in the US have this strange attitude that if it isn't standard in the US then it isn't worthwhile. How anyone can argue against faster wireless internet connections seems crazy to me. It's like that famous quote (which Bill Gates sternly denies having made) about 640k being enough for anyone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
- kylec 7y ago
  All the use cases put forth by 5G proponents, like remote surgery, are so niche that it’s hard for normal citizens to see what impact 5G will make in their lives. In the US, if you have LTE it’s usually more than fast enough for what you want to do on your phone, but there’s still so many areas of the US without coverage that it seems like it would be more impactful to address that issue first.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  > How anyone can argue against faster wireless internet connections seems crazy to me. If it came without costs nobody would be against it. The question is if's worth the cost and opportunity costs.
rayiner 7y ago
It’s the same problem that sets the US back on other kinds of infrastructure. Every two-bit municipality and HOA can abuse the legal process to hold up infrastructure deployment, whether we’re talking about rail or 5G: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/5g-wireless https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/5g-wireless.

60 points by jseliger 7y ago

The original headline is extremely click-baity, but the content itself is much deeper than the headline implies.

Most people have bandwidth caps AT HOME w/landlines. Large swathes of the country don't have 4G. Is 4K content on our phones really going to matter?

donutdan4114 7y ago

Anyone else concerned about placing these on every block? How do they affect birds? Bees? Or the local level tracking they can do on your phones now... Ain't no hiding.

overlordalex 7y ago
How about reducing our weather forecasting ability? The downlink for satellite data is using the same frequency ranges, leading to concerns about local noise overwhelming satellite signals. > The Federal Communications Commission has proposed policy that could jeopardize the collection of vital information for weather prediction, the heads of the Commerce Department and NASA say. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48772008 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48772008 https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/03/08/critical-weather-data-threatened-by-fcc-spectrum-proposal-say-department-commerce-nasa/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/03/08/critical-w...
sambull 7y ago
Sounds like everything will be visible always now. https://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/ https://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/
gruez 7y ago
>Or the local level tracking they can do on your phones now... Ain't no hiding. Don't bring your phone, put it in airplane mode, use a burner, use a pager. Just a few ways of "hiding".
Dove 7y ago
Birds and bees, heck. I'm concerned about the effects they may have on HUMANS.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  Well if bees go, we wont be far behind them-failing significant haste in artificial pollination solutions, so...porque no los tres (why not all three)?

jMyles 7y ago

I'm not at all convinced that the model of 5G and the model of Amazon satellites providing "internet" access from above is consistent with a serious decentralized network to serve humanity's needs. Where are we on mesh technology at this point? I haven't caught up in like 3 years, but I hear it is coming along?

YeahSureWhyNot 7y ago

I don't think americans need the 'couple of hundred mbps' on their cellphones in metro areas as much as they need decent 3g coverage in other parts of the country, especially in seasonal touristy places where visitors don't know where things are or where to go. In my personal experience, almost all of ski resorts and beach towns on the east coast as well as small coastal towns and wineries in California have this problem.

tomohawk 7y ago
The telcos have been fibbing about their coverage of rural areas. They do that to attract customers, but they also get subsidies for coverage. There is no independent verification of their claims. Yet another example of government not being competent when handing out money. They're in the process of pulling out 3G in some rural areas I've been to. There's even less coverage than before.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. It's true that wireless carriers lie about rural coverage because they don't think anyone will call them on it. The State of Vermont did, though: https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/vermont/2019/01/24/vermont-cell-phone-coverage-maps-dead-zone-verizon-att/2467205002/ https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/vermont...
  - ianai 7y ago
    OP twisted it against government. I’d say it’s more a symptom of needing more government. The US has had many decades of turning government back away from market oversight to many disastrous effects. (I still upvoted them though. )
    - tomohawk 7y ago
      If we're going to have these large regulated monopolies, then the regulator had better be competent. Either set the rules to allow market forces to work or suspend market forces and regulate the monopoly/oligopoly. In the AT&T days, you couldn't own any telco equipment (not even a phone) - you had to rent it. The inventor of the answering machine was not AT&T, so you could buy one but not legally hook it up. Long distance was next town over and cost north of $2 / minute. On the flip side, we had Bell Labs and lots of redundancy and everyone had the same service.

Causality1 7y ago

What's the point? So instead of hitting the 22GB shadowcap on my "unlimited" plan in 70 minutes at my usual 40mb/s I can do it in four minutes and eleven seconds at 700mb/s 5G speeds. Meanwhile I still can't even check e-mail or send a Whatsapp message when I visit my grandmother out in the boonies. 5G is breathtakingly unnecessary.

rhexs 7y ago
I have the same reservations. What impetus is there to compete against entrenched cartels/monopolies? Inevitably 5G will have the same 1TB cap Comcast invented in order to juice profits off the death of cable television. LTE had the same promise. Best case 5G takes off, media conglomerates attempt to purchase/merge with new ISPS/old telecoms rolling out 5G, the government inevitably doesn't enforce antitrust, and we're in the exact same place we're at now.

corodra 7y ago

Um, but in all seriousness, do we really need even faster speeds on our phones? 5g requires even more fiber junctioned off to boxes that only have, what was it, 500ft radius? So I can do what "faster" on my phone? I get as a home internet replacement. Sure. Maybe offices, as long as it's nothing crazy. But I've seen people argue for it by using Fortnite mobile. Itd take like 30seconds instead of 2 minutes to download. And? Not being an ass, other than the occasional app updates and music sync, what all do you need fiber fast connections on your phone or you might die waiting? Problem I see is the same argument for 6g. Suddenly 5g isn't enough. Suddenly all that infrastructure is going to be a waste. Makes me think that people imagine setting up this stuff is magic and free. New fiber lines. Crews to trench and pull cable. Line crews to go on hundreds of thousands of poles. This isn't cheap both materials and labor. Hell, my buddy and I got a quote about 2 years ago to run a fiber trunk line about 1.5 miles from the interstate to an office we had in Colorado. It roughed out to about 750k. That was with a friend who would do the boring. Easements, code, general feasibility due to existing infrastructure. Shit ain't easy or cheap. And we were in a rural area. I'd imagine an actual city is about two nightmares and a trip to a suicide booth.

pcr910303 7y ago
As for why you need faster connections, I have seen live streams or youtube videos lagging on the 4G network. In South Korea, many people are very excited in 5G as our current 4G LTE-A speed (about 50 ~ 80 Mbps) is considered 'not-enough'. Generally, 4G networks are (at least in Korea) about 1/10 ~ 1/2 of the general WLAN speeds (100Mbps ~ 1Gbps), and I believe that cellular networks have a long way to go to be as fast as WLANs.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  As for why you need faster connections, I have seen live streams or youtube videos lagging on the 4G network. Here's something that people never say anymore: So what? Who cares if YouTube lags on 4G? So what if you have to wait eight seconds for buffering. Does it really matter if you see SD or HD video instead of 4K video on a three-inch cell phone screen? No, it doesn't.

orev 7y ago

I’m not opposed to progress, but LTE serves my needs just fine so I don’t see the urgency that it being pushed. I don’t see why this needs to be a “race”, except that telcos seem to be driving urgency in the public mind potentially to further their goal of removing the local approval process and associated fees [1], saving them money. Without that incentive, this would be a regular upgrade to keep up with the competition, instead of some national emergency some are making it out to be. [1] https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/04/fcc-will-vote-on-5g-plan-for-faster-local-deployments-and-reduced-fees/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/04/fcc-will-vote-on-5g-plan-...

ta30149 7y ago

The U.S. is woefully, even disgracefully, behind on so many many things. Feels like we're all holding our breath until the current conundrum resolves itself.

oceanghost 7y ago

There's no point in having fast internet when Verizon is still charging me per GB.

jimmaswell 7y ago
The infrastructure could lead to 5G becoming a replacement/competitor for cable internet.
freyr 7y ago
Conceivably, if 5G increased network capacity and lowered operating costs, Verizon could charge consumers less per GB. Usage costs are tied, at least somewhat, to their operating costs and their supply of network capacity. And even if the cost were the same, why would you rather pay for a slow GB than a fast GB? Why don't you switch to a company with an unlimited plan, if you don't like paying per GB? Sure, they'll throttle you after you use some number of GBs, but it's still probably a better alternative if you don't like paying per GB.
- kylec 7y ago
  I pay for a slow GB. I’m on the AT&T “Unlimited Choice” plan, which is capped at 3Mbps, because slower internet the whole month is better than fast internet for part of the month, then hitting the cap and getting throttled to 128Kbps. 3Mbps is perfectly usable, 128Kbps is not.
- oceanghost 7y ago
  The reason that I don't switch is because, Verizon is the only provider I have used that works all the time, everywhere I go, and that's important to me. The only time I can remember it not working was on the California coast near Big Sur, even then, I was able to get a text out.

jorblumesea 7y ago

The article is far more interesting than the title indicates. tl;dr, US govt dysfunction is largely responsible for the lack of innovation in the area, as the military "owns" the prime 5g wireless spectrum. No US competitor exists because there's no competitive market that is allowed to exist. People that are saying "we don't need 5g" are missing the point. These problems could be applied to many future technologies.

duxup 7y ago

I'm in the "I don't think I 'need' this" category in the US. 4G is pretty fast for my use cases, I'm often on Wi-Fi... I feel like we're looking at diminishing returns here.

londons_explore 7y ago

Simply legislate that no phone shall be allowed to be operated with less than two carriers. If everyone had two SIM cards and two carriers at all times, people would soon switch to the one with best coverage/price/speed, and suddenly there would be real competition again. A bit like "project Fi" is backed into two networks.

heisenbit 7y ago

The US may be behind at the moment but they are catching up.Not because the US is moving faster but by having thrown a spanner in the deployments across the globe which were relying on Huawei delivering as agreed.

reggieband 7y ago

I'm actually amazed at the amount of "we don't need this" attitude in this thread. Is this really just sour grapes [1]? It feels a bit like moving back to Canada where contactless payments is standard for most transactions, while in US I had to sign a piece of paper for $5 coffee at Starbucks. People in the US have this strange attitude that if it isn't standard in the US then it isn't worthwhile. How anyone can argue against faster wireless internet connections seems crazy to me. It's like that famous quote (which Bill Gates sternly denies having made) about 640k being enough for anyone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

kylec 7y ago
All the use cases put forth by 5G proponents, like remote surgery, are so niche that it’s hard for normal citizens to see what impact 5G will make in their lives. In the US, if you have LTE it’s usually more than fast enough for what you want to do on your phone, but there’s still so many areas of the US without coverage that it seems like it would be more impactful to address that issue first.
mehrdadn 7y ago
> How anyone can argue against faster wireless internet connections seems crazy to me. If it came without costs nobody would be against it. The question is if's worth the cost and opportunity costs.

rayiner 7y ago

It’s the same problem that sets the US back on other kinds of infrastructure. Every two-bit municipality and HOA can abuse the legal process to hold up infrastructure deployment, whether we’re talking about rail or 5G: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/5g-wireless https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/5g-wireless.