6 ms·

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 count

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.
      - rayiner 7y ago
        Nobody in this discussion is a monopoly. U.S. cellular service has less market concentration than: cell phones, mobile operating systems, e-commerce, mobile phone operating systems, web browsers, or search.
        GauntletWizard 7y ago
        One of the hardest learned lessons of the twentieth century was that you didn't need collusion for a duopoly to become a monopoly. We have four major carriers, everyone else leases their bandwidth. They don't talk to each other, but their deals are a subtle form of signaling, and they have arrived at a monoplistic market, even with competition. Several rational actors with complete public information can still collaborate just by their actions alone. There's an entire category of "Hat Puzzles" [1] that involve extracting information from other players moves. The big four (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) don't need to collude to arrive at a stagnant, uncompetitive market. They have found an equalibrium that benefits all of them, and would hurt any who attempted "competition". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_puzzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_puzzle
        ianai 7y ago
        That’s a very straightforward explanation of market concentration! Thank you! I wish people better understood how monopolistic power harms everybody. It results in false scarcity trade offs, for instance. But that’s abstract.
        rayiner 7y ago
        You can’t just hand wave and say that because price coordination is possible, it’s happening. You have to tie your theory to the facts. Sprint and T-Mobile offer dramatically lower pricing, so there can’t be price coordination. There is no carving up of the market—the service area of the four carriers mostly overlap. In the LTE era, there is very little barrier to switching. (All the carriers offer big switching incentives.) Capital expenditures remain enormous across the board. What exactly is the sign of lack of competition? In the last ten years, I can think of few pieces of tech that’s gotten better faster than cell service. When the iPhone 3GS came out, you could get peak speeds up to 2-3 Mbps. On my XR, I’ve gotten 100 Mbps+. That factor of 20-30 increase is about the same as the increase in iPhone CPU performance over that time (which itself has been a stupendous success story). Maybe GPUs have improved faster? Certainly not desktop CPUs, or mobile or desktop operating systems, or web browsers, or search.
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  Wait, so companies are potentially not meeting the terms and conditions of the subsidies they receive, and this is somehow the government’s fault?
  - cglace 7y ago
    The government not policing the deal would certainly be their fault.
    - enraged_camel 7y ago
      Is the government intentionally not policing it due to nefarious reasons, or do they simply not have the money and/or the expertise to police it?
      - notatoad 7y ago
        it's not really a question of expertise, if you don't have it you can hire it. And as long as they keep giving out more subsidies, it can't really be a question of not having enough money either.
        enraged_camel 7y ago
        You can hire expertise, assuming you have the budget for it. And that budget is completely separate from the pot of money out of which subsidies are doled.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        notatoad 7y ago
        >And that budget is completely separate from the pot of money out of which subsidies are doled. but there's no reason that has to be true, other than "that's the way it is". The money itself is fungible.
      - 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 7y ago
  The accusation is actually the opposite: https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2018/12/13/fcc-says-at-least-one-carrier-lied-about-4g-and-thats-not-all https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2018/12/13/fcc-says.... The subsidies are only given for areas that don’t have coverage currently. One national carrier is accused of overstating coverage in rural areas to keep subsidies from being given to rural cellular carriers. To get the subsidy, you’d want to understate the coverage. EDIT: Previously, I incorrectly stated there is no subsidy for cellular. I forgot about Obama’s Mobility Fund. Phase 1 was $300 million in 2012, and Phase 2 was planned to be about $450 million per year over the next ten years. But that’s halted at the moment. Note that annual capital expenditures by the big 4 cellular providers is $55 billion annually. You’re talking about a really tiny investment by the government in the most underserved areas, not something big enough to really influence the coverage map.
axaxs 7y ago
I'm inclined to agree. It seems TMobile is the only one going after low band, long range stuff with their band 71. ATT/Verizon seem full steam ahead on their short range clusters. That's fine, but I'll take coverage over speed any day, and I'm sure most would agree.
kurthr 7y ago
Agreed, 5G is probably better to support very dense areas with adequate coverage, conventions and stadiums would be examples, I agree... that's not where I have issues. The US is not that dense, while other countries are. I think delaying rollout here isn't such a problem. I wish 5G had addressed the data and meta-data security model for wireless communications. If that had also been targeted, it would have mitigated a lot of current concerns.
deelowe 7y ago
Isn't this problem the reason 5g includes specs for microcells? I think 3g coverage in dense areas is a spectrum issue.
Merrill 7y ago
5G can eliminate the need to provide fiber or cable to the home. Instead, radio is used for the last hundreds of meters. Physical drops into homes are expensive to install and maintain.
- sroussey 7y ago
  mm 5G stops at the wall/window and doesn’t make it indoors.
  - matthewmacleod 7y ago
    That’s really not a problem with an outdoor antenna though. I think the idea is that 5G would be used as the last mile carrier into some kind of CPE.
    - ianai 7y ago
      Also we already have a model for bringing weak signals into the home through antennas-even roof mounted.
  - Merrill 7y ago
    A clear glass window is about a 10 dB drop at 28 GHz. Windows with film and foil-faced insulation in walls result in more like a 20 dB drop. The obvious solution is a CPE in the window that converts to WiFi within the dwelling. Alternatively, use the sub-6 GHz bands. The end game by whatever means is that all the cords are cut and radio is the ubiquitous connection technology.
  - anticensor 7y ago
    High-speed modes of 5G are like that. Sub-5Ghz modes of 5G-NR also exist.
    - sroussey 7y ago
      Yeah, that’s why I said mm 5G. Curious... what is the sub-6 speed increases in 5G over LTE?
Nokinside 7y ago
The benefit to rural areas comes from Low-band FDD. It will come maybe a year later because current 5G chipsets don't support low-band FDD spectrum yet. Low-band FDD 5G is cheaper to deploy and more energy efficient and yet provides more bandwith than existing 4G. 5G home modems will become very popular in rural areas. Besides, roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas. Why should 5G deployment wait for the rest.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Besides, roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas. Are the 20% who live in rural places not full Americans who do not deserve something simply because of their geography? I hope you don't like eating, using a computer, or living in a house because those are the people who grow your food, mine your minerals, and cut your lumber. Why should 5G deployment wait for the rest. No one is saying wait. They're saying that there's no need to hurry through a major deployment that delivers only minor benefits.
  - Nokinside 7y ago
    No hurry means no American startups providing new types of applications and services that 5g can provide. US has no companies selling 4g/lte/5g infrastructure for carriers, maybe the US won't have startups selling services either.
  - notatoad 7y ago
    When you make the decision to live in a rural area, you know that you're giving up a lot of the conveniences that you take for granted when living in a city. For most people who live in rural areas, slightly worse cell coverage is a perfectly acceptable tradeoff to not having to deal with the noise, crime, and crowding of cities. Nobody deserves 5G.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      When you make the decision to live in a rural area, you know that you're giving up a lot of the conveniences that you take for granted when living in a city Are you under the impression that when the stork is delivering babies, it asks them where they want to live? There is a subset of people who choose to live in rural areas. But they are not a majority. And the remainder shouldn't be condescended to as if they made a bad life decision and are being punished for not wanting to live in a city. Nobody deserves 5G I'm not arguing that they do. But there are an awful lot of people in this thread who are OK if 3G and 4G never finish rolling out in rural areas as long as they, themselves, get gigabit 5G connections.
fakeslimshady 7y ago
I would love to have higher bandwidth as would most IT related professionals. Thats been true since the days of analog modems.
jinglebells 7y ago
5G doesn't solve a bandwidth problem, it solves a latency problem. 4G has a latency of ~50ms, 5G is more like 1ms. 50ms is noticeable in areas like remote robot control, video conferencing, remote surgery etc.
- kylec 7y ago
  Video conferencing works just fine with 50ms latency, and the other two are very niche
  - anticensor 7y ago
    50ms latency means 20fps max. No cinematically smooth pictures.
    - pkolaczk 7y ago
      Latency doesn't affect frame rate. It affects... well, latency. 50 ms is perfectly fine for video and audio. And 4G actually is capable of much lower latency. I get pings at around 20 ms in Poland. 50 ms was achievable on 3G (HSPA+).
      - anticensor 7y ago
        I assumed full-live (fresh frame comes strictly after previous one), not quasi-live.
        pkolaczk 7y ago
        That still doesn't imply lower frame rate. Frames are pipelined.
  - jinglebells 7y ago
    Yes... is it possible the other two are niche because we can't do them with the current infrastructure? Computers used to be niche, not everyone had one. That's not how technological progression is made though.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

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.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      Nobody in this discussion is a monopoly. U.S. cellular service has less market concentration than: cell phones, mobile operating systems, e-commerce, mobile phone operating systems, web browsers, or search.
      - GauntletWizard 7y ago
        One of the hardest learned lessons of the twentieth century was that you didn't need collusion for a duopoly to become a monopoly. We have four major carriers, everyone else leases their bandwidth. They don't talk to each other, but their deals are a subtle form of signaling, and they have arrived at a monoplistic market, even with competition. Several rational actors with complete public information can still collaborate just by their actions alone. There's an entire category of "Hat Puzzles" [1] that involve extracting information from other players moves. The big four (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) don't need to collude to arrive at a stagnant, uncompetitive market. They have found an equalibrium that benefits all of them, and would hurt any who attempted "competition". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_puzzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_puzzle
        ianai 7y ago
        That’s a very straightforward explanation of market concentration! Thank you! I wish people better understood how monopolistic power harms everybody. It results in false scarcity trade offs, for instance. But that’s abstract.
        rayiner 7y ago
        You can’t just hand wave and say that because price coordination is possible, it’s happening. You have to tie your theory to the facts. Sprint and T-Mobile offer dramatically lower pricing, so there can’t be price coordination. There is no carving up of the market—the service area of the four carriers mostly overlap. In the LTE era, there is very little barrier to switching. (All the carriers offer big switching incentives.) Capital expenditures remain enormous across the board. What exactly is the sign of lack of competition? In the last ten years, I can think of few pieces of tech that’s gotten better faster than cell service. When the iPhone 3GS came out, you could get peak speeds up to 2-3 Mbps. On my XR, I’ve gotten 100 Mbps+. That factor of 20-30 increase is about the same as the increase in iPhone CPU performance over that time (which itself has been a stupendous success story). Maybe GPUs have improved faster? Certainly not desktop CPUs, or mobile or desktop operating systems, or web browsers, or search.
enraged_camel 7y ago
Wait, so companies are potentially not meeting the terms and conditions of the subsidies they receive, and this is somehow the government’s fault?
- cglace 7y ago
  The government not policing the deal would certainly be their fault.
  - enraged_camel 7y ago
    Is the government intentionally not policing it due to nefarious reasons, or do they simply not have the money and/or the expertise to police it?
    - notatoad 7y ago
      it's not really a question of expertise, if you don't have it you can hire it. And as long as they keep giving out more subsidies, it can't really be a question of not having enough money either.
      - enraged_camel 7y ago
        You can hire expertise, assuming you have the budget for it. And that budget is completely separate from the pot of money out of which subsidies are doled.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        notatoad 7y ago
        >And that budget is completely separate from the pot of money out of which subsidies are doled. but there's no reason that has to be true, other than "that's the way it is". The money itself is fungible.
    - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 7y ago
The accusation is actually the opposite: https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2018/12/13/fcc-says-at-least-one-carrier-lied-about-4g-and-thats-not-all https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2018/12/13/fcc-says.... The subsidies are only given for areas that don’t have coverage currently. One national carrier is accused of overstating coverage in rural areas to keep subsidies from being given to rural cellular carriers. To get the subsidy, you’d want to understate the coverage. EDIT: Previously, I incorrectly stated there is no subsidy for cellular. I forgot about Obama’s Mobility Fund. Phase 1 was $300 million in 2012, and Phase 2 was planned to be about $450 million per year over the next ten years. But that’s halted at the moment. Note that annual capital expenditures by the big 4 cellular providers is $55 billion annually. You’re talking about a really tiny investment by the government in the most underserved areas, not something big enough to really influence the coverage map.

axaxs 7y ago

I'm inclined to agree. It seems TMobile is the only one going after low band, long range stuff with their band 71. ATT/Verizon seem full steam ahead on their short range clusters. That's fine, but I'll take coverage over speed any day, and I'm sure most would agree.

kurthr 7y ago

Agreed, 5G is probably better to support very dense areas with adequate coverage, conventions and stadiums would be examples, I agree... that's not where I have issues. The US is not that dense, while other countries are. I think delaying rollout here isn't such a problem. I wish 5G had addressed the data and meta-data security model for wireless communications. If that had also been targeted, it would have mitigated a lot of current concerns.

deelowe 7y ago

Isn't this problem the reason 5g includes specs for microcells? I think 3g coverage in dense areas is a spectrum issue.

Merrill 7y ago

5G can eliminate the need to provide fiber or cable to the home. Instead, radio is used for the last hundreds of meters. Physical drops into homes are expensive to install and maintain.

sroussey 7y ago
mm 5G stops at the wall/window and doesn’t make it indoors.
- matthewmacleod 7y ago
  That’s really not a problem with an outdoor antenna though. I think the idea is that 5G would be used as the last mile carrier into some kind of CPE.
  - ianai 7y ago
    Also we already have a model for bringing weak signals into the home through antennas-even roof mounted.
- Merrill 7y ago
  A clear glass window is about a 10 dB drop at 28 GHz. Windows with film and foil-faced insulation in walls result in more like a 20 dB drop. The obvious solution is a CPE in the window that converts to WiFi within the dwelling. Alternatively, use the sub-6 GHz bands. The end game by whatever means is that all the cords are cut and radio is the ubiquitous connection technology.
- anticensor 7y ago
  High-speed modes of 5G are like that. Sub-5Ghz modes of 5G-NR also exist.
  - sroussey 7y ago
    Yeah, that’s why I said mm 5G. Curious... what is the sub-6 speed increases in 5G over LTE?

Nokinside 7y ago

The benefit to rural areas comes from Low-band FDD. It will come maybe a year later because current 5G chipsets don't support low-band FDD spectrum yet. Low-band FDD 5G is cheaper to deploy and more energy efficient and yet provides more bandwith than existing 4G. 5G home modems will become very popular in rural areas. Besides, roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas. Why should 5G deployment wait for the rest.

reaperducer 7y ago
Besides, roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas. Are the 20% who live in rural places not full Americans who do not deserve something simply because of their geography? I hope you don't like eating, using a computer, or living in a house because those are the people who grow your food, mine your minerals, and cut your lumber. Why should 5G deployment wait for the rest. No one is saying wait. They're saying that there's no need to hurry through a major deployment that delivers only minor benefits.
- Nokinside 7y ago
  No hurry means no American startups providing new types of applications and services that 5g can provide. US has no companies selling 4g/lte/5g infrastructure for carriers, maybe the US won't have startups selling services either.
- notatoad 7y ago
  When you make the decision to live in a rural area, you know that you're giving up a lot of the conveniences that you take for granted when living in a city. For most people who live in rural areas, slightly worse cell coverage is a perfectly acceptable tradeoff to not having to deal with the noise, crime, and crowding of cities. Nobody deserves 5G.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    When you make the decision to live in a rural area, you know that you're giving up a lot of the conveniences that you take for granted when living in a city Are you under the impression that when the stork is delivering babies, it asks them where they want to live? There is a subset of people who choose to live in rural areas. But they are not a majority. And the remainder shouldn't be condescended to as if they made a bad life decision and are being punished for not wanting to live in a city. Nobody deserves 5G I'm not arguing that they do. But there are an awful lot of people in this thread who are OK if 3G and 4G never finish rolling out in rural areas as long as they, themselves, get gigabit 5G connections.

fakeslimshady 7y ago

I would love to have higher bandwidth as would most IT related professionals. Thats been true since the days of analog modems.

jinglebells 7y ago

5G doesn't solve a bandwidth problem, it solves a latency problem. 4G has a latency of ~50ms, 5G is more like 1ms. 50ms is noticeable in areas like remote robot control, video conferencing, remote surgery etc.

kylec 7y ago
Video conferencing works just fine with 50ms latency, and the other two are very niche
- anticensor 7y ago
  50ms latency means 20fps max. No cinematically smooth pictures.
  - pkolaczk 7y ago
    Latency doesn't affect frame rate. It affects... well, latency. 50 ms is perfectly fine for video and audio. And 4G actually is capable of much lower latency. I get pings at around 20 ms in Poland. 50 ms was achievable on 3G (HSPA+).
    - anticensor 7y ago
      I assumed full-live (fresh frame comes strictly after previous one), not quasi-live.
      - pkolaczk 7y ago
        That still doesn't imply lower frame rate. Frames are pipelined.
- jinglebells 7y ago
  Yes... is it possible the other two are niche because we can't do them with the current infrastructure? Computers used to be niche, not everyone had one. That's not how technological progression is made though.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]