4 ms·
Sorry, but this "study" is fluff. I've worked in telecom and for the DOD. There are many people in these organizations whose careers depend on continual teleco
by freyr 7y ago
Sorry, but this "study" is fluff.
I've worked in telecom and for the DOD. There are many people in these organizations whose careers depend on continual telecom infrastructure upgrades, and so they spend their days writing reports like these. They're filled with scare tactics about being left behind, but there's virtually no substantive discussion about the tangible benefits of 5G. There's some vague references to IOT, but this just further discredits the report IMO because IOT data tends to be small, adoption of IOT tends to be overstated, and I've seen no compelling evidence that IOT is threatening to exhaust the capacity of our network infrastructure.
The actual threat here is that there are only three cellular networking companies (Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia), none of which are US-based, and Huawei has taken the lead. But buying a bunch of Ericsson/Nokia equipment and rolling out 5G is not going to fix this.
I worked for one of the three companies in Silicon Valley for several years. They paid a non-competitive salary with no stock options, and eventually the skilled people left for greener pastures. The company survives on hiring naive recent graduates who are here on Visas and have limited job mobility. I don't have high expectations for them, and the U.S. buying more 5G equipment from them will not fix the underlying problems.
- jorblumesea 7y agoWhether 5G is superior is completely missing the point. Countries are adopting and buying these devices anyways. So why would the US lose out on that huge amount of money and economic power? Widespread 5G adoption is coming whether you like it or not. So, we can either accept the reality of the situation or stubbornly lose out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. I truly don't understand your position here.
- corodra 7y agoYou defeated your own argument. If it's not superior or not needed, why does it matter? That's literally the joke from the movie Canadian Bacon: "Why are the Canadians so advanced in zamboni technology?" That being part of the public reason to invade Canada. You're also making a "keeping up with the Joneses" argument. "Oh my God, they have it! I need it to! Or I might be left behind!" "What is it?" "I don't know, but I know I have to have it!" Japan is pretty advanced in toilet tech too. That's WAY more useful at this point. Slap some AI into that with your phone so they track what you eat and can predict when you're going to take a shit. Then, it'll pre-warm the toilet seat for you. Compared to 4G, I'm not going to die waiting an extra few seconds to watch a youtube video while bored at the DMV because I forgot to bring a book. It would be nice for telecom and municipalities to maintain current infrastructure better so they can reduce costs. A savings that should go to users. Instead of always buying new shit when they just paid off the old equipment.
- pertymcpert 7y agoYou're not providing any concrete evidence. What exactly is being lost? Where would those billions of dollars come from? If you have limited resources, why not spend it on NASA or universal healthcare instead? What about the ROI there? Why not spend it on funding the NIH, the EPA, or subsidies for green energy?
- freyr 7y agoI'm not understanding your position. Could you clarify what you're actually advocating we do? Are you suggesting we make a massive investment in Ericsson/Nokia 5G equipment and roll it out nationwide? That's costing us billions, not making us billions. For technology that may never provide any significant benefit. Or that we manufacture 5G in-house? No U.S. company makes cellular infrastructure. Even if we could somehow incentivize a company to do so (which again, would likely cost us many billions), they could never do so in time. We could buy out Ericsson or Nokia, but they're now well behind Huawei, there's no obvious buyer, they're mostly situated overseas, and would likely be a poor investment.