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There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In plac
by _bxg1 7y ago
There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast.
I can only assume it's a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)
- didibus 7y agoAnd honestly, they should start by improving home internet. It's already at the point where 4G is often more reliable.
- thekyle 7y agoI wish it was as easy to get people enthusiastic about other networking upgrades like IPv6.
- np_tedious 7y agoYou can hear some particularly wild assertions like this in the long running commercial throughout the past few episodes of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast. They are formatted as conversation between Gladwell and an AT&T exec. It always starts with "what are some things that might be enabled if bandwidth improved and latency decreased" and then just jumps immediately to some Internet of Things utopia.
- dmix 7y agoI'd love to hear this, sounds cringey. Edit: weird it's a 3 short episode advertisement thing, a "live-read" ad in an interview format. These Pop science people are a great marketing/hype vector. I'm curious how much AT&T paid for this. https://youtu.be/EccF6jR3CFo https://youtu.be/EccF6jR3CFo https://youtu.be/n5AWdU75c1w https://youtu.be/n5AWdU75c1w https://youtu.be/UKaIg102CAU https://youtu.be/UKaIg102CAU The ATT guy said 5g will solve bike deaths by having your bike talk to the stop light and other cars, but with machine learning! It seems to have the same disconnect from the real world implementations that the AI sales hucksters are pushing, like those IBM Watson ads that were very obviously (to every programmer) being over sold to big businesses.
- reaperducer 7y agoThe ATT guy said 5g will solve bike deaths by having your bike talk to the stop light and other cars, but with machine learning! Reminds me of all the garbage that went around in the transition from AMPS to digital. I had a co-worker tell me her phone was better than mine because mine was only Edge, but hers was PCS! The AT&T guy should have put an "e" in front of it to tap the nostalgia for 90's marketing nonsense. eMachines, eBike, etailor, etc... People will love 5G because it's one more G than 4G. And then AT&T can call it's version 6Ge.
- cookingrobot 7y agoFunny you say that - my AT&T phone currently shows that I’m using “5G E”, where the “E” apparently stands for “evolution”, which means while it’s not 5G speed yet it might become that fast in the future. It’s basically marketing fraud. https://www.heapooh.com/apple-iphones-5ge-att-network/ https://www.heapooh.com/apple-iphones-5ge-att-network/
- Causality1 7y agoIndeed. What's the point in being able to use up the 22GB data cap on my "unlimited" plan in five minutes instead of seventy minutes?
- tzs 7y agoYou only need about 70 Kbit/second to use 22 GB in a month. Would you be happy with a wireless plan that only gave you 70 Kbit/second? Probably not. For the large number of people, probably a majority, who in most months don't hit their caps their two main annoyances with wireless performance are poor signal and things taking too long.
- Causality1 7y agoYep. I'm just making the argument that there's no quality of life difference between a 40 megabit mobile connection and a 700 megabit one. If 5G came with a massive range improvement instead of a speed boost I'd be excited, but it doesn't. I can't check email at my grandparent's house now and I still won't be able to after 5G deployment.
- rhino369 7y agoThe reason their are low caps like 22GB is because LTE networks have limited bandwdith. These 5G networks will have 10X bandwidth. Eventually, the carriers will increase bandwidth caps.
- Causality1 7y agoThat wasn't true for 3G/4G. Unlimited 3G plans were truly unlimited, and for a while 4G plans were also truly unlimited. My highest data usage in a month was 144GB. At no point in time were "unlimited" plans more restricted than they are now and there is no evidence that trend will suddenly reverse itself with 5G.
- ma2rten 7y agoThis is remind me of when Trump gave a statement about 5G. He said something like "Right now we have 5G, which is great. Soon we will have 6G which will be even better."
- asciident 7y agoEverything I've heard about it indicates that it's a trash technology. Unless you're standing next to an emitter, it's no faster than 4G and potentially even slower. Like you walk one block or behind a wall and it's not good anymore. So you gotta put one of these up on every block. I'm banking on it being a complete dud, like 3D televisions.
- renaudg 7y agoMaybe you'll be interested to hear from actual 5G users before making uninformed claims. I have home wireless broadband in central London (no other good broadband offering in my street) and was upgraded from 4G to 5G last week. I went from an average of 5-10Mbps at peak times and 20Mbps max on 4G, to 150-250Mbps peak time and 350MBps max on 5G, on the same carrier (Three). Enough said.
- wikibob 7y agoHow did you manage to get upgraded?
- renaudg 7y agoIt's available commercially. http://www.three.co.uk/5g http://www.three.co.uk/5g
- hyperbovine 7y agoIs it? I don’t really see how that contradicts what op was saying.
- ptero 7y agoBut does it matter for you? I know it would not for me. I can certainly find counterexamples, but for me the last leg bandwidth is seldom the bottleneck. My 2c.
- renaudg 7y agoBack in the day I didn't think upgrading from a 56K PSTN modem to DSL broadband would matter that much to me. I was naively thinking in terms of downloading things a bit faster, the classic futurologist mistake of seeing things through today's frame of reference. What happened instead is that it enabled Youtube, Skype, Facetime, and that did change the world.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> at best it's just... faster internet Counterpoint: streaming audio and video were singularly enabled by faster internet. That is restructuring multibillion-dollar industries. The iPhone, one could argue, and through it real-time social media, are products of mobile internet. There are legitimate new capabilities that will likely erupt from cheaper, faster mobile internet. If the playground is in Shenzhen versus Silicon Valley, that’s where resources should be allocated to explore that potential. I’m not arguing for 5G. (I don’t know enough about it.) But “it’s just faster internet” is a facile counterargument.
- clairity 7y agopervasive AR/VR is supposed to be the killer app for 5G, but i'm personally not excited about it (à la 3D TV). just give me the lower prices we were promised by the carrier oligopoly in exchange for all those governmental concessions (not holding my breath).
- wongarsu 7y agoSure, livestreaming videos to VR headsets would be great, and the desirable 2x8k@120hz would require 5G. But if that's the use case then there's no need to hurry with 5G since most applications would be just fine with local wifi and haven't proven significant demand.
- michaelmrose 7y agoYou can't necessarily prove demand for even retroactively obvious products without the products sometimes. I don't think VR is something you are extremely likely to do on the go. AR on the other hand has potential.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago360 video is not going to take off because it’s a sucky experience. “Real” VR with positional tracking makes you feel like you’re in another space, and has lots of potential for that reason. 360 video does not.
- sambull 7y agoProvides more throughput for mass surveillance systems, that will totally reshape society. Think 'social credit' systems. Servicing these customers will be the bread and butter.
- dontbenebby 7y ago>There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society It won't reshape society, but it could reshape geopolitics. The US has had a unique position to monitor the internet thus far. With 5G that could shift (if large swathes of the world use Chinese hardware).
- konschubert 7y agoIt’s basically a bunch of glorified WiFi hotspots.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 7y agoMy sense is that this is all completely driven by the need to have something new to sell.
- HyperTalk2 7y agoThey want to be able to easily boil the organs of any target by simply typing coordinates in 3D space for multiple towers to focus their beams on. It's a weapon pretending to be a useful innocent technology so no one will protest its widespread deployment.
- godelski 7y ago640 KB is all you'll ever need!
- dustycowboy 7y agoThe bigger problem right now are the tiny data caps. Allowing users to use 1TB a month of 4G data would be a much bigger game changer.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoIt’s faster by an order of magnitude. As in all things, every order brings new changes distinguishable from the previous order.
- tus88 7y agoI get the feeling and have been asking the same thing. It wasn't like this for 4G. Is it because it will replace wired internet as well? Or the ubiquitous nodes allow detailed location tracking? It will be managed by a skynet inspired AI? Or the fact China has taken the lead in implementing it? Whatever the case it's a bit weird and I wonder what we don't know.
- apexalpha 7y agoI work at an ISP and even internally people are parotting this '5G will change the world'. They said it about 4G as well, and sure, a lot became possible with mobile devices because of it. But all in all, it's just faster internet.
- jnordwick 7y agoUmm.. 4g did change the world though. "Just faster internet" is like calling the planes "just a faster truck"
- rayiner 7y agoAmong other things, 5G holds the promise of making traditional wired telecom regulation obsolete, by getting rid of the last mile problem, reducing the tendency toward natural monopoly, and enabling competition.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoOn a cautionary note, the past 25 years of technology have promised that they "enable competition" (anyone else remember the late 90s ethos of "anyone with a computer can publish on the web!"), yet here we are stuck with Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. which are some of the largest monopolies in world history.
- nilram 7y agoI don’t see how it reduces competition since the technology requires even more bass stations then does 4G. More infrastructure equals more cost equals more investment required. Only the big players can afford this, and there’s only a few big players left.
- rayiner 7y ago5G drastically eases the bottleneck on available spectrum. There’s tons of spectrum up in the millimeter wave bands, which means you don’t need to spend billions up front on spectrum to start deploying the technology. At the same time wireless dramatically reduces the cost per household served. The fan-out problem for wired internet is brutal. It can cost almost as much to bring fiber from a subdivision into each house as it does to bring it to the subdivision in the first place. (It’s way easier to just string fiber along some utility poles to the edge of a subdivision than to then trench it through a couple of hundred yards.)
- Spooky23 7y agoPerhaps in a perfect world where a competent local government owns the poles. You may be shocked to hear that Verizon or Spectrum won’t provide cheap or timely service to competitors looking to rent pole space.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoI definitely didn't understand anything about 5G being better at fixed locations, e.g. factories, where the comparison isn't really against 4G, but against wifi. What benefit does 5G have over the latest 802.11 spec?
- avianlyric 7y agoI can understand why “faster internet” is good or even great thing. We’re seeing all kinds of new streaming tech that can take advantage of more bandwidth. Something that does confuse me though, is the way 5G is being touted as the solution to better home internet in the US. It only going to fast in cities, which are the perfect place for fibre or even wireless ISP using normal WiFi running point-to-point between buildings. US poor home internet seems to be driven by lack of competition, 5G is one way of increasing competition. But surely trying to legislate local-loop unbundling (which is what happens in most of the world) would be a cheaper quicker way to drive competition? Coming from the privileged position of living in a place with a cheap unlimited 1Gpbs home internet connection, it’s hard to see what 5G brings to the table, except perhaps a better mobile connection in train stations and concert arenas.
- pas 7y agoWell, if 5G brings base station prices (and all the related equipment's) even further down, it could help poor communities. But so far the problem seems to be simple density related. Laying/installing new cabling does not worth it in many places, because of the overhead costs. (The fixed costs.)
- firecall 7y agoIn Australia I hear the parroted argument that our NBN effort was pointless because 5G will save us all :-/
- antpls 7y ago5G is designed to enable the Internet of Things, not just to improve speed and watch videos.