6 ms·

> but there sure will be later on Like what? I remember having a 3G iPhone and actively looking forward to 4G because bandwidth actually limited certain tasks.

by _bxg1 7y ago

> but there sure will be later on Like what? I remember having a 3G iPhone and actively looking forward to 4G because bandwidth actually limited certain tasks. Since 4G has become widespread, I've never felt that way. The only time I notice my phone's finite bandwidth is when buildings are blocking my signal, which will only be more prevalent with 5G because millimeter waves can't penetrate materials. There is literally no media that my device makes use of that it can't download in a comfortable amount of time. With modern compression technology, even streaming HD video is basically seamless over cell towers. Years ago I was able to play online games by tethering my Xbox to my phone. I just don't have a use for more bandwidth.

unapologetic 7y ago
I would honestly much rather have consistent 4g speeds than try to jump to something faster. In the middle of Seattle there are still holes in coverage where I data speeds slow to a complete crawl.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Exactly. And of course the situation is much worse anywhere outside of a major city. Pushing a newer, faster, shorter-range technology is the opposite of what needs to be worked on.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Isn't this exactly what 5G offers? The mmWave stuff is largely a sideshow, but the big win was supposed to be allowing more people to share LTE frequencies without interfering with each other as much I thought?
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Since these towers have shorter range and less penetration, worse coverage is next to certain.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  Coverage holes are the real problem in American wireless. It's awful in rural areas, and often still pretty bad around big cities. When carriers claim they have coverage of 300 M pops, I wonder if it is more like 220 M pops. All the time I go to places that the carrier maps say have coverage and there is no signal. Efforts to parcel out money to improve rural cell service fell through because there are no useful coverage maps.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    I spent last weekend in a town with no cell service. Amazingly, every person there didn't suddenly die. There weren't pedophiles crawling all over the place looking for children to snatch. The town didn't burn down. None of the fears that cell companies have put into us came to pass. People simply didn't have a phone stuck in their pockets everywhere they went. When people wanted to communicate, they went to the little bar/restaurant next to the sheriff's office. Lots of people talking. Trading jokes. Watching sports on satellite TV. Kids outside playing whatever shouty games kids play. Not one cell phone. And somehow the world didn't end. Go figure.
    - detaro 7y ago
      Fears nobody except you brought up, so why are they relevant to a discussion if people would prefer more coverage to greater speeds?
    - PaulHoule 7y ago
      I think it is just a factor that limits the business. I don't own a smartphone or even a dumbphone. At times I had two prepaid phones, one on the Verizon network, one on the AT&T network. Neither one worked at my house. Between the two prepaid phones I could sometimes talk on the phone while traveling, whether that means driving around Upstate NY or visiting big cities. At one point I was about to put another $100 on my Tracfone for a year's service and realized I'd accumulated 4500 minutes. Given that I don't talk on the phone much and that the coverage is poor in places where I go, I don't even have a cheap phone plan, never mind an expensive phone plan. So in my case, U.S. carriers could increase their revenue if they improved their coverage.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > In the middle of Seattle there are still holes in coverage where I data speeds slow to a complete crawl. Ironically, this is the one situation where 5G is actually useful. The unambiguous benefit to 5G is that it increases the total load capacity of the cell network. People who live in areas where the network operates at capacity large amounts of the time (such as Seattle) will see an increase in reliability even if they don't see an increase in speed.
matwood 7y ago
> The only time I notice my phone's finite bandwidth is when buildings are blocking my signal, which will only be more prevalent with 5G because millimeter waves can't penetrate materials. I'm pretty bearish on 5g in the short/medium term, but if carriers do deploy 5g it should mean many more smaller cell base stations. These extra stations should help in cities.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Lots of little towers sounds logistically more challenging than a few big ones. And it's the sort of thing that requires constant reevaluation as new large buildings go up, shadowing regions that once had good coverage. Will carriers stay on top of the matter, or will coverage start to suffer? I'd bet on the later.
  - matwood 7y ago
    I agree. That’s why I said “if” and “should”. :)
pochamago 7y ago
Real time AR streaming. We likely can't get glasses with the necessary processor down to the right form factor, but they could offload that work to a server if you had 5g in place
- Barrin92 7y ago
  I feel like the last few years have been a constant letdown when it comes to consumer AR or VR. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of appetite for it even if you look at more powerful home systems. With Carmack leaving at Occulus and a lot of the startups not really amounting to anything I'm not so sure that this is just an issue of not enough mobile bandwidth.
  - moron4hire 7y ago
    I feel like you don't actually pay attention to VR and are just saying what you hear in the tech press.
    - Barrin92 7y ago
      that feels unreasonably abrasive. I know one or two people in the industry who have recently left VR firms and they painted a pretty pessimistic picture for me, so I'm not just going by what I read in the press.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > There just doesn't seem to be a lot of appetite for it even if you look at more powerful home systems. Speaking for myself, I have no actual interest in AR/VR. It doesn't bring me anything that I need or would use for more than the novelty factor. I suspect that I'm in the majority here. Where this tech shines is in niche markets -- gaming, industrial uses, and so forth.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  > We likely can't get glasses with the necessary processor down to the right form factor That's silly. We're already pretty close, and if they really had to offload some things then the powerful computer that's a couple feet away in your pocket would make much more sense. Plus, as I said we already stream HD video on 4G networks without much trouble.
julianozen 7y ago
I think perhaps being able to replace cable is the biggest benefit. This will force prices down in certain markets and allow consumers to choose between more consumer friendly companies then comcast
- gambiting 7y ago
  Cable? As in....TV? At a risk of sounding dismissive - won't TV be dead by then? I'm 29 and I literally don't know anyone who watches actual live TV anymore. Well, no, that's not true, my grandparents do. But even my mum and my wife's parents have already switched to netflix-only situation, regular TV is just so full of ads and nonsense that it doesn't make any sense to pay for it.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    I think the parent comment was referring to hard-line internet, i.e. fiber and coax ("cable").
  - smabie 7y ago
    I like TV because it tells me what to watch. I don’t have to choose. I think other people derive a lot of value from this as well. I don’t have TV but I’m at a hotel right now and watching TV while drinking beer (and typing this I guess) is pretty damn nice. It’s possible that feeling would wear off if I had it around regularly, though. But I bet TV will still be a major thing, say, 30 years in the future. Right now 75% of households in the US pay for TV, so I think your comment is a little overblown.
    - jedberg 7y ago
      > It’s possible that feeling would wear off if I had it around regularly, though. Over Christmas/New Years I was at my parents place, and they have DirectTV. The first few days were nice. After that I realized I was just watching for the sake of watching just to see what came on next, and it was all reruns of stuff I've already seen. I am a big fan of curation, but I much prefer the curation of seeing what the programmers put on in prime time and then watching it on demand, or Netflix's recommendations.
cobookman 7y ago
Using cellular for home internet is what I hope 5G brings us. 5G is fast enough to the point where I could just ditch my cable internet line, assuming there's an adequate bandwidth cap.
- the_minh 7y ago
  I haven't had DSL for 4 years now. 4G rocks and is cheap, at least in France!
gscott 7y ago
T-Mobile has launched 600mhz 5g which solves the 5g through buildings problem. Not as fast as millimeter-wave but will get 5g to everyone.
- fsh 7y ago
  What's the difference to LTE+ though? You already get hundreds of megabits and a few ten ms of latency in the 600 MHz band right now.
- SkyMarshal 7y ago
  Any idea what equipment provider built T-Mobile’s 600mhz 5G?

by _bxg1 7y ago

unapologetic 7y ago

I would honestly much rather have consistent 4g speeds than try to jump to something faster. In the middle of Seattle there are still holes in coverage where I data speeds slow to a complete crawl.

_bxg1 7y ago
Exactly. And of course the situation is much worse anywhere outside of a major city. Pushing a newer, faster, shorter-range technology is the opposite of what needs to be worked on.
jandrese 7y ago
Isn't this exactly what 5G offers? The mmWave stuff is largely a sideshow, but the big win was supposed to be allowing more people to share LTE frequencies without interfering with each other as much I thought?
- catalogia 7y ago
  Since these towers have shorter range and less penetration, worse coverage is next to certain.
PaulHoule 7y ago
Coverage holes are the real problem in American wireless. It's awful in rural areas, and often still pretty bad around big cities. When carriers claim they have coverage of 300 M pops, I wonder if it is more like 220 M pops. All the time I go to places that the carrier maps say have coverage and there is no signal. Efforts to parcel out money to improve rural cell service fell through because there are no useful coverage maps.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I spent last weekend in a town with no cell service. Amazingly, every person there didn't suddenly die. There weren't pedophiles crawling all over the place looking for children to snatch. The town didn't burn down. None of the fears that cell companies have put into us came to pass. People simply didn't have a phone stuck in their pockets everywhere they went. When people wanted to communicate, they went to the little bar/restaurant next to the sheriff's office. Lots of people talking. Trading jokes. Watching sports on satellite TV. Kids outside playing whatever shouty games kids play. Not one cell phone. And somehow the world didn't end. Go figure.
  - detaro 7y ago
    Fears nobody except you brought up, so why are they relevant to a discussion if people would prefer more coverage to greater speeds?
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    I think it is just a factor that limits the business. I don't own a smartphone or even a dumbphone. At times I had two prepaid phones, one on the Verizon network, one on the AT&T network. Neither one worked at my house. Between the two prepaid phones I could sometimes talk on the phone while traveling, whether that means driving around Upstate NY or visiting big cities. At one point I was about to put another $100 on my Tracfone for a year's service and realized I'd accumulated 4500 minutes. Given that I don't talk on the phone much and that the coverage is poor in places where I go, I don't even have a cheap phone plan, never mind an expensive phone plan. So in my case, U.S. carriers could increase their revenue if they improved their coverage.
JohnFen 7y ago
> In the middle of Seattle there are still holes in coverage where I data speeds slow to a complete crawl. Ironically, this is the one situation where 5G is actually useful. The unambiguous benefit to 5G is that it increases the total load capacity of the cell network. People who live in areas where the network operates at capacity large amounts of the time (such as Seattle) will see an increase in reliability even if they don't see an increase in speed.

matwood 7y ago

> The only time I notice my phone's finite bandwidth is when buildings are blocking my signal, which will only be more prevalent with 5G because millimeter waves can't penetrate materials. I'm pretty bearish on 5g in the short/medium term, but if carriers do deploy 5g it should mean many more smaller cell base stations. These extra stations should help in cities.

catalogia 7y ago
Lots of little towers sounds logistically more challenging than a few big ones. And it's the sort of thing that requires constant reevaluation as new large buildings go up, shadowing regions that once had good coverage. Will carriers stay on top of the matter, or will coverage start to suffer? I'd bet on the later.
- matwood 7y ago
  I agree. That’s why I said “if” and “should”. :)

pochamago 7y ago

Real time AR streaming. We likely can't get glasses with the necessary processor down to the right form factor, but they could offload that work to a server if you had 5g in place

Barrin92 7y ago
I feel like the last few years have been a constant letdown when it comes to consumer AR or VR. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of appetite for it even if you look at more powerful home systems. With Carmack leaving at Occulus and a lot of the startups not really amounting to anything I'm not so sure that this is just an issue of not enough mobile bandwidth.
- moron4hire 7y ago
  I feel like you don't actually pay attention to VR and are just saying what you hear in the tech press.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    that feels unreasonably abrasive. I know one or two people in the industry who have recently left VR firms and they painted a pretty pessimistic picture for me, so I'm not just going by what I read in the press.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > There just doesn't seem to be a lot of appetite for it even if you look at more powerful home systems. Speaking for myself, I have no actual interest in AR/VR. It doesn't bring me anything that I need or would use for more than the novelty factor. I suspect that I'm in the majority here. Where this tech shines is in niche markets -- gaming, industrial uses, and so forth.
_bxg1 7y ago
> We likely can't get glasses with the necessary processor down to the right form factor That's silly. We're already pretty close, and if they really had to offload some things then the powerful computer that's a couple feet away in your pocket would make much more sense. Plus, as I said we already stream HD video on 4G networks without much trouble.

julianozen 7y ago

I think perhaps being able to replace cable is the biggest benefit. This will force prices down in certain markets and allow consumers to choose between more consumer friendly companies then comcast

gambiting 7y ago
Cable? As in....TV? At a risk of sounding dismissive - won't TV be dead by then? I'm 29 and I literally don't know anyone who watches actual live TV anymore. Well, no, that's not true, my grandparents do. But even my mum and my wife's parents have already switched to netflix-only situation, regular TV is just so full of ads and nonsense that it doesn't make any sense to pay for it.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I think the parent comment was referring to hard-line internet, i.e. fiber and coax ("cable").
- smabie 7y ago
  I like TV because it tells me what to watch. I don’t have to choose. I think other people derive a lot of value from this as well. I don’t have TV but I’m at a hotel right now and watching TV while drinking beer (and typing this I guess) is pretty damn nice. It’s possible that feeling would wear off if I had it around regularly, though. But I bet TV will still be a major thing, say, 30 years in the future. Right now 75% of households in the US pay for TV, so I think your comment is a little overblown.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    > It’s possible that feeling would wear off if I had it around regularly, though. Over Christmas/New Years I was at my parents place, and they have DirectTV. The first few days were nice. After that I realized I was just watching for the sake of watching just to see what came on next, and it was all reruns of stuff I've already seen. I am a big fan of curation, but I much prefer the curation of seeing what the programmers put on in prime time and then watching it on demand, or Netflix's recommendations.

cobookman 7y ago

Using cellular for home internet is what I hope 5G brings us. 5G is fast enough to the point where I could just ditch my cable internet line, assuming there's an adequate bandwidth cap.

the_minh 7y ago
I haven't had DSL for 4 years now. 4G rocks and is cheap, at least in France!

gscott 7y ago

T-Mobile has launched 600mhz 5g which solves the 5g through buildings problem. Not as fast as millimeter-wave but will get 5g to everyone.

fsh 7y ago
What's the difference to LTE+ though? You already get hundreds of megabits and a few ten ms of latency in the 600 MHz band right now.
SkyMarshal 7y ago
Any idea what equipment provider built T-Mobile’s 600mhz 5G?