8 ms·

I want 5G. There, you heard it. I’m not a telecom CEO and I’m not a politician. Edit: I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. I want ultra fa

by nxc18 6y ago

I want 5G. There, you heard it. I’m not a telecom CEO and I’m not a politician. Edit: I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. I want ultra fast reliable telecom in crowded cities. I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices.

antsar 6y ago
So you can exhaust the monthly high-speed data cap in 5 minutes instead of 5 days?
- nxc18 6y ago
  So I can use my mapping application when I’m in the park. So I can look up an earthquake that just happened when I’m in the lobby of a movie theater (that really happened, and the 4G network really is not capable of handling any sort of crowd at least not in my area).
  - wrkronmiller 6y ago
    > the 4G network really is not capable of handling any sort of crowd at least not in my area As someone living in NYC and using 4G daily with few problems, I suspect this is a problem of your telecom provider not having adequate infrastructure or having a bad configuration for handling many connections to a few nodes.
    - throwaway55554 6y ago
      > ... I suspect this is a problem of your telecom provider not having adequate infrastructure or having a bad configuration for handling many connections to a few nodes. Which they'll likely do for their 5G network as well because, well, telecoms do the minimum possible.
  - takeda 6y ago
    I live in LA and don't have this issues with crowds disabling me from using 4G. Regarding the earthquake, yes it is common that you can't access SCEC website right after an earthquake, but this is not a problem with 4G. You can have 10 gbps over fiber and the site still won't be accessible, because the site itself is bogged down by the traffic.
    - nxc18 6y ago
      In my case the site was google but yes individual sites are always at risk of going down.
      - takeda 6y ago
        So in that case I don't know what problems you have. I did not had these kind of issues. The only issues I had was that there was no cell phone signal in certain buildings, and 5G won't solve that.
    - asdff 6y ago
      Also in LA and I find 4G is not very reliable. Who is your carrier? I use verizon. Speeds are bad and my connection drops all the time. I'm by ktown so maybe it's the density at play compared to other areas.
      - takeda 6y ago
        T-Mobile. Was a Verizon user until 2011 or 12. Actually when I switched T-Mobile felt like an upgrade in LA (especially it worked inside buildings that Verizon didn't), it was not great in rural areas but never had problems in LA.
        akiselev 6y ago
        Second this. Verizon was basically unusable in wide swaths of the LA metro area but TMobile is unusable in wide swaths of rural areas. In mountainous areas like San Diego east county it becomes even more annoying: the I8 has decent coverage until like El Centro, CA (enough to stream HD video) but even a km from the freeway the signal completely disappears. Often times the only real option is AT&T.
  - Retric 6y ago
    4G can work even in crowded convention centers. If you’re having an issue due to overcrowding, that’s a problem with your telecom not really 4G.
- TomMarius 6y ago
  That's my dream.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  My operator has 60 GB on their 4G plan and unlimited on their 5G plan
dylan-m 6y ago
These are reasonable, but what are these IoT devices and why can't they connect to your wifi, or to a zigbee network? Why do they need their own IP addresses?
- nxc18 6y ago
  I’d like to be able to put things like raspberry pi weather sensors, etc outside of the range of WiFi. I know in a lot of places especially on larger properties, there is going to be cellular coverage but it is prohibitively expensive to install WiFi. I’m honestly tired of all of these ‘but why do you need it?’ arguments. The same was said about electricity, long before anyone envisioned dishwashers, game consoles, blenders, etc. But why aren’t gas lamps good enough? Heck, the same thing could be said about WiFi. 10 years ago no one would think a WiFi network should need to support 100+ devices, but here we are in 2020.
  - kingdomcome50 6y ago
    See: https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html We aren't talking about the difference between electricity and gas. We are talking about the difference between a fast cellular network and slightly faster cellular network.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      Then would something like the difference between 1 gbps and 10gbps ethernet apply? In the large majority of American households that have wired computers, 1gbps could handle almost any task including fast file transfers, yet 10gbps is something you can purchase if you think you need it and using it will result in even faster speeds.
      - kingdomcome50 6y ago
        Do you think the difference between 1gbps and 10gbps is a similar jump forward, in terms of progress, as the advent of electricity as a replacement for gas? I understand that the GP's argument is that the effects of a particular technological advancement cannot always be understood at the time of, or before, its introduction. But we aren't talking about gun powder here... We are discussing an incremental change to an already existing technology. As Asimov explains, the velocity of "progress", specifically in areas we already have come to understand in some way, diminishes with each step forward.
takeda 6y ago
> I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices. It never will be though. Whatever frequencies you can do wirelessly you can do over a wire without the interference of other users using the same frequency at the same time. Also a lot of promises 5G offers only sound good on paper. The higher frequencies don't travel well through walls (that's why it uses lower frequencies as well) and the maximum speed being talked can only be obtained during tests, but in the real deployment it has to be shared over all users. Another problem is that the speeds don't mean sh*t if we have the same data caps, in fact higher speed is worse, because many applications will switch to a higher bitrate and consume more data, even when there's no noticeable difference on a phone.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  >> I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices. > It never will be though. Whatever frequencies you can do wirelessly you can do over a wire without the interference of other users using the same frequency at the same time. this is true in principle, but not necessarily in practice. I suspect it will hold for the near/medium future, but I can imagine a world where much more money is invested in improving mobile networks than home cable connections, causing the latter to stagnate. most "normal" people I know don't even own a desktop computer. there are no devices in their homes that connect via ethernet (or even have an ethernet port without a dongle!). at a certain point, it might make sense to ditch the home modem/router altogether and scale up wifi networks to the point where they basically merge with cellular.
  - state_less 6y ago
    I agree the internet is increasingly carried over radio these days (e.g. WiFi, LTE, Satellite). Wireless still seems pretty young and crude yet. There seems to be plenty of room to grow with respect to negotiating power levels, frequency use, routing topologies and so on. I think big fiber backhauls are still going to be a thing though.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
close04 6y ago
> I want 5G You listed the theoretical advantages of 5G. Whether or not the practice mirrors theory is debatable. But I can't help but noticed you missed listing any disadvantage. Most people are completely unaware of any because they don't make it in the marketing leaflets. When you say 5G I can just as well read: I want close range, LoS connections, substantially higher power consumption for devices and increased complexity, higher costs, security concerns, and the inability to take advantage of the speed not only because it's purely theoretical but because data plans did not keep up in 99.9% of the world. Listing only benefits can make even an amputation sound like a great way to keep weight off. I'm all for new tech and advancements but if it feels like 1 step forward, 1 step back then it's not much of an advancement. It's half baked and pushed just to sell "the new stuff".
- nxc18 6y ago
  We don’t know about data plans because 5G hasn’t been widely deployed yet. The same could be said for 3G->4G transition, but then we started seeing caps move from 500MB to 10+GB. Line of sight connections are great in crowded cities. Large venues can install cells locally for even better performance, and wide deployment of these cells is an accepted part of the deployment. Power consumption is an issue, but that’s an issue that will improve over time and also applies to any technology upgrade in modern devices. I don’t list the downsides because each one is either so minor as to be a non-issue, is totally hypothetical and didn’t apply to previous generational upgrades, or a downside that applies to literally any new mobile technology and therefore doesn’t need to be said.
  - close04 6y ago
    > We don’t know about We also don't know how fast and reliable 5G will be (beyond the severely limited range) but it was at the top of your list of advantages. Some of the disadvantages of current Gees you mentioned seem to be exacerbated by your mobile carrier and they may very well apply to 5G. > each one is either so minor as to be a non-issue For the purpose of making your argument you were willing to just downplay every disadvantage, ignore it, or just glance over it, and pump up every advantage. Many others aren't. The reason 5G is going ahead as such (half baked and expensive, more so than 4G was in its time) is that most people don't know what they want, or what they get. But enough have the money and the promotional material says it's the thing to get. If it weren't for the slowing smartphone market nobody would have considered going ahead with this. But the phone market is catatonic so suddenly here you are convinced that your RPi with sensors can only work over 5G, ignoring that LoRa may be an even better choice for such applications. LoRa doesn't have great marketing though. WiFi is genuinely better for some of the applications you listed. Voice is still 4G. And the law of diminishing returns strongly suggests that the jump brings less noticeable real world difference than the numbers suggest.
Spooky23 6y ago
It won’t, because the favored status granted to carriers will put cable out of business, and you’ll be stuck with Ma Bell again.
FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
> I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. Don't leave the city then. 5G has very limited range and doesn't work in rural areas where there aren't enough customers to provide needed geographical coverage.
- asdff 6y ago
  Will it even be good in the city? I live in a city and 4G is pretty crap. Drops the connection all the time, speeds are poor, latency is high.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    My understanding is that 5G is specifically designed to improve that situation, at the expense of things like range and building penetration.
    - asdff 6y ago
      I understand that to do this you would need to blanket an area. I don't have any issue with that, it's the correct thing to do. What I do have issue with are these ISPs and telecoms are going to do a half assed job to maximize profit, just like they've done with every other technology in their possession. They can do this because you are beholden to them with no alternative in the market. Their track record is very poor to build reliable infrastructure, and for 5G to work you need reliable infrastructure. It doesn't matter what the specific technology is if you fail to build it optimally.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      The only way this works is if carriers invest in a ton more hardware, which means leasing more tower space, creating new tower space, getting creative with placing radios in areas where you can't really put towers, etc. That's expensive. What's also expensive -- sometimes even more expensive -- is running wiring to all those places to connect those radios to the backhaul network. I frankly do not expect US carriers to go to that expense, at least not universally.
innocenat 6y ago
> I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. Already possible with 4G/3G in many Asian countries. Your provider just sucks. > I want ultra fast reliable telecom in crowded cities. See above. > I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. Not gonna happen. FFTX is already at 10Gbp, and it is going higher as time pass.
- nxc18 6y ago
  Competitive doesn't have to mean faster. It just needs to be available and passable. 4G is pretty close in some markets, but with wide deployment of 5G mmWave, there might be just enough competition with the local cable monopoly to push better prices or speeds or both. For context I pay a lot for 150 Mbps and really don't have any choice in the matter.
- dharma1 6y ago
  6G - 1TB/s
mcguire 6y ago
Everywhere you go? What was the range of 5G, again?
foxrider 6y ago
I've not been excited about 3G, and I was only lukewarm about 4G, because 4G was meant to be something for laptops (still ended up in phones tho). But I am very excited about 5G - it's fundamentally different way if interconnecting stations is really cool. If it's half as good as the promise we will all see annoyances like super slow internet in dense areas or huge ping gone, and remote locations would get a huge step up from 4G. That's why I'm not upgrading my phone to something without 5G.
kelnos 6y ago
> I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. I want ultra fast reliable telecom in crowded cities. I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices. We don't have this today mainly because wireless carriers do the minimum required to compete with their minimal competition. It doesn't have that much to do with 4G vs. 5G or whatever. Even living in a city, I don't expect 5G to improve the situation all that much, unless carriers start really spending on their network. The ubiquity, reliability, and bandwidth will only be there if carriers make huge investments in their networks, which I don't expect will happen. You can certainly get what you want today, with 4G/LTE. You just have to go to a country with carriers that actually prioritize that, like Taiwan or Japan (and probably several other east/southeast Asian countries).
PunksATawnyFill 6y ago
Why? What massive files are you downloading on your phone? And IoT devices typically require tiny throughput. Is your electricity meter pumping out 4K video?

by nxc18 6y ago

antsar 6y ago

So you can exhaust the monthly high-speed data cap in 5 minutes instead of 5 days?

nxc18 6y ago
So I can use my mapping application when I’m in the park. So I can look up an earthquake that just happened when I’m in the lobby of a movie theater (that really happened, and the 4G network really is not capable of handling any sort of crowd at least not in my area).
- wrkronmiller 6y ago
  > the 4G network really is not capable of handling any sort of crowd at least not in my area As someone living in NYC and using 4G daily with few problems, I suspect this is a problem of your telecom provider not having adequate infrastructure or having a bad configuration for handling many connections to a few nodes.
  - throwaway55554 6y ago
    > ... I suspect this is a problem of your telecom provider not having adequate infrastructure or having a bad configuration for handling many connections to a few nodes. Which they'll likely do for their 5G network as well because, well, telecoms do the minimum possible.
- takeda 6y ago
  I live in LA and don't have this issues with crowds disabling me from using 4G. Regarding the earthquake, yes it is common that you can't access SCEC website right after an earthquake, but this is not a problem with 4G. You can have 10 gbps over fiber and the site still won't be accessible, because the site itself is bogged down by the traffic.
  - nxc18 6y ago
    In my case the site was google but yes individual sites are always at risk of going down.
    - takeda 6y ago
      So in that case I don't know what problems you have. I did not had these kind of issues. The only issues I had was that there was no cell phone signal in certain buildings, and 5G won't solve that.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Also in LA and I find 4G is not very reliable. Who is your carrier? I use verizon. Speeds are bad and my connection drops all the time. I'm by ktown so maybe it's the density at play compared to other areas.
    - takeda 6y ago
      T-Mobile. Was a Verizon user until 2011 or 12. Actually when I switched T-Mobile felt like an upgrade in LA (especially it worked inside buildings that Verizon didn't), it was not great in rural areas but never had problems in LA.
      - akiselev 6y ago
        Second this. Verizon was basically unusable in wide swaths of the LA metro area but TMobile is unusable in wide swaths of rural areas. In mountainous areas like San Diego east county it becomes even more annoying: the I8 has decent coverage until like El Centro, CA (enough to stream HD video) but even a km from the freeway the signal completely disappears. Often times the only real option is AT&T.
- Retric 6y ago
  4G can work even in crowded convention centers. If you’re having an issue due to overcrowding, that’s a problem with your telecom not really 4G.
TomMarius 6y ago
That's my dream.
kalleboo 6y ago
My operator has 60 GB on their 4G plan and unlimited on their 5G plan

dylan-m 6y ago

These are reasonable, but what are these IoT devices and why can't they connect to your wifi, or to a zigbee network? Why do they need their own IP addresses?

nxc18 6y ago
I’d like to be able to put things like raspberry pi weather sensors, etc outside of the range of WiFi. I know in a lot of places especially on larger properties, there is going to be cellular coverage but it is prohibitively expensive to install WiFi. I’m honestly tired of all of these ‘but why do you need it?’ arguments. The same was said about electricity, long before anyone envisioned dishwashers, game consoles, blenders, etc. But why aren’t gas lamps good enough? Heck, the same thing could be said about WiFi. 10 years ago no one would think a WiFi network should need to support 100+ devices, but here we are in 2020.
- kingdomcome50 6y ago
  See: https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html We aren't talking about the difference between electricity and gas. We are talking about the difference between a fast cellular network and slightly faster cellular network.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Then would something like the difference between 1 gbps and 10gbps ethernet apply? In the large majority of American households that have wired computers, 1gbps could handle almost any task including fast file transfers, yet 10gbps is something you can purchase if you think you need it and using it will result in even faster speeds.
    - kingdomcome50 6y ago
      Do you think the difference between 1gbps and 10gbps is a similar jump forward, in terms of progress, as the advent of electricity as a replacement for gas? I understand that the GP's argument is that the effects of a particular technological advancement cannot always be understood at the time of, or before, its introduction. But we aren't talking about gun powder here... We are discussing an incremental change to an already existing technology. As Asimov explains, the velocity of "progress", specifically in areas we already have come to understand in some way, diminishes with each step forward.

takeda 6y ago

> I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices. It never will be though. Whatever frequencies you can do wirelessly you can do over a wire without the interference of other users using the same frequency at the same time. Also a lot of promises 5G offers only sound good on paper. The higher frequencies don't travel well through walls (that's why it uses lower frequencies as well) and the maximum speed being talked can only be obtained during tests, but in the real deployment it has to be shared over all users. Another problem is that the speeds don't mean sh*t if we have the same data caps, in fact higher speed is worse, because many applications will switch to a higher bitrate and consume more data, even when there's no noticeable difference on a phone.

leetcrew 6y ago
>> I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices. > It never will be though. Whatever frequencies you can do wirelessly you can do over a wire without the interference of other users using the same frequency at the same time. this is true in principle, but not necessarily in practice. I suspect it will hold for the near/medium future, but I can imagine a world where much more money is invested in improving mobile networks than home cable connections, causing the latter to stagnate. most "normal" people I know don't even own a desktop computer. there are no devices in their homes that connect via ethernet (or even have an ethernet port without a dongle!). at a certain point, it might make sense to ditch the home modem/router altogether and scale up wifi networks to the point where they basically merge with cellular.
- state_less 6y ago
  I agree the internet is increasingly carried over radio these days (e.g. WiFi, LTE, Satellite). Wireless still seems pretty young and crude yet. There seems to be plenty of room to grow with respect to negotiating power levels, frequency use, routing topologies and so on. I think big fiber backhauls are still going to be a thing though.
  - leetcrew 6y ago

close04 6y ago

> I want 5G You listed the theoretical advantages of 5G. Whether or not the practice mirrors theory is debatable. But I can't help but noticed you missed listing any disadvantage. Most people are completely unaware of any because they don't make it in the marketing leaflets. When you say 5G I can just as well read: I want close range, LoS connections, substantially higher power consumption for devices and increased complexity, higher costs, security concerns, and the inability to take advantage of the speed not only because it's purely theoretical but because data plans did not keep up in 99.9% of the world. Listing only benefits can make even an amputation sound like a great way to keep weight off. I'm all for new tech and advancements but if it feels like 1 step forward, 1 step back then it's not much of an advancement. It's half baked and pushed just to sell "the new stuff".

nxc18 6y ago
We don’t know about data plans because 5G hasn’t been widely deployed yet. The same could be said for 3G->4G transition, but then we started seeing caps move from 500MB to 10+GB. Line of sight connections are great in crowded cities. Large venues can install cells locally for even better performance, and wide deployment of these cells is an accepted part of the deployment. Power consumption is an issue, but that’s an issue that will improve over time and also applies to any technology upgrade in modern devices. I don’t list the downsides because each one is either so minor as to be a non-issue, is totally hypothetical and didn’t apply to previous generational upgrades, or a downside that applies to literally any new mobile technology and therefore doesn’t need to be said.
- close04 6y ago
  > We don’t know about We also don't know how fast and reliable 5G will be (beyond the severely limited range) but it was at the top of your list of advantages. Some of the disadvantages of current Gees you mentioned seem to be exacerbated by your mobile carrier and they may very well apply to 5G. > each one is either so minor as to be a non-issue For the purpose of making your argument you were willing to just downplay every disadvantage, ignore it, or just glance over it, and pump up every advantage. Many others aren't. The reason 5G is going ahead as such (half baked and expensive, more so than 4G was in its time) is that most people don't know what they want, or what they get. But enough have the money and the promotional material says it's the thing to get. If it weren't for the slowing smartphone market nobody would have considered going ahead with this. But the phone market is catatonic so suddenly here you are convinced that your RPi with sensors can only work over 5G, ignoring that LoRa may be an even better choice for such applications. LoRa doesn't have great marketing though. WiFi is genuinely better for some of the applications you listed. Voice is still 4G. And the law of diminishing returns strongly suggests that the jump brings less noticeable real world difference than the numbers suggest.

Spooky23 6y ago

It won’t, because the favored status granted to carriers will put cable out of business, and you’ll be stuck with Ma Bell again.

FlyMoreRockets 6y ago

> I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. Don't leave the city then. 5G has very limited range and doesn't work in rural areas where there aren't enough customers to provide needed geographical coverage.

asdff 6y ago
Will it even be good in the city? I live in a city and 4G is pretty crap. Drops the connection all the time, speeds are poor, latency is high.
- mcguire 6y ago
  My understanding is that 5G is specifically designed to improve that situation, at the expense of things like range and building penetration.
  - asdff 6y ago
    I understand that to do this you would need to blanket an area. I don't have any issue with that, it's the correct thing to do. What I do have issue with are these ISPs and telecoms are going to do a half assed job to maximize profit, just like they've done with every other technology in their possession. They can do this because you are beholden to them with no alternative in the market. Their track record is very poor to build reliable infrastructure, and for 5G to work you need reliable infrastructure. It doesn't matter what the specific technology is if you fail to build it optimally.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    The only way this works is if carriers invest in a ton more hardware, which means leasing more tower space, creating new tower space, getting creative with placing radios in areas where you can't really put towers, etc. That's expensive. What's also expensive -- sometimes even more expensive -- is running wiring to all those places to connect those radios to the backhaul network. I frankly do not expect US carriers to go to that expense, at least not universally.

innocenat 6y ago

> I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. Already possible with 4G/3G in many Asian countries. Your provider just sucks. > I want ultra fast reliable telecom in crowded cities. See above. > I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. Not gonna happen. FFTX is already at 10Gbp, and it is going higher as time pass.

nxc18 6y ago
Competitive doesn't have to mean faster. It just needs to be available and passable. 4G is pretty close in some markets, but with wide deployment of 5G mmWave, there might be just enough competition with the local cable monopoly to push better prices or speeds or both. For context I pay a lot for 150 Mbps and really don't have any choice in the matter.
dharma1 6y ago
6G - 1TB/s

mcguire 6y ago

Everywhere you go? What was the range of 5G, again?

foxrider 6y ago

I've not been excited about 3G, and I was only lukewarm about 4G, because 4G was meant to be something for laptops (still ended up in phones tho). But I am very excited about 5G - it's fundamentally different way if interconnecting stations is really cool. If it's half as good as the promise we will all see annoyances like super slow internet in dense areas or huge ping gone, and remote locations would get a huge step up from 4G. That's why I'm not upgrading my phone to something without 5G.

kelnos 6y ago

> I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. I want ultra fast reliable telecom in crowded cities. I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices. We don't have this today mainly because wireless carriers do the minimum required to compete with their minimal competition. It doesn't have that much to do with 4G vs. 5G or whatever. Even living in a city, I don't expect 5G to improve the situation all that much, unless carriers start really spending on their network. The ubiquity, reliability, and bandwidth will only be there if carriers make huge investments in their networks, which I don't expect will happen. You can certainly get what you want today, with 4G/LTE. You just have to go to a country with carriers that actually prioritize that, like Taiwan or Japan (and probably several other east/southeast Asian countries).

PunksATawnyFill 6y ago

Why? What massive files are you downloading on your phone? And IoT devices typically require tiny throughput. Is your electricity meter pumping out 4K video?