14 ms·

5G doesnt seem like its enabling anything fundamentally new. The talk of any ”killer app” based on having more throughput or on these optimizations always feels

• rsynnott 6y ago
  Last mile for fixed rural wireless broadband seems like the obvious one. Today, this is generally done with either LTE or various proprietary things (or if you’re particularly unlucky, satellite). 5G should allow for greater total bandwidth, reducing the impact of contention. And on the other side, it should be helpful for very dense urban usage. Try using LTE in a large city’s central train station at a busy time and see how you get on. But yeah, not revolutionary, but should make existing LTE applications less awful in some scenarios where they struggle.
  • CydeWeys 6y ago
    I wonder how this will fare vs Starlink, which seems like it's trying to solve the same problem.
    • magicsmoke 6y ago
      Starlink will probably do better than 5G for access to rural areas because you don't need to build out a physical cable. In highly dense urban areas with large numbers of simultaneous users, 5G is a better fit.
      • dylan604 6y ago
        Have the 5G towers connect to Starlink rather than running the cabling to them.
        • selectodude 6y ago
          That doesn't really fix the total bandwidth capacity issue though.
          • kalleboo 6y ago
            I wonder if a tower with a larger array of Starlink antennas could connect to multiple satellites and get more performance than the pizzabox-sized consumer receivers
      • thu2111 6y ago
        In many cases you can link base stations to other downlink points using lasers or really tight beams though. It's not like they can only go upwards.
  • bdamm 6y ago
    Starlink is going to dominate this. Cellular can't economically scale out to meet the vast rural coverage. There are still plenty of towns that don't have basic coverage even now, and to think that suddenly they're going to get 5G equipment... seems unlikely. Meanwhile, the Starlink satellites are up and base stations are in testing. Once they approve and start building out their ground stations, it's SpaceX's business to lose.
    • rudolph9 6y ago
      It's worth explicitly noting that Starlink is applicable to rural areas. As OG noted 5G is applicable to both densely populated and rural areas. Further, it's theoretically possible to combine 5G and satellite internet where Starlink or similar serves as the connection to the internet backbone for a device broadcasting a 5G network. Connectivity isn't an all or nothing game and 5G is protocol that the SpaceX internet service business can leverage.
      • mikepurvis 6y ago
        I feel like the viability of that depends a lot on the price point of the service and the user terminal. If it's cheap enough that everyone might as well just have their own then there's no point doing infrastructure for a terrestrial backhaul.
    • graerg 6y ago
      5g and starlink are almost certainly going to be used in tandem in rural areas.
    • woah 6y ago
      IIRC Starlink can handle about 2gbs per 50 sq miles due to frequency bandwidth limitations. That's a few hundred subscribers. It's not going to make an impact in any but the most rural areas.
      • semi-extrinsic 6y ago
        Wow, that sounds like a huge limitation, no? The number of people living in places that sparsely populated must be very limited, how does it make economical sense to launch that huge number of satellites?
  • elil17 6y ago
    I don’t really see 5G solving rural broadband issues. You still need to lay backhaul line from the node Bs, and 5G requires more of them, so it’s not orders of magnitude cheaper than running cable to home.
    • aaomidi 6y ago
      A lot of rural areas have backbone just fine. It's the last mile that's the issue. You can find gigabit business internet basically anywhere.
      • HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
        Woah, that's an enormous sweeping generalization. I have a friend whose parents live in rural Kansas who to this day can't get more than dialup or satellite, even though they've called up every single semi-local ISP (way more than once) and said they'd be willing to pay for installation. At this point, they have more than $20K saved for the chance that some company says maybe. It's simply way more complicated than you're making it out to be.
        • dboreham 6y ago
          No, parent cited _business_ Gigabit. You're talking about retail consumer connectivity. Totally different things. Based on my deep knowledge of connectivity options here in rural Montana parent is correct: there's lit fiber all over the place (certainly to all cell towers) and various telcos will trench up to 5km from any of those pops, for a price. So a business looking to acquire Gigabit connectivity can readily access it. Ask your parents to call the ILEC business sales guy and see what happens. They'll need $5k/mo budget for transit fees and be willing to sign a 3-5 year contract.
          • HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
            I shall tell my friend about that. Thank you for the information!
  • swebs 6y ago
    >Try using LTE in a large city’s central train station at a busy time and see how you get on. There was some ad campaign in Helsinki about two or three years ago telling people to do just this to compare carriers. Telia, Dna, and all the others worked just fine at rush hour at the central station with 50mbps+
    • tuatoru 6y ago
      Ah, but Finland considers internet access a human right.
      • swebs 6y ago
        The point is that they were able to meet capacity with 4g towers. I'm not sure how that's related. I guess I should also point out that the population of the city is 600k people, so it may not carry over to something like NYC or Tokyo.
        • menybuvico 6y ago
          And most of those towers provide comparably low-bandwidth connectivity (at least outside urban areas). It's not like you have decent speeds up here, but the legally mandated 2mbps is available in most places.
  • phkahler 6y ago
    >> Last mile for fixed rural wireless broadband seems like the obvious one. I was under the impression that 5G has shorter range and requires smaller cells. That's exactly the opposite of being better for rural areas.
    • carteloupe 6y ago
      5G is several things, availability of the new mmwave spectrum is just one of them
  • numpad0 6y ago
    > fixed rural wireless broadband It’s well worth trying but WiMAX tried the same so not novel > Try using LTE in a large city’s central train station at a busy time and see how you get on. uh, um, I thought LTE is already at least okay as it is for Shinjuku morning/Comiket queue problem
  • maliker 6y ago
    There’s a huge push at the US federal level to get fiber to the home in rural areas. 10s of billions in funding. A lot of times it’s run by the electric companies (coops). They already have the right of way, pole access, and customer relationships. There are dozens of utilities pursuing this, haven’t heard of any working with 5g. There was a recent executive order restricting foreign equipment on the grid, and I suspect that’s going to make things harder for 5g. I’m not saying 5g can’t be used in rural applications, just that it looks like fiber has a big head start. Now that there’s also more LEO satellite internet companies coming in with decent latency and bandwidth, that’s going to be another competitor to 5g in rural areas.
    • deelowe 6y ago
      Most coops aren't able to make use of the funding due to competing regulations getting in the way. My local coop has been sending us updates every few months on the situation and they're just getting ignored. Their recent emails have taken a more cynical tone that the government was doing more than playing lip service.
    • bleepblorp 6y ago
      Is there much evidence that this funding will do anything more than previous rounds of rural internet funding? Previous funding has simply disappeared into the pockets of incumbent players without any hardware being built. Technology isn't a solution for graft.
  • packetlost 6y ago
    I used to work for a telcom, and the thing I'm most excited for is the benefits dense urban areas may see with 5G-based internet service. If it weren't for caps, it would significantly drive down the cost and bureaucracy of installing/updating infrastructure while increasing the speeds in a lot of areas.
  • BenjiWiebe 6y ago
    Quite a bit of rural fixed wireless broadband uses Wifi for the last mile.
• smitty1e 6y ago
  In a Periscope anecdote, Scott Adams of Dilbert fame went on about 5G bringing enrichment via eyewear such that profiles of people you meet pop up, and any other VR variation you can imagine. The geek can groove on turning cities into the holodeck on the Enterprise. But one surmises that the appeal of gadget-free living in the country will grow, also. Seems hard to derive a good balance point with "enough" technology for optimal enjoyment without begetting Big Brother along the way.
  • Latty 6y ago
    Scott Adams seems to be pretty divorced from reality, so I would take his ideas with a pinch of salt. (To clarify: He's also claimed that if Biden wins the election, Republicans will literally be hunted in the streets, and I think regardless of your political views that is pretty clearly not actually going to happen, so his ability to predict future events with any accuracy isn't something I'd trust. Source: https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1278316325044056064 https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/127831632504405606...)
    • smitty1e 6y ago
      To clarify: when not raising interesting technical points, he does engage in overt trolling to test cancel culture limits, yes. He has stated this in his Periscopes.
      • Latty 6y ago
        I'm not sure “this person routinely trolls” implies that he is going to have particularly valuable insight either. Are you sure his 5G ideas aren't just trolling too? I can't see how what he suggests requires 5G really.
      • sseagull 6y ago
        Seems like Popehat’s Rule of Goats applies, then. And therefore he is not credible. For the unfamiliar (contains NSFW language) https://twitter.com/popehat/status/858722120620265473 https://twitter.com/popehat/status/858722120620265473
• tekstar 6y ago
  I haven't researched it fully but to me it seemed like a utopia.. For the device makers, and dystopia for the customer. Imagine all your wireless IoT except you can't block them or filter from the wifi network, they are always connected and you can't see what data they're sending.
  • mhh__ 6y ago
    Don't buy them then? It's not like you can control most IoT today
    • nightski 6y ago
      Hopefully that remains an option. I look at it like Smart TVs today. It's pretty much impossible to buy a TV that is not smart. If IoT takes off this will become the case with many other things imho.
      • nitrogen 6y ago
        Faraday cage houses will become a thing.
        • BenjiWiebe 6y ago
          Or 5G sniffers/detectors, to wave around your supposedly-non-5G smart appliance.
      • cortesoft 6y ago
        There are a TON of TVs that aren't smart. Where do you get the idea that it is impossible to buy one?
    • lm28469 6y ago
      > Don't buy them then? Tech doesn't work like that. Good look buying a high end "dumb" tv or a high end smartphone with a jack 3.5. It always starts with "don't buy them" until there is no choice anymore.
• mhh__ 6y ago
  One thing the Test and Measurement industry is looking forward to, is being able to have extremely high bandwidth (wireless) connections between gear. The idea is that with 5G you can combine your function generate with your oscilloscope to form a basic network analyser with the data travelling wireless between themselves and your computer. The throughput is high enough, and there wouldn't be any wires.
  • dfox 6y ago
    Many manufacturer demos tend to be soma variant of that: ie. replacing LXI or some kind of RT-ish fieldbus with 5G. I somehow fail to see any point in making such things wireless.
    • mhh__ 6y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoRJOCdNahc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoRJOCdNahc (From this series of interviews) I think the idea is that they have identified it as an area where they can make productivity gains. If the throughput is there it has obvious in-the-field applications i.e. Who actually enjoys fucking around with cables before you even wire up the DUT - if you want to automatically (say) measure the efficiency of a power supply over some parameter you have to do it by hand (SCPI takes too much time)
  • wmf 6y ago
    Why 5G instead of WiFi for that scenario?
    • mhh__ 6y ago
      I think the idea is that the want to replace the cables rather (i.e. not centralized around a WiFi network). 5G is a bit faster too (apparently, not my area of expertise)
  • luma 6y ago
    As we have SCPI and the like already available over ethernet, I'd have a hard time with throwing an intentional radiator inside my measurement gear. I have enough noise sources to deal with.
• ksec 6y ago
  It enables much higher capacity. So theoretically it would work more like wired Internet where you are sold on Bandwidth and not on Data. ( Within Reasonable usage ) Many Countries in Europe are already doing it right now with 4G. Technically it is more much interesting from a Carrier / Backend perspective. Where there are huge unit cost optimisation and ease of management. But for consumers it really is just a faster 4G.
  • ses1984 6y ago
    >where you are sold on Bandwidth and not on Data Hahah
    • mrep 6y ago
      Your mileage may vary but verizon 5g home for example does not have a data cap [0]. [0]: https://www.verizon.com/support/5g-home-faqs/ https://www.verizon.com/support/5g-home-faqs/
      • ses1984 6y ago
        No company or plan has ever gone back on unlimited promises. No company has ever defined unlimited to be, "really fast for a little bit, then really slow."
• regularfry 6y ago
  This V2X thing looks like it's potentially a bit of a paradigm shift. With a mesh network layered over a set of V2X-connected devices, you could extend high-bandwidth (if not necessarily low-latency) internet connectivity to anywhere there are client devices, without needing base towers except at the edges. In The Diamond Age, if I'm remembering it right, Neal Stephenson has a character describe how the in-world ubiquitous network works, and it's basically exactly that: high reliability through ubiquity of peers, any of which can relay your packets. We've had mesh networks before, but they've always needed special hardware, distinct from "it's just a router".
• foobiekr 6y ago
  5g is mostly about spectrum and positioning the user plane such that traffic can avoid backhaul and concentration for internet-destined traffic. The marketing around it is incredible, though. Every undefined or hypothetical market is being tied to 5g. There's pretty much a new version of Betteridge's Law of Headlines - any future product that will "drive 5g" or "needs 5g" doesn't.
• mdorazio 6y ago
  Be careful with expectations of "possible" vs. "practical". 5G for IoT devices is a big deal in remote field and some industrial settings where wi-fi is not an option. Two examples for you: I worked on a pilot project with a state government group that wanted remote monitoring of water levels in wetlands and ponds spread across a few hundred square miles of mostly-rural area. wi-fi obviously wasn't an option and getting a WAN mesh setup was a huge pain in the ass and had its own limitations. We ended up testing with 3G, switching on twice a day to report, but the power consumption and data costs were too prohibitive to be practical long-term. 5G power use per bit is supposedly going to be far lower than 3G/4G. Jury is still out on data cost. I now work in the automotive industry where vehicle logistics can be an interesting challenge. Parking lots for completed vehicles awaiting transport outside factories can be spread across a square mile of land (more if remote overflow lots are used), with multiple locations. There are multiple use cases for inspecting, tagging, remote driving, etc. these vehicles using aerial or ground-based drones and teleoperation to significantly cut down on costs. However, those use cases depend on high bandwidth, low-latency connections and extending effective wi-fi to lots would be massively expensive. 5G is a pretty interesting option here. As others have mentioned, vehicle-centric use cases abound, but there are some additional ones for industries like oil & gas as well.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • karmakaze 6y ago
    Seems to me the 'lots of vehicles' communication can be solved using a mesh network with the vehicles as nodes. The trend is in that direction already and can serve a pre-delivery function.
  • TheDesolate0 6y ago
    Nope. Your vendors a lying to you. 5g in general will require a lot more power. That's one of the barriers.
  • mattlondon 6y ago
    Is it realistic to expect 5G coverage in rural wetlands? From what I understand, the range of a single 5G base station is significantly lower than 2/3/4G so they are having to install new cell sites in major towns and cities just for 5G coverage.
• gumby 6y ago
  If you can find old publicity and propaganda from 4G, 3G amd even GSM deployment you will find the same tired set of new capabilities that will magically come true, 5G’s actual advantages will be more prosaic which Ironically will lead to them being more profound. It’s not really clear which they will be though.
• Lammy 6y ago
  > 5G doesnt seem like its enabling anything fundamentally new. It does, just not for you and I. We will be surveilled more completely and inescapably than ever.
• limomium 6y ago
  And a car is just a faster horse, but it sure changed society in fundamental ways. Often, incremental progress leads to unexpected critical mass, which opens new unimagined avenues for exploitation.
  • tuatoru 6y ago
    > And a car is just a faster horse No, it's a low maintenance, low latency horse. The start-up time of cars is a few orders of magnitude faster than horses. And they can be housed in very little space and basically ignored when not needed.
• hawski 6y ago
  Cynical view: web and app developers for work use fiber connections via Wi-Fi ac or even 1G ethernet, now users, thanks to 5g will be able to finally, somewhat, catch-up.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• cromwellian 6y ago
  Around 2000, I was working at OracleMobile, attened 3GPP/Mobile Congress/etc meetings, and there was a similar discussion around 3g. People were like "what's the killer app"? At the time, most phones were WML/WAP and Blackberry-like SMS/MMS/Email experiences. People speculated "maybe music or video", but it was all very vague, no one imagined the smartphone revolution that brought all of these services, like Uber. I'd say it's impossible to know what super-high bandwidth and low-latency will bring to the table as the next killer app. It's going to be something we don't expect.
  • overkalix 6y ago
    But your case what enabled the emergence of mobile apps and associated markets was the apparition of affordable smartphones -that's what created a new ecosystem for tech and pseudotech companies to grow in. What new market is 5g enabling?
    • nextweek2 6y ago
      > What new market is 5g enabling? The more interesting feature in 5G is the signalling for IoT devices, those that wake up infrequently. Metering devices, handheld payment devices, patient home monitors, security systems, Airton, etc. 5G isn't really about more bandwidth but always on and more efficient use. This will enable more than just phones and a few tablets.
      • kurthr 6y ago
        This low power argument makes far more sense than the high-bandwidth cases normally thrown around, especially because a lot of iOT can be outside where the signals aren't blocked by walls or near a for purpose commercial antena. I can imagine some server based interactive gaming/UIs only if the rest of the backend also improves. Fast refresh VR could be another use-case, if they didn't get so heavy and hot for other (non data) reasons.
        • mlyle 6y ago
          Just getting more spectral efficiency when signal strengths are high benefits all users. Lots of towers are at saturation over the air now, so if we can squeeze more bandwidth out of them, traffic that is presently being delayed will do better... even before we account for growth. That is, 5G isn't just mmwave; it's also getting more out of existing low and mid band spectrum. (And mmwave, of course, will unload the other spectrum too somewhat in the densest areas).
• wdb 6y ago
  What about we first try to meet the internet speeds that is suggested can be met with 4G? Don't know any provider in the UK which allows the ~500mbps?
• inefficient 6y ago
  I think the biggest thing I have seen that is a reasonable use of the tech is game streaming. Stadia, XCloud, Geforce Now. 5G with low latency and unlimited data could be a game changer (pardon the pun) for mobile gaming. It works on 4G. I've tested. But you definitely run into latency issues.
  • thu2111 6y ago
    Do you need unlimited data? Gaming is equivalent to streaming hi-def video. With good codecs that doesn't really tax even the low end of 5G bandwidth capabilities. It's really all about latency. Of course, it's not just games that might be streamed this way. Any computing device could be.
• beaunative 6y ago
  5G enables IoT data sharing, in case of Self Driving Car, nearby car should be able to share maps with each other fast enough and conveniently enough, and use that to optimize best route and avoid accidents. 5G is vital to develop next gen self driving technologies. With this kind of sharing enabled, cars can be equipped with less expensive radar and still achieve a higher accuracy.
• paul7986 6y ago
  Maybe 5G will provide much needed and true home broadband competition to the Comcast's and Charters we have now. Some ppl are lucky and have two options to choose from while most only have one which is terrible.
• hammock 6y ago
  The massive MIMO/beamforming for location-pinpointing seems novel to me. Can't really do that with current tech/infra
• pjkundert 6y ago
  It enables great technologies — not especially beneficial for you, but awesome for those who hate you, such as ubiquitous high-definition surveillance.
• quantified 6y ago
  Sidelinking seems to open up some possibilities for converging WiFi/local and base-tower networks. Along with any number of security issues... I think the question is not “technologies enabled” but rather “useful applications enabled”. We’ll find out, I wouldn’t count it out. I would expect it to be enormously expensive if it hits, get people s/addicted/accustomed to it and they’ll pay $500/month.
• scoot_718 6y ago
  It's all about internet of shit.