8 ms·

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 th

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).
- cromwellian 6y ago
  No, it's more than that. There was no YouTube in 2000. Web video for wired connections was shitty. MPEG-2 was the codec dujour. Progressive Networks/Real Networks was people's conception of online video. Netflix was shipping DVDs by snail mail. If the iPhone existed in 2000, there still couldn't have been a TikTok. AR glasses for example, could totally upend all of this and require 5G low latency, and fast accurate positioning. Yes, 5g when it arrives next year, won't change anything. However, 7 years from now, it may be the enabling platform for AR glasses the way 4g LTE was the enabling platform for smartphones. Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection?
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    > Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection? Very. Lots of sites had mobile versions of pages by the iPhone's release. These were originally intended for Blazor and pocket IE but they worked fine for an iPhone on EDGE. I could do e-mail just fine on EDGE as well.
    - cromwellian 6y ago
      Not for me. I've owned every smartphone and high end feature phone since the 90s. A Blackberry was still better than an iPhone + IMAP + EDGE in terms of subjective speed. Mobile websites sucked hard on the iPhone. (Don't even get me started on Pocket IE and the IPAQ). Quite literally my day job was Windows CE development, I was on the W3C XHTML/CSS/XForms committees, I worked on implementation of those specs on HW before it hit the market, none of these mobile web sites were very usable except for basic text information serving. Interactions (eg clicking links, submitting forms) were agonizing. I used to joke that slapping Gopher or a libcurses based apps on these phones would be superior (IMHO, the experience was inferior to an Amiga on a v34 modem dial to Unix) Mobile Web apps are not really functional at EDGE speeds. And certainly todays' media, which is rich with imagery, would be completely overwhelmed at EDGE/3g speeds, even if you remove the overhead of HTML and JS bundles. Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, all of these apps would be terrible on EDGE. The thing is, we are so used to high bandwidth now and its availability, we seldom realize how dependent we are on it until we lose it.
Spooky23 6y ago
The latency sensitive thing is supposed to be smart cars and roads. 5G is all about displacing terrestrial cable and telco to homes. (And profiting off of the carve out regulations around wireless. Most other applications don’t really care about latency. If anything, we’ve used software to move lower latency applications like voice to crowded, latent and unreliable networks.
- skybrian 6y ago
  Yes, this is true because wiring the house is annoying and people often don't realize how much it can help, and because there are other delays. But the big Internet companies have found that lowering latency will increase engagement. Lower latency should change how well video chat works even if people don't quite realize why it's better.
- balola 6y ago
  It's such a myth that 5G can replace optic fibers, afterall 5G itself relies on it, if it requires setting up expensive(controversial) cell towers really really close to homes, why bother making it wireless. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/5g-as-a-home-broadband-replacement-isnt-a-slam-dunk-yet-but-it-might-be-soon/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/5g-as... >Noting the dense deployment of cell sites that millimeter-wave spectrum requires, he commented: "This means that a wireless company almost needs to become a cable company to make it work."
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    It’s a lower capital expense than running fiber, and wireless carriers have more favorable regulatory environment than wired companies.
xenonite 6y ago
super-high bandwidth and low-latency? Also given high reliability, I imagine remote drone-flight and remote car-driving.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  How do you get around the extremely poor range of 5G? Also, I’ve heard a lot of ISPs tout the download speed with 5G and almost none say how much the upload speed will be on their networks.
  - gsich 6y ago
    5g can have the same range as LTE, if similar frequencies are used.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
shoguning 6y ago
The latency is only reduced from tower to phone right? The tower still has to ping the rest of the network to find the service you were requesting to in the first place. If total latency ~ 500 ms, phone-to-tower is maybe 50ms of that in 4G. Even if it's down to ~1ms, total latency is only down 10%. Not a networking expert so maybe I'm missing something here. Perhaps better use of CDNs could make this much faster?
- markalexander 6y ago
  Computing is getting closer and closer to the edge. One example, as you said, is putting it at the CDN PoPs, but even beyond that you can put your compute into the CSP locations. E.g. https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/ https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/, but if you’re big enough I’m sure you can make more interesting deals.
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    https://vapor.io/ https://vapor.io/ might be building out the edge network faster than Amazon. Cloudflare is a customer.
- stephen_g 6y ago
  I would expect the last mile to generally be one of the larger contributors to latency unless you're traversing very long distances (i.e. cross country, undersea cables, etc.). For example, just looking now I get 23ms to a close speedtest server on my LTE and 3ms to the same server on my work's fibre connection. Going a larger distance (~1000km to the next large capital city) it's 43ms vs 18ms on the fibre. That's quite a significant difference, but not as bad as it used to be (3G could have hundreds of milliseconds of latency from device to tower).
- HALtheWise 6y ago
  It seems to me like Uber doesn't depend on high bandwidth or sub-second latency.
  - ric2b 6y ago

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).
cromwellian 6y ago
No, it's more than that. There was no YouTube in 2000. Web video for wired connections was shitty. MPEG-2 was the codec dujour. Progressive Networks/Real Networks was people's conception of online video. Netflix was shipping DVDs by snail mail. If the iPhone existed in 2000, there still couldn't have been a TikTok. AR glasses for example, could totally upend all of this and require 5G low latency, and fast accurate positioning. Yes, 5g when it arrives next year, won't change anything. However, 7 years from now, it may be the enabling platform for AR glasses the way 4g LTE was the enabling platform for smartphones. Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection?
- giantrobot 6y ago
  > Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection? Very. Lots of sites had mobile versions of pages by the iPhone's release. These were originally intended for Blazor and pocket IE but they worked fine for an iPhone on EDGE. I could do e-mail just fine on EDGE as well.
  - cromwellian 6y ago
    Not for me. I've owned every smartphone and high end feature phone since the 90s. A Blackberry was still better than an iPhone + IMAP + EDGE in terms of subjective speed. Mobile websites sucked hard on the iPhone. (Don't even get me started on Pocket IE and the IPAQ). Quite literally my day job was Windows CE development, I was on the W3C XHTML/CSS/XForms committees, I worked on implementation of those specs on HW before it hit the market, none of these mobile web sites were very usable except for basic text information serving. Interactions (eg clicking links, submitting forms) were agonizing. I used to joke that slapping Gopher or a libcurses based apps on these phones would be superior (IMHO, the experience was inferior to an Amiga on a v34 modem dial to Unix) Mobile Web apps are not really functional at EDGE speeds. And certainly todays' media, which is rich with imagery, would be completely overwhelmed at EDGE/3g speeds, even if you remove the overhead of HTML and JS bundles. Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, all of these apps would be terrible on EDGE. The thing is, we are so used to high bandwidth now and its availability, we seldom realize how dependent we are on it until we lose it.

Spooky23 6y ago

The latency sensitive thing is supposed to be smart cars and roads. 5G is all about displacing terrestrial cable and telco to homes. (And profiting off of the carve out regulations around wireless. Most other applications don’t really care about latency. If anything, we’ve used software to move lower latency applications like voice to crowded, latent and unreliable networks.

skybrian 6y ago
Yes, this is true because wiring the house is annoying and people often don't realize how much it can help, and because there are other delays. But the big Internet companies have found that lowering latency will increase engagement. Lower latency should change how well video chat works even if people don't quite realize why it's better.
balola 6y ago
It's such a myth that 5G can replace optic fibers, afterall 5G itself relies on it, if it requires setting up expensive(controversial) cell towers really really close to homes, why bother making it wireless. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/5g-as-a-home-broadband-replacement-isnt-a-slam-dunk-yet-but-it-might-be-soon/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/5g-as... >Noting the dense deployment of cell sites that millimeter-wave spectrum requires, he commented: "This means that a wireless company almost needs to become a cable company to make it work."
- Spooky23 6y ago
  It’s a lower capital expense than running fiber, and wireless carriers have more favorable regulatory environment than wired companies.

xenonite 6y ago

super-high bandwidth and low-latency? Also given high reliability, I imagine remote drone-flight and remote car-driving.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
How do you get around the extremely poor range of 5G? Also, I’ve heard a lot of ISPs tout the download speed with 5G and almost none say how much the upload speed will be on their networks.
- gsich 6y ago
  5g can have the same range as LTE, if similar frequencies are used.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

shoguning 6y ago

The latency is only reduced from tower to phone right? The tower still has to ping the rest of the network to find the service you were requesting to in the first place. If total latency ~ 500 ms, phone-to-tower is maybe 50ms of that in 4G. Even if it's down to ~1ms, total latency is only down 10%. Not a networking expert so maybe I'm missing something here. Perhaps better use of CDNs could make this much faster?

markalexander 6y ago
Computing is getting closer and closer to the edge. One example, as you said, is putting it at the CDN PoPs, but even beyond that you can put your compute into the CSP locations. E.g. https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/ https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/, but if you’re big enough I’m sure you can make more interesting deals.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  https://vapor.io/ https://vapor.io/ might be building out the edge network faster than Amazon. Cloudflare is a customer.
stephen_g 6y ago
I would expect the last mile to generally be one of the larger contributors to latency unless you're traversing very long distances (i.e. cross country, undersea cables, etc.). For example, just looking now I get 23ms to a close speedtest server on my LTE and 3ms to the same server on my work's fibre connection. Going a larger distance (~1000km to the next large capital city) it's 43ms vs 18ms on the fibre. That's quite a significant difference, but not as bad as it used to be (3G could have hundreds of milliseconds of latency from device to tower).
HALtheWise 6y ago
It seems to me like Uber doesn't depend on high bandwidth or sub-second latency.
- ric2b 6y ago