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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

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.
    - mycall 6y ago
      2G modem tethering to a laptop was usable. I did this all the time.
    - giantrobot 6y ago
      I wonder what product you were using labeled "iPhone". Mobile Safari was head and shoulders above other smartphone browsers. It handled mobile sites of the day without any issues in my experience. It was nothing like other mobile browsers. I went through just about every family of PDA and smartphone before the iPhone came out. Their web browsing universally sucked. The iPhone was a huge leap beyond other mobile browsers. The whole idea of clicking links being agonizing is either fiction or hyperbole. It's funny you claim YouTube and Facebook would be terrible on EDGE when both services had mobile apps in the days of EDGE, YouTube even shipped on the iPhone. That isn't to say they aren't better served by higher bandwidth cellular service but they existed and functioned in the past. High bandwidth connections are expected today and plenty of services would be unworkable without them. At the same time many web services are downright wasteful in their design and implementation. Increased end-user bandwidth has just been eaten up by lazier or stupider designs and implementations. I fully expect these trends to continue as 5G rolls out. No one will actually do anything interesting because sites will load twice the ads (in 4K) and quadruple the size of their JavaScript bundles.

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.
  - mycall 6y ago
    2G modem tethering to a laptop was usable. I did this all the time.
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    I wonder what product you were using labeled "iPhone". Mobile Safari was head and shoulders above other smartphone browsers. It handled mobile sites of the day without any issues in my experience. It was nothing like other mobile browsers. I went through just about every family of PDA and smartphone before the iPhone came out. Their web browsing universally sucked. The iPhone was a huge leap beyond other mobile browsers. The whole idea of clicking links being agonizing is either fiction or hyperbole. It's funny you claim YouTube and Facebook would be terrible on EDGE when both services had mobile apps in the days of EDGE, YouTube even shipped on the iPhone. That isn't to say they aren't better served by higher bandwidth cellular service but they existed and functioned in the past. High bandwidth connections are expected today and plenty of services would be unworkable without them. At the same time many web services are downright wasteful in their design and implementation. Increased end-user bandwidth has just been eaten up by lazier or stupider designs and implementations. I fully expect these trends to continue as 5G rolls out. No one will actually do anything interesting because sites will load twice the ads (in 4K) and quadruple the size of their JavaScript bundles.