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One would think, but that does not seem to be the reality thus far. Once one of those markets can be fully substituted with the other, then we can see if they t
by tomc1985 6y ago
One would think, but that does not seem to be the reality thus far. Once one of those markets can be fully substituted with the other, then we can see if they truly compete, or if it somehow forms yet another abusive oligopoly
- eru 6y agoWhy do you need 'full' substitution for competition? What does full substitution mean here?
- tomc1985 6y agoMeaning that they're both roughly equal in terms of latency and bandwidth, so much that one could swap one out with the other and not know the difference Because I do not see them as strongly competing technologies. Cable has sheer speed and latency on its side and 5G has mobility. Switching my cable connection today for a 5G connection tomorrow would make my life worse. They both fill niches the other can't.
- eru 6y agoI think it's all a sliding scale, not a binary either/or. Of course, the better they substitute, the more competition there is. But in the grand scheme of things, even eg email and telephone and driving and sending a letter compete with each other to a certain extent. So eg for watching a movie, latency ain't that important. I live in Singapore, and my options right now are 4G and fibre. In practice, 4G is regularly faster and lower latency for me around the flat, but that's just because I usually cripple my fibre connection by using it via wifi. And our 4G is usually more than competitive with wifi.
- Reason077 6y agoThis sounds like an issue with your WiFi. Properly configured, a modern 802.11ac (or better, 802.11ax) WiFi router should be much faster than the fastest 4G or even 5G speeds.
- eru 6y agoWe have up to 1Gbps 4G speeds in the city centre. But I just got 68 Mbps on the iPhone indoors (via fast.com). The wifi router is just the cheap one that the ISP gave us. When I went next to it just now, it reached 330Mbps (also on fast.com via the iPhone's wifi). Why main complaint is the latency of the wifi when we are in a different part of the flat, ie through a wall. I suspect there might be some packet loss and then tcp adds a few round-trips to resend packages and the congestion control reduces the amount of data sent or something like that.
- tomc1985 6y agoIf you're on 2.4ghz its quite likely your spectrum is too crowded. 5ghz usually fares better in crowded spaces
- eru 6y agoWe have both. 5GHz is usually faster. But I'd also say it's pretty crowded, there's lots of other wifi networks around since we are in the heart of Singapore.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Reason077 6y agoYes, I get pretty similar indoor 4G speeds on my iPhone X here in the UK. And I also saw exactly 330 Mbps via WiFi to my 5G router. My MacBook is a little faster, 430 Mbps. I have heard of these claims of 1Gbps+ massive MIMO LTE in Singapore, but is it really achievable in the real world or just a "theoretical" speed? There are impressive speed claims for 5G here in the UK, but 500 Mbps or so seems to be the real-world peak for most current devices.
- eru 6y agoWhen I connect my laptop via copper cable to our fibre modem, I get just shy of the Gigabit. Only a few handsets can achieve the Gigabit LTE. I don't think any iPhone is amongst them. (It is after all predominately an American device. And what good would that capability do you in the US?) The Gigabit LTE is useful in practice not so much for any sustained Gigabit speeds, but because it allows your phones to 'race to idle'. Most traffic is bursty, and higher peak speeds mean your phone transmits for a smaller proportion of time. Leaving more time for other phones on the network, and perhaps helping with battery conservation?