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Has anyone ever had awesome lte and said “I need more bandwidth” on their phone? Idk I just don’t see the need for 5g but I’m definitely not a phone power user

Has anyone ever had awesome lte and said “I need more bandwidth” on their phone? Idk I just don’t see the need for 5g but I’m definitely not a phone power user.

girvo 5y ago
Yes, but only in the context of tethering a more powerful device personally.
kevml 5y ago
Having a mobile hotspot has allowed me to work just about anywhere I want to. The more bandwidth the better!
LeoPanthera 5y ago
I'm going to guess that you have home broadband internet that is reasonably fast and reliable.
- snowgrove 5y ago
  But that’s just it. How is 5G-based rural broadband a significant improvement on LTE-based service?
  - vel0city 5y ago
    More customers being able to be served from the same number of towers with better per-customer performance. One challenge in rural broadband deployments is there are only so many good locations for the carrier to actually stick antennas. Maybe a water tower or two, you might get lucky and have some tall radio tower at the edge of town. So then all the customers in the area are essentially sharing a single tower, all needing to point their CPE to that one point. You can only slice the tower up into some number of sectors and once you hit that point the tower is saturated. Every additional customer is now diminishing the service for every other customer. Having better spectral efficiency per sector means you can service more customers, have better service per customer, or even both depending on how you balance it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ultrarunner 5y ago
There are many categories of LTE UE beyond just phones. Applications like professional live streaming cameras or home & business internet (free from the tyranny of cable providers) could benefit from additional bandwidth. There are supposedly also additional sleep modes for 5G but I'm only familiar with DRX modes on 4G LTE. This would theoretically be important for small battery powered sensors, but again, short-range frequencies probably restrict this to devices that don't need to rely on batteries to begin with. Maybe smart watches? Does it deserve all the hype? It doesn't really seem like it. But cell infrastructure is definitely used well beyond phones, so I'm trying to keep an open mind.
octoberfranklin 5y ago
5G is just an excuse to not run fiber the last 100 feet to your residence. Basically the cell companies outbid the homeowners for control of the last 100 feet between the house and the nearest utility pole. Now the auction losers will proceed to get screwed.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
This is what people said when LTE came in too. 3G woth HSDPA was fine. Now we sigh when we drop back to 3G. 5G is not just for today but for tomorrow :) Also 4G made decent YouTube streaming possible. It worked on 3G but was horrible. Now people can't do without it. We won't even know what 5G will bring us until it does.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  I don’t remember ever saying that about 3g haha.
- fma 5y ago
  Honestly don't recall hearing that about 4G...to me it was this 2G: Slow WAP internet browsing 3G: Better internet browsing, maps, basic audio 4G: Stream video and better audio 5G:?? All the above were known beforehand because allowed for current apps which were on broadband to be used out of the house. I would be more convinced there would be everyday application if there was current technology that is on broadband that I can take remotely.
  - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
    Something like Stadia or Steam's remote play maybe?
  - ketzo 5y ago
    > current technology that is on broadband that I can take remotely. I actually think that there are a couple of solid examples of this: * Console/PC videogames: people wanna play God of War on their bus ride, as evidenced by the massive success of the Switch and the growing excitement for the Steam Deck * High-quality video calling: latency and bandwidth increases in 5G are both huge for the experience of FaceTime/Skype/Discord/etc. * VR/AR: again, applications that are seriously harmed by both latency and bandwidth, and ones that have many concrete, business-value use cases in a mobile / non-living-room setting. and my "dark horse" candidate: * Machine learning applications: any "AI"-powered product or service has a quality that is pretty directly proportional to the amount of iterations it can perform. Self-driving cars have the capacity to gather gigabytes per second of environmental data; the ability to stream this data back to a central e.g. Tesla datacenter, rather than just doing procession onboard, confers a pretty serious increase to model quality.
DannyCasolaro 5y ago
Crosseye_Jack 5y ago
Used a 4G modem for a year because I couldn’t get broadband at that address, speeds were patchy, ping was >100ms, “buffer bloat” was a nightmare, was CGNAT’ed, you couldn’t rely on keeping a tcp connection open for ages without having to reconnect (the buffer bloat and tcp issues _may_ have been my modem though. Was it ok? Sure, you can stream video just fine (my mobile isp didn’t force 480p video). But for anything behind basic browsing and consuming content it was a pain for example playing multiplayer games. I was very happy when I moved back to a fixed line connection. So yeah, I would have been very happy with more bandwidth, lower ping and a more stable connection.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I don't think that justifies the 90% reduction in overall range from 4g, but ymmv.
  - Crosseye_Jack 5y ago
    Same could be said about 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Are you looking at millimeter wave ranges there? The range of 4G depends a lot on which band you pick, but these C-band frequencies should go several miles, maybe half as far on average.
  - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    5G additionally uses the same frequency bands as 4G, with the same range, just better throughput/latency.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    Running on the same frequencies as current 4G deployments, 5G should have very similar range. The massive reduction of range is only on additional frequencies available.
- user_7832 5y ago
  I'm not sure that was what the OP was talking about - I think the question was "If you already have good 4g, would you benefit?" - aka isn't good 4g good enough? Just out of curiosity I tested my 4g speeds/ping - I got 30mbps and an average of 35ms (6.4ms jitter) here in the Netherlands (KPN network). Given by test results I certainly think you could have had a better network.
jahewson 5y ago
No but I have said “I’d like LTE to not be horribly congested and unusable” when in high-demand.
OJFord 5y ago
Every home internet connection will be by 'mobile' internet, that's my prediction. When a friend moved to London for six months, a 4G modem & router was the cheapest option, (not least because rolling 1month SIM plans are common here, but ISPs like twelve months, and charge exit fees or a premium for a shorter plan), faster than the cheapest ISP plans, and delivered next day vs. two weeks' wait for an 'engineer' to visit and mess about with 'master sockets' and 'lines'.
- bogomipz 5y ago
  >"(not least because rolling 1month SIM plans are common here,..." Does that just mean prepaid SIM cards? If so how does the rolling part work? Does that mean you can roll-over unused bandwidth to the next month?
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Not prepaid, just like a 12month contract but only 1 month, so you can cancel (or change the amount of data or whatever) any month and not pay (without penalty) the next.
- gspr 5y ago
  > Every home internet connection will be by 'mobile' internet, that's my prediction. I highly doubt it. There's only so much capacity per base station, so the amount of base stations needed would be prohibitive in urban settings. I honestly don't think this is a serious plan even by cell companies, except in rural settings. That isn't to say that they won't dupe some number of urban dwellers into it, too. Enough to earn some money, not enough to overload capacity.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    > I honestly don't think this is a serious plan even by cell companies, except in rural settings. I can't speak for their seriousness obviously, but EE (major provider in the UK) is advertising wait-list sign-up/'coming soon' in London. I recall tube ads years ago (it was probably 4G, but certainly not 5) for a minor player that sprung up using someone else's network (Three/EE/O2/Vodafone, I don't know) specifically to provide home internet. I think they got killed by uncapped/high cap data becoming more common, tethering being more allowed; so anyone who cared could use any provider (and any modem) directly - and most people don't care they just want it to work at a good price and be easy. I think EE will make it an opt-in up-sell for now, but that eventually they (and others) will just send SIMs & modems out instead of 'engineers'. No more copper lines to faff about with. If the customer wants a landline number, well that's just adding minutes on to their SIM plan. (And for a while they'll get away with charging through the nose for that, like the old £15pcm line rental or whatever, until the masses realise that any SIM would work, and most high/unlimited data ones have lots of if not unlimited minutes included anyway.)
nickysielicki 5y ago
Many of the frequencies they’ve allotted are just not feasible without the access point being in the same room as you. Long term I see it as less of a replacement for 4G lte and more of a replacement for WiFi. The idea is that you’re going to pay one cell phone bill for all of your devices if you want to get them online. I don’t know anyone stupid enough to pay for a SIM card for their personal iPad currently, because you’d prefer to tether off your phone instead of paying $10 a month. But in the future you might see people drop their home internet and just go with SIM cards in everything.
- toast0 5y ago
  > But in the future you might see people drop their home internet and just go with SIM cards in everything. I mean, maybe, but more likely to just be a 5G modem with wifi/ethernet, like has been available with LTE. I've got one with a $5/month plan as backup for my DSL, because my DSL is unreliable, and the local cable company doesn't service my house, and municipal fiber installation is unsubsidized and the actual installtion costs are too high, IMHO.
mdasen 5y ago
It's not just about what exists today, but what we want to be able to do in the future. First, there are situations where it's hard to get "awesome LTE" because there's a lot of usage. Getting more bandwidth is important to handle situations like that. Beyond that, we don't know what the future will offer if we build greater capacity. When Apple launched the iPhone, we didn't know that we'd be changing the way we live our lives. Things like TikTok wouldn't exist without the abundant bandwidth offered by LTE. We don't always know what greater bandwidth and capacity will offer. We are seeing some things already. We're seeing wireless home internet become available to a lot of people. For cell carriers, this is a new stream of revenue. For customers, this can be increase home broadband competition and for many rural customers the first chance at broadband. We're seeing things like Nvidia's GeForce NOW allow you to play games that are being run on the cloud rather than your local device. Lower latency and greater bandwidth/capacity means a better experience. Nvidia recommends 50Mbps which LTE can do, but won't have as much capacity to support as many simultaneous users. 5G will also drive down latencies which are important for gaming. It's possible that self-driving technology might take advantage of this in the future. I'm not someone that promotes self-driving tech, but one can see how lower latency and higher bandwidth/capacity could mean being able to send more data to the cloud both for computation and also for storage/learning. A lot of people are talking about VR and meta-verses. Again, I'm not necessarily buying into this yet, but it seems like greater bandwidth and lower latency could make things better. Heck, even video-conferencing on mobile can benefit from more bandwidth and lower latency. While LTE can accommodate it, there are times when networks get congested and less congestion is a good thing. Lower latency also offers a better experience. Do you need it? No. But you don't need a smartphone. At the same time, it's possible that someone will create something that you won't know how you lived without that's made possible by more bandwidth/capacity and lower latency.
- tenelmike 5y ago
  Yeah I feel like that's an important aspect. We never are able to imagine at the time completely what's possible. It's only in hindsight the new thing seems obvious
- fomine3 5y ago
  Totally agree. Should consumers get costly highend phones in 2020-2021 with degraded battery life due to 5G is different story, but maybe we should be sacrificed to build futureproof 5G infra by buying phones with unnecessary 5G. 3G(HSPA) to 4G(LTE) was huge. I happily upgraded.
IggleSniggle 5y ago
I’m just happy to be able to switch from my $130/month cable provider with terrible service to a $50/month 5G provider, while it lasts. I’d honestly rather have a hardwire connection, but I am incredibly happy that competition has finally arrived.
ajross 5y ago
No, but lots of people have had terrible LTE service in congested areas and thought "why can't the network provider support more users!?". 5G is much more about more efficient use of scarce bandwidth uses than it is about raw point to point bandwidth.
kkylin 5y ago
I personally don't need more bandwidth when I'm on the go, but would love to see some real alternative to my local cable company.
orev 5y ago
Other than general ideas of “the future”, having faster speeds allows current applications to complete their data transfers faster, which allows them to get off the radio faster, which means more space is available for other devices. So even at current workloads, you can handle more users in a single area.
deegles 5y ago
How about not having to pay for internet access for both your home and phone? I would be ok with an unmetered 5G connection for both home and mobile.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  Then the network would need to have enough towers to handle everyone's streaming traffic and the cost of that would have to be passed on and eat your savings. Wired networks have lower cost when dealing with high data rates because they don't need scarce shared radio spectrum for higher speeds. You can already pretty much get what you want by going the other way. Get a fast home internet connection, use WiFi at home and at work and get the cheapest available pay per use data plan for the small percentage of data you use while in a car etc. Doesn't work for people who use a large amount of data while traveling, but that's not actually most people.
  - asteroidp 5y ago
    Or get a 5g hotspot and use that...and even take it with you for mobility
daveoc64 5y ago
Pre-pandemic, LTE was just too congested in busy city centres and other high demand locations in the UK. 5G will help alleviate the strain on LTE networks in the long run, so I want (and have) it for that purpose.
- vinay427 5y ago
  I doubt most of this is related to LTE. Other megacities seem to handle it relatively fine including in countries with similar mobile internet adoption. Meanwhile, in London some mobile operators at least in my travels seem to have nearly useless (slower than 2G) internet connectivity across large swaths of the central area. I’m sure 5G will help, but unless I’m missing something I would suppose LTE could provide far better access in UK cities today.
akvadrako 5y ago
It's about density more than individual speed. More spectrum, used more efficiently.
himinlomax 5y ago
It's not mainly about more bandwidth for individual users, it's about having more bandwidth collectively.
jonathanstrange 5y ago
I'd love to have a lot of bandwidth on my phone but the pricing in my country is tied to data usage and ridiculously high. 5G is essentially useless here except for a dozen customers or so who are willing to spend absurd monthly fees for an unlimited data plan (which probably isn't even unlimited if you look at the fine print).
upofadown 5y ago
Each provider requires a separate chunk of spectrum under the current system. So a competitive market tends to multiply the spectrum requirements.
nijave 5y ago
I think it's also supposed to help with density. Ever been to a busy event (sports, concert, etc) and had no internet even though signal strength is fine? A lot of times companies will move in temporary/portable towers for big events but having more baseline capacity is good, too I was under the impression 5G is pretty worthless outside densely populated areas Other comments mention fixed wireless which is also big (home internet access)
- post_break 5y ago
  With 5G I can pull 500 down on my phone sitting inside a building. If LTE hadn't become so saturated with users it would have been fine. I remember back in the day T-Mobile had faster 3G than 4G due to congestion.
salemh 5y ago

Has anyone ever had awesome lte and said “I need more bandwidth” on their phone? Idk I just don’t see the need for 5g but I’m definitely not a phone power user.

girvo 5y ago

Yes, but only in the context of tethering a more powerful device personally.

kevml 5y ago

Having a mobile hotspot has allowed me to work just about anywhere I want to. The more bandwidth the better!

LeoPanthera 5y ago

I'm going to guess that you have home broadband internet that is reasonably fast and reliable.

snowgrove 5y ago
But that’s just it. How is 5G-based rural broadband a significant improvement on LTE-based service?
- vel0city 5y ago
  More customers being able to be served from the same number of towers with better per-customer performance. One challenge in rural broadband deployments is there are only so many good locations for the carrier to actually stick antennas. Maybe a water tower or two, you might get lucky and have some tall radio tower at the edge of town. So then all the customers in the area are essentially sharing a single tower, all needing to point their CPE to that one point. You can only slice the tower up into some number of sectors and once you hit that point the tower is saturated. Every additional customer is now diminishing the service for every other customer. Having better spectral efficiency per sector means you can service more customers, have better service per customer, or even both depending on how you balance it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ultrarunner 5y ago

There are many categories of LTE UE beyond just phones. Applications like professional live streaming cameras or home & business internet (free from the tyranny of cable providers) could benefit from additional bandwidth. There are supposedly also additional sleep modes for 5G but I'm only familiar with DRX modes on 4G LTE. This would theoretically be important for small battery powered sensors, but again, short-range frequencies probably restrict this to devices that don't need to rely on batteries to begin with. Maybe smart watches? Does it deserve all the hype? It doesn't really seem like it. But cell infrastructure is definitely used well beyond phones, so I'm trying to keep an open mind.

octoberfranklin 5y ago

5G is just an excuse to not run fiber the last 100 feet to your residence. Basically the cell companies outbid the homeowners for control of the last 100 feet between the house and the nearest utility pole. Now the auction losers will proceed to get screwed.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

This is what people said when LTE came in too. 3G woth HSDPA was fine. Now we sigh when we drop back to 3G. 5G is not just for today but for tomorrow :) Also 4G made decent YouTube streaming possible. It worked on 3G but was horrible. Now people can't do without it. We won't even know what 5G will bring us until it does.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
I don’t remember ever saying that about 3g haha.
fma 5y ago
Honestly don't recall hearing that about 4G...to me it was this 2G: Slow WAP internet browsing 3G: Better internet browsing, maps, basic audio 4G: Stream video and better audio 5G:?? All the above were known beforehand because allowed for current apps which were on broadband to be used out of the house. I would be more convinced there would be everyday application if there was current technology that is on broadband that I can take remotely.
- iamstupidsimple 5y ago
  Something like Stadia or Steam's remote play maybe?
- ketzo 5y ago
  > current technology that is on broadband that I can take remotely. I actually think that there are a couple of solid examples of this: * Console/PC videogames: people wanna play God of War on their bus ride, as evidenced by the massive success of the Switch and the growing excitement for the Steam Deck * High-quality video calling: latency and bandwidth increases in 5G are both huge for the experience of FaceTime/Skype/Discord/etc. * VR/AR: again, applications that are seriously harmed by both latency and bandwidth, and ones that have many concrete, business-value use cases in a mobile / non-living-room setting. and my "dark horse" candidate: * Machine learning applications: any "AI"-powered product or service has a quality that is pretty directly proportional to the amount of iterations it can perform. Self-driving cars have the capacity to gather gigabytes per second of environmental data; the ability to stream this data back to a central e.g. Tesla datacenter, rather than just doing procession onboard, confers a pretty serious increase to model quality.

DannyCasolaro 5y ago

Crosseye_Jack 5y ago

Used a 4G modem for a year because I couldn’t get broadband at that address, speeds were patchy, ping was >100ms, “buffer bloat” was a nightmare, was CGNAT’ed, you couldn’t rely on keeping a tcp connection open for ages without having to reconnect (the buffer bloat and tcp issues _may_ have been my modem though. Was it ok? Sure, you can stream video just fine (my mobile isp didn’t force 480p video). But for anything behind basic browsing and consuming content it was a pain for example playing multiplayer games. I was very happy when I moved back to a fixed line connection. So yeah, I would have been very happy with more bandwidth, lower ping and a more stable connection.

smoldesu 5y ago
I don't think that justifies the 90% reduction in overall range from 4g, but ymmv.
- Crosseye_Jack 5y ago
  Same could be said about 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Are you looking at millimeter wave ranges there? The range of 4G depends a lot on which band you pick, but these C-band frequencies should go several miles, maybe half as far on average.
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  5G additionally uses the same frequency bands as 4G, with the same range, just better throughput/latency.
- vel0city 5y ago
  Running on the same frequencies as current 4G deployments, 5G should have very similar range. The massive reduction of range is only on additional frequencies available.
user_7832 5y ago
I'm not sure that was what the OP was talking about - I think the question was "If you already have good 4g, would you benefit?" - aka isn't good 4g good enough? Just out of curiosity I tested my 4g speeds/ping - I got 30mbps and an average of 35ms (6.4ms jitter) here in the Netherlands (KPN network). Given by test results I certainly think you could have had a better network.

jahewson 5y ago

No but I have said “I’d like LTE to not be horribly congested and unusable” when in high-demand.

OJFord 5y ago

Every home internet connection will be by 'mobile' internet, that's my prediction. When a friend moved to London for six months, a 4G modem & router was the cheapest option, (not least because rolling 1month SIM plans are common here, but ISPs like twelve months, and charge exit fees or a premium for a shorter plan), faster than the cheapest ISP plans, and delivered next day vs. two weeks' wait for an 'engineer' to visit and mess about with 'master sockets' and 'lines'.

bogomipz 5y ago
>"(not least because rolling 1month SIM plans are common here,..." Does that just mean prepaid SIM cards? If so how does the rolling part work? Does that mean you can roll-over unused bandwidth to the next month?
- OJFord 5y ago
  Not prepaid, just like a 12month contract but only 1 month, so you can cancel (or change the amount of data or whatever) any month and not pay (without penalty) the next.
gspr 5y ago
> Every home internet connection will be by 'mobile' internet, that's my prediction. I highly doubt it. There's only so much capacity per base station, so the amount of base stations needed would be prohibitive in urban settings. I honestly don't think this is a serious plan even by cell companies, except in rural settings. That isn't to say that they won't dupe some number of urban dwellers into it, too. Enough to earn some money, not enough to overload capacity.
- OJFord 5y ago
  > I honestly don't think this is a serious plan even by cell companies, except in rural settings. I can't speak for their seriousness obviously, but EE (major provider in the UK) is advertising wait-list sign-up/'coming soon' in London. I recall tube ads years ago (it was probably 4G, but certainly not 5) for a minor player that sprung up using someone else's network (Three/EE/O2/Vodafone, I don't know) specifically to provide home internet. I think they got killed by uncapped/high cap data becoming more common, tethering being more allowed; so anyone who cared could use any provider (and any modem) directly - and most people don't care they just want it to work at a good price and be easy. I think EE will make it an opt-in up-sell for now, but that eventually they (and others) will just send SIMs & modems out instead of 'engineers'. No more copper lines to faff about with. If the customer wants a landline number, well that's just adding minutes on to their SIM plan. (And for a while they'll get away with charging through the nose for that, like the old £15pcm line rental or whatever, until the masses realise that any SIM would work, and most high/unlimited data ones have lots of if not unlimited minutes included anyway.)

nickysielicki 5y ago

Many of the frequencies they’ve allotted are just not feasible without the access point being in the same room as you. Long term I see it as less of a replacement for 4G lte and more of a replacement for WiFi. The idea is that you’re going to pay one cell phone bill for all of your devices if you want to get them online. I don’t know anyone stupid enough to pay for a SIM card for their personal iPad currently, because you’d prefer to tether off your phone instead of paying $10 a month. But in the future you might see people drop their home internet and just go with SIM cards in everything.

toast0 5y ago
> But in the future you might see people drop their home internet and just go with SIM cards in everything. I mean, maybe, but more likely to just be a 5G modem with wifi/ethernet, like has been available with LTE. I've got one with a $5/month plan as backup for my DSL, because my DSL is unreliable, and the local cable company doesn't service my house, and municipal fiber installation is unsubsidized and the actual installtion costs are too high, IMHO.

mdasen 5y ago

It's not just about what exists today, but what we want to be able to do in the future. First, there are situations where it's hard to get "awesome LTE" because there's a lot of usage. Getting more bandwidth is important to handle situations like that. Beyond that, we don't know what the future will offer if we build greater capacity. When Apple launched the iPhone, we didn't know that we'd be changing the way we live our lives. Things like TikTok wouldn't exist without the abundant bandwidth offered by LTE. We don't always know what greater bandwidth and capacity will offer. We are seeing some things already. We're seeing wireless home internet become available to a lot of people. For cell carriers, this is a new stream of revenue. For customers, this can be increase home broadband competition and for many rural customers the first chance at broadband. We're seeing things like Nvidia's GeForce NOW allow you to play games that are being run on the cloud rather than your local device. Lower latency and greater bandwidth/capacity means a better experience. Nvidia recommends 50Mbps which LTE can do, but won't have as much capacity to support as many simultaneous users. 5G will also drive down latencies which are important for gaming. It's possible that self-driving technology might take advantage of this in the future. I'm not someone that promotes self-driving tech, but one can see how lower latency and higher bandwidth/capacity could mean being able to send more data to the cloud both for computation and also for storage/learning. A lot of people are talking about VR and meta-verses. Again, I'm not necessarily buying into this yet, but it seems like greater bandwidth and lower latency could make things better. Heck, even video-conferencing on mobile can benefit from more bandwidth and lower latency. While LTE can accommodate it, there are times when networks get congested and less congestion is a good thing. Lower latency also offers a better experience. Do you need it? No. But you don't need a smartphone. At the same time, it's possible that someone will create something that you won't know how you lived without that's made possible by more bandwidth/capacity and lower latency.

tenelmike 5y ago
Yeah I feel like that's an important aspect. We never are able to imagine at the time completely what's possible. It's only in hindsight the new thing seems obvious
fomine3 5y ago
Totally agree. Should consumers get costly highend phones in 2020-2021 with degraded battery life due to 5G is different story, but maybe we should be sacrificed to build futureproof 5G infra by buying phones with unnecessary 5G. 3G(HSPA) to 4G(LTE) was huge. I happily upgraded.

IggleSniggle 5y ago

I’m just happy to be able to switch from my $130/month cable provider with terrible service to a $50/month 5G provider, while it lasts. I’d honestly rather have a hardwire connection, but I am incredibly happy that competition has finally arrived.

ajross 5y ago

No, but lots of people have had terrible LTE service in congested areas and thought "why can't the network provider support more users!?". 5G is much more about more efficient use of scarce bandwidth uses than it is about raw point to point bandwidth.

kkylin 5y ago

I personally don't need more bandwidth when I'm on the go, but would love to see some real alternative to my local cable company.

orev 5y ago

Other than general ideas of “the future”, having faster speeds allows current applications to complete their data transfers faster, which allows them to get off the radio faster, which means more space is available for other devices. So even at current workloads, you can handle more users in a single area.

deegles 5y ago

How about not having to pay for internet access for both your home and phone? I would be ok with an unmetered 5G connection for both home and mobile.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
Then the network would need to have enough towers to handle everyone's streaming traffic and the cost of that would have to be passed on and eat your savings. Wired networks have lower cost when dealing with high data rates because they don't need scarce shared radio spectrum for higher speeds. You can already pretty much get what you want by going the other way. Get a fast home internet connection, use WiFi at home and at work and get the cheapest available pay per use data plan for the small percentage of data you use while in a car etc. Doesn't work for people who use a large amount of data while traveling, but that's not actually most people.
- asteroidp 5y ago
  Or get a 5g hotspot and use that...and even take it with you for mobility

daveoc64 5y ago

Pre-pandemic, LTE was just too congested in busy city centres and other high demand locations in the UK. 5G will help alleviate the strain on LTE networks in the long run, so I want (and have) it for that purpose.

vinay427 5y ago
I doubt most of this is related to LTE. Other megacities seem to handle it relatively fine including in countries with similar mobile internet adoption. Meanwhile, in London some mobile operators at least in my travels seem to have nearly useless (slower than 2G) internet connectivity across large swaths of the central area. I’m sure 5G will help, but unless I’m missing something I would suppose LTE could provide far better access in UK cities today.

akvadrako 5y ago

It's about density more than individual speed. More spectrum, used more efficiently.

himinlomax 5y ago

It's not mainly about more bandwidth for individual users, it's about having more bandwidth collectively.

jonathanstrange 5y ago

I'd love to have a lot of bandwidth on my phone but the pricing in my country is tied to data usage and ridiculously high. 5G is essentially useless here except for a dozen customers or so who are willing to spend absurd monthly fees for an unlimited data plan (which probably isn't even unlimited if you look at the fine print).

upofadown 5y ago

Each provider requires a separate chunk of spectrum under the current system. So a competitive market tends to multiply the spectrum requirements.

nijave 5y ago

I think it's also supposed to help with density. Ever been to a busy event (sports, concert, etc) and had no internet even though signal strength is fine? A lot of times companies will move in temporary/portable towers for big events but having more baseline capacity is good, too I was under the impression 5G is pretty worthless outside densely populated areas Other comments mention fixed wireless which is also big (home internet access)

post_break 5y ago
With 5G I can pull 500 down on my phone sitting inside a building. If LTE hadn't become so saturated with users it would have been fine. I remember back in the day T-Mobile had faster 3G than 4G due to congestion.

salemh 5y ago