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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 sacrifice

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.

mdasen 5y ago
I think whether it's currently unnecessary might depend on where you are and what network you're on. T-Mobile has mid-band spectrum that isn't C-Band spectrum and they've been able to deploy it sooner. They're seeing 300Mbps+ speeds on a lot of their network already. We're also seeing battery life get better fast. X50 phones were problematic. X55 phones had some degraded battery life. X60 phones seem to be doing pretty well. I think it's easy to forget that LTE wasn't as big a jump initially as we see today. Back in 2012, T-Mobile's HSPA network scored 5.5Mbps in PC World's testing against 7.4Mbps for Verizon's LTE and 9.1Mbps for AT&T's LTE. In PCMag's 2013 testing, T-Mobile's HSPA got a similar 7.7Mbps while the 4 LTE networks got 5.1Mbps, 10.3Mbps, 13.1Mbps, and 16.0Mbps. Again, LTE networks were seeing marginal improvements. Over time as network deployments matured and new LTE releases came out, LTE's improvements went way beyond HSPA. But the first round of LTE phones on Verizon were terrible - way worse than any 5G device we saw. Some people wanted to be a first adopter. I think waiting a generation or two gives you better results, but some people always want to be first. I actually think the reason the US pushed LTE so quickly is simply because Verizon didn't have an upgrade path for their 3G network which was stuck in the 1Mbps range while HSPA-based competitors were pushing into the 4-8Mbps range. In Europe, carriers could delay a year and offer dual-channel HSPA service in the meantime. LTE was still better even in the early days, but the fact that CDMA didn't have an upgrade path put Verizon in a tough place. They could either watch AT&T offer 5x faster speeds than their HSPA network (at a time when AT&T had an exclusive on the iPhone) or they could be an LTE early adopter. I think AT&T would have liked to milk their HSPA investment a bit longer (as many carriers did around the world), but once Verizon started marketing LTE they had to follow. And you're saying that the upgrade was huge - and it certainly has been. However, it was more marginal at the start. That's not to say it wasn't a good upgrade even initially, but it wasn't anywhere near the 40-50Mbps that LTE averages today in the US. If 5G can follow a similar trajectory, we'll be able to support a lot of things we can't today.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
There are plenty of cheap Android phones with 5G now. E.g. there are a few nice Nokia ones. I wouldn't buy a phone without support for that right now. This stuff was standardized and agreed years ago and it's just the rollout that is going very slowly. The same happened with 4G. That took many years. The point of 5G is better quality of service. Marketing people of course dumb down the improvements to "it's faster" but throughput is actually the least important thing. Though of course a better QoS means that operators can guarantee a bit better throughput as well. Better latency, improved scaling for operators (more connected devices in an area), lower power usage, and more reliable connections. That is a big issue for me with 4G. Coverage here in Germany is not great and even in areas that are covered, the quality of service is pretty bad and I often struggle to get it to work at all even in places that are supposedly well covered. E.g. the are around the TV tower in Berlin (i.e. the largest FFing antenna in the wider area) is pretty bad because the area is full of tourists usually and the local base station ins hopelessly oversubscribed. That's the kind of stuff you could reasonably expect to improve with 5G.

mdasen 5y ago

I think whether it's currently unnecessary might depend on where you are and what network you're on. T-Mobile has mid-band spectrum that isn't C-Band spectrum and they've been able to deploy it sooner. They're seeing 300Mbps+ speeds on a lot of their network already. We're also seeing battery life get better fast. X50 phones were problematic. X55 phones had some degraded battery life. X60 phones seem to be doing pretty well. I think it's easy to forget that LTE wasn't as big a jump initially as we see today. Back in 2012, T-Mobile's HSPA network scored 5.5Mbps in PC World's testing against 7.4Mbps for Verizon's LTE and 9.1Mbps for AT&T's LTE. In PCMag's 2013 testing, T-Mobile's HSPA got a similar 7.7Mbps while the 4 LTE networks got 5.1Mbps, 10.3Mbps, 13.1Mbps, and 16.0Mbps. Again, LTE networks were seeing marginal improvements. Over time as network deployments matured and new LTE releases came out, LTE's improvements went way beyond HSPA. But the first round of LTE phones on Verizon were terrible - way worse than any 5G device we saw. Some people wanted to be a first adopter. I think waiting a generation or two gives you better results, but some people always want to be first. I actually think the reason the US pushed LTE so quickly is simply because Verizon didn't have an upgrade path for their 3G network which was stuck in the 1Mbps range while HSPA-based competitors were pushing into the 4-8Mbps range. In Europe, carriers could delay a year and offer dual-channel HSPA service in the meantime. LTE was still better even in the early days, but the fact that CDMA didn't have an upgrade path put Verizon in a tough place. They could either watch AT&T offer 5x faster speeds than their HSPA network (at a time when AT&T had an exclusive on the iPhone) or they could be an LTE early adopter. I think AT&T would have liked to milk their HSPA investment a bit longer (as many carriers did around the world), but once Verizon started marketing LTE they had to follow. And you're saying that the upgrade was huge - and it certainly has been. However, it was more marginal at the start. That's not to say it wasn't a good upgrade even initially, but it wasn't anywhere near the 40-50Mbps that LTE averages today in the US. If 5G can follow a similar trajectory, we'll be able to support a lot of things we can't today.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

There are plenty of cheap Android phones with 5G now. E.g. there are a few nice Nokia ones. I wouldn't buy a phone without support for that right now. This stuff was standardized and agreed years ago and it's just the rollout that is going very slowly. The same happened with 4G. That took many years. The point of 5G is better quality of service. Marketing people of course dumb down the improvements to "it's faster" but throughput is actually the least important thing. Though of course a better QoS means that operators can guarantee a bit better throughput as well. Better latency, improved scaling for operators (more connected devices in an area), lower power usage, and more reliable connections. That is a big issue for me with 4G. Coverage here in Germany is not great and even in areas that are covered, the quality of service is pretty bad and I often struggle to get it to work at all even in places that are supposedly well covered. E.g. the are around the TV tower in Berlin (i.e. the largest FFing antenna in the wider area) is pretty bad because the area is full of tourists usually and the local base station ins hopelessly oversubscribed. That's the kind of stuff you could reasonably expect to improve with 5G.