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5G Skeptic

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• superkuh 5y ago
  In terms of increased thoroughput, hz for hz, compared to 4G LTE, 5G NR can send about 15-20% more data. That's not a huge improvement compared to past increases of multiple hundreds of percent (3G-4G). Because of this most increases in thoroughput have to come from using new frequency ranges. So they telcos pretty much stole half of the 3 GHz C-band from incumbent satellite operators (who were told to "just use h265"). But beyond this there's not much available spectrum that's even just decent like C-band. Most of it is crappy mm-wave.
  • Ekaros 5y ago
    One one hand it is annoying to lose that type of spectrum. On other hand terrestrial can mean smaller cell sizes thus much better utilization rates. Which really is needed if demand continues to increase.
  • H8crilA 5y ago
    Yup, there's only 1Mbit/sec for every 1Mhz of radio bandwidth, and this is shared between all users in a given cell. This is also why I don't understand the fascination with Starlink, which makes cells obnoxiously large (the size of a satellite coverage), even Musk himself says it's only for remote areas.
    • Ekaros 5y ago
      And why I have wondered how does the math really work out. Fiber and cell tower cost only so much. And outside some mobile cases does areas where this isn't viable have enough customers? Then again, USA is always an argument where telco seems to have really failed for various reasons. Still, I see no reason why same would apply to Africa or other markets they talk about...
    • ac29 5y ago
      > there's only 1Mbit/sec for every 1Mhz of radio bandwidth That can't be right, cellular networks have had > 1 bps/hz efficiency for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_efficiency
    • jlokier 5y ago
      > there's only 1Mbit/sec for every 1Mhz of radio bandwidth > this is shared between all users in a given cell Both statements are untrue. For example, "Wifi 7" 802.11be reaches up to 125 Mbit/s for each 1 MHz of radio bandwidth in perfect conditions, to a single user. Inside a cell area, multiple users can share the same radio frequencies at the same time using various spatial modulation techniques (typically called beamforming but it doesn't have to be a beam, and might involve 3 or more stations working together). The theoretical limits scale very differently than common understanding of bandwidth.
      • H8crilA 5y ago
        > reaches up to 125 Mbit/s for each 1 MHz of radio bandwidth I see. What is the theoretical limit of bits/second per hertz of radio bandwidth, if any?
        • jlokier 5y ago
          Ignoring quantum effects, there's no upper limit in theoretically perfect radio conditions, even for a single radio channel, where there is absolutely no background noise or interference, and the antennae and electronics are literally perfect. However, nothing can be built like that, and there is always background noise. The real life limit is complicated. For each single radio channel the limit depends on other characteristics of the channel than just the (temporal) radio bandwidth, for example the antenna, background radio noise, interference, and power level. The Shannon-Hartley theorom covers capacity of a single noisy channel with fixed characteristics; it depends on the signal to noise ratio as well as the bandwidth. Radio channels used for mobile communications are typically "fast-fading", which means the conditions keep changing, and both ends have to continuously measure those conditions and adapt dynamically how they encode and decode the data. This complicates a measure of the theoretical limit, and also means the limit is changing with time, for example as the user moves the handset around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_capacity#Channel_capacity_in_wireless_communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_capacity#Channel_capac... The highest rate encoding used in 802.11be is "4096-QAM" which carries 24 bits/sec per Hz when noise is sufficiently low, and decreases the more error correction is required. I'm not sure if 4096-QAM is chosen because the signal-to-noise level is such that a larger number wouldn't improve thoughput enough to matter, or if it's limited by the electronics, non-linearity and calculations at those high speeds. That bit rate is for a single radio channel. Multiple channels overlapping the same frequencies are also possible, as long as the antennae are sufficiently spread out in space and/or polarisation. When something large enough like a laptop (which has multiple antenna in the display) talks to a base station, it is combined with beamforming and diversity, or in a general mathematical description, polarisation modes and spatial bandwidth. That is equivalent to having multiple radio channels using the same frequencies to the same device, but the channels are not physically distinct, they are combined and separated mathematically with linear algebra. As with MHz bandwidth, spatial and polarisation are also limited. You can't add more channels with no limit to a single device of fixed size. But if you have no limit on device size so can add more antenna spread out, and/or many base stations cooperating, you can increase the total bits/second by using those. 4G LTE does the multiple base stations thing to some extent already, to maintain channels to multiple user handsets at the same time inside a cell. It's not that each handset talks to a separate base station. It's that the signals are combined with linear algebra in such a way that each handset can decode different information from the multi-spatial-channel signal that they all receive slightly differently.
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  The irony is that the main case for 5G is reduced costs for operators. 4G blew the top off what people thought the Shannon Limit was but at the expense of extreme and expensive coordination between base stations. (If your digital front-ends are sampling at a rate of N Hz and a bit depth of d you need to bring all that data to one place!) 5G gets better spectral efficiency (serve more customers with expensive spectrum) with a simpler coordination model. (lower capital cost) Of course since 5G is the new shiny carriers want to charge you more for it but they'd save money if they got you off 4G and onto 5G.
  • zw123456 5y ago
    It most certainly did not do that, neither has 5G for that matter. The Shannon's Law refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theore... to see the actual formula the basic principle is that the Capacity C of a comm channel is proportional to the amount of spectrum you have B and the Signal to Interference and Noise ratio (SINR). So basically, if you want more throughput, you need either more spectrum or more cell sites in order to improve the SINR, you cannot simply continue to crank up the power because then you are increasing the co-channel interference (interfering with other terminals on the wireless network). This is why Spectrum is so expensive, the alternative is to build more cell sites, which is expensive. 4G LTE did come a lot closer by using OFDMA but they most certainly did not exceed the limit. 5G using mm-wave also did not, it uses phased array antennas to implement beam forming which created space separation, that is, each user gets their own beam and do not have to share it with others, but within that beam, they still are confined to the law C ~ B * SINR The operators did add a ton of spectrum through various auctions and that plus the new tech is what is driving the tputs up.
    • tails4e 5y ago
      You need more SNR (power), more BW (spectrum) , or more 'channels'. 5G solves this using the last dimension, channels. Beamforming allows the same spectrum to be reused by allowing for spacial separation, i.e. use the same spectrum 5 times by sending 5 beams to 5 physically sperare locations. MIMO is layered on top of this ans uses multipath effects to offer more bandwidth to a single user by taking advantage of the fact each path is its own channel. No violation of the Shannon limit for sure, but very smart and computationally intensive techniques to skirt around the issues of the single isotropic or sector antenna of old.
• vmception 5y ago
  Note that their goalpost can always move to "but does it justify the trillion dollar buildout" even in the face of incremental improvements or new use cases They can calcify their opinions by imagining that they know what a company or ISP needs to do They've already received many impressions and responses on twitter from their questions about whether 5g has changed anyone's day to day, and did a little survey when working with vendors, and its not likely most people did an empirical analysis on their own day to day to begin with. So it isn't really necessary to add more to that
• baggy_trough 5y ago
  I've never noticed an improvement from 5G over LTE. What I care about most is reliability of some low but usable amount of bandwidth, as opposed to maximum bandwidth. Both 5G and LTE are annoyingly unreliable for me (wandering around in Silicon Valley).
  • 8note 5y ago
    Yeah, going for a walk round Seattle on a VoIP conference call on either 4g or 5g, and both drop out for half the trip
  • fomine3 5y ago
    5G on higher frequency could be less stable while moving.
• trothamel 5y ago
  5G is weird, since it's being sold as a big deal, when it really isn't. It has some nice improvements, with the big ones being that it makes more efficient use of the spectrum. I'm not really an expert on this, so if someone is, feel free to correct me, but my understanding is that some of the big changes with 5G NR are making better use of good signals via higher-order modulation, allowing less resources to be allocated to low-bandwidth users, and decreasing latency by allowing communications to start more often. That doesn't really help any one phone, at least ones that are working well now. What it does do is to make the network better, in the same way going from 3G to LTE did.
• smitty1e 5y ago
  One of the big arguments I've heard from an AT&T PM who is supposedly In The Know is that 5G lets First Responders have privileged bandwidth in a saturated area.
  • ac29 5y ago
    First responders already have their own band with 20MHz of spectrum: FirstNet In fact, its run by AT&T. Its not a 5G specific thing.
• whatshisface 5y ago
  Why is 5G being treated like a big public decision that we're supposed to have an opinion on, when in reality it's coordination between chipset manufacturers and cell tower operators that hardly involves us at all? It doesn't even seem like it's worth marketing to me, I'm not going to go out and buy a cell tower. Even selling me on 5G so I'll buy a new phone is unnecessary, the phone manufacturers could sell me on the improved performance directly.
  • RyanShook 5y ago
    The costs to carriers will be going up and by marketing they are subtly letting us know the cost of our service plan will be going up.
  • JauntyHatAngle 5y ago
    Don't think it's the whole story, but 3g, 4g and now 5g were used as big selling points for new phones and plans to consumers. If people start buying things based on the name, they'll form opinions on it. Most consumers purchase based on buzz words like 4g and 5g. They barely pay attention to bandwidth.
  • ep103 5y ago
    Because Chinese companies developed 5G before American companies did. American telecarriers not only didn't initially research the technology, they refused to even agree to a standard definition. IIRC, AT&T marketed their 4G network as 5G for a while. As a result, Chinese companies had an opportunity to enter western markets with superior, government funded technology. They started making sales, notably in Canada, IIRC, before Western pushback started. From the private sector, telecoms pushed on the government to ban the Chinese technology, to buy them time to play catch-up with China. Politically, the need to protect the inadequate technology (not) developed by the private market, from a government funded program doesn't fit with the current US ideological model, so a different excuse was found. The legitimate reason: "Telecommunications infrastructure is a national security priority, and Chinese technology in this arena, due to its ties to the CCP, is a national security threat" was used. Again, a legitimate reason. It even has the bonus that it implies the current western ideology that governments should not direct private research. But this sort of market protectionism makes 5G a public policy and national security interest matter. So in order to ensure there is public support for such a policy, one of the easiest things to do, is convince the bottom-information tiers of society with conspiratorial, xenophobic, nonsense. Which is where the 5G conspiracy theories come from. You will note that the 5G conspiracy theories can be generalized into the statement "5G is evil, and is used for mind control / cancer", which really, is a dumbed-down game of telephone (pun) away from the original source material: [5G is evil] <-- The CCP is bad / national security and we must reject their tainted technology; [It is used for mind control] <-- CCP = big brother, Chinese 5G = surveillance, national security; [Cancer] <-- more tangible than 'mind control'.
• sydthrowaway 5y ago
  Whoever did the dsp behind 4g is a genius
• hanklazard 5y ago
  Agree with author on the last part … I don’t need this. Bought an iPhone 13 mini recently and one of the first things I did was set the cellular from “5G Auto” to “LTE” to save battery life. My suspicion has been that this tech isn’t for me, but actually more for the companies that are deploying it. For those who know the tech behind this better than me (ie, most of you), does 5G make it possible to turn my phone into a signal booster for my neighbor? Am I now a piece of the network infrastructure with 5G in a way that I’m not with LTE?
• imdsm 5y ago
  I found this hard to follow so stopped reading. > [Note: When I say “G” or “M” I’m talking about Gbits or Mbits/second.] > Why 5G? Faster connections — there is talk of 10G! Wait, does he think 4G = 4 Gbit/s, and 5G = 5 Gbit/s? If there's talk of 10G well, what about 6/7/8/9G? G is generation. Additionally: > The phone calls what it sees “LTE+” (I don’t claim to understand what that means) It isn't hard to find out information. A quick search leads to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_Advanced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_Advanced.
  • cogman10 5y ago
    Agreed. This was a hard to understand article because of that note. The author appeared to switch between G as in Gbps and G as in generation multiple times without clarification. Would have been way more clear if they just used Gbits instead of G when they meant Gbits. (or Gen instead of G).
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • throwusawayus 5y ago
    author invented xml. while i haven't any love for xml i assume he is on solid technical footing and just worded poorly ?
  • timbray 5y ago
    Oops haha you're right, "G" has two different meanings in the article. Couple proofreaders missed that too. I think most readers are smart enough to figure out which is meant most times?
• Mo3 5y ago
  Ugh, that's just super opinionated and short sighted. I have countrywide 5G here, and the difference in latency on voice or video calls is super notable and nice. Obviously it doesn't make sense to run on 5G permanently because energy consumption is still comparably higher, just like it was the case with 4G in its beginning, but the automatic switching does a somewhat good job at it. 5G also has a ton of other benefits such as being able to support a multitude more clients and being able to prioritize traffic (like for emergency services) and handle slicing/QoS much better. Not to mention stuff like e.g. active beamforming capabilities reducing power consumption and lowering emission levels for the general environment SIGNIFICANTLY. All of the amazon internals and obvious marketing/hype around 5G aside: Author is a good example of naysaying - Saying no to obviously better technology because it doesnt fit their reality and/or knowledge.
  • acdha 5y ago
    What kind of latency are you seeing? I see 4G latency around 30±10ms so I could believe that's an area for improvement but also one which wouldn't be transformative for many applications. From my perspective, the big change we need in the U.S. is getting away from tiny data plans — most of the interesting 5G applications also use a ton of data and when 1GB is concerned a princely amount it's hard to care much about video calls.
    • Mo3 5y ago
      I get ±40-60ms on 4G legacy and ±5-10ms on 5G. Which no matter what people try to claim here is a great and very notable improvement in latency on voice calls. Another benefit I have noticed is that latency seems to be much more stable in all kinds of conditions - stationary, in trains, in the car. I believe this is one of the key factors in what makes the experience so much nicer. I have no idea about US cell plans, here in NL it's included in afaik all new contracts. I have unlimited data + 5G for 40€/month
      • acdha 5y ago
        That does sound like a nice improvement. We’re held back by the pricing model so most people I know have treated 5G as something they’ll get eventually but won’t really change what they do.
• darthrupert 5y ago
  For me 5G has been absolutely wonderful. It made my connection at home about 2x faster than whatever we have at the city office. And about 50x faster than what I had at home before. Also much more stable latencies.
  • novok 5y ago
    You must have some pretty crappy wired ISPs
    • darthrupert 5y ago
      Perhaps. There was some indication that the wiring in our house caused some trouble for our previous VDSL. But even if it had worked at advertised speeds, 5G would have given me roughly double the speed. As it was, 5G gave us about 50x better and stable connection. Only fiber directly to our house could top that, but unfortunately that's not available here yet. Plus costly.
  • chimeracoder 5y ago
    > For me 5G has been absolutely wonderful. It made my connection at home about 2x faster than whatever we have at the city office. And about 50x faster than what I had at home before. Also much more stable latencies. But why are you using 5G at home in the first place? Where are you that 5G actually outperforms your wired connection (accessed through WiFi)?
    • tyrfing 5y ago
      It's cheaper than fiber internet here. Costs less for the same bandwidth, without a contract and without data caps - unlike the wired option. Assuming the latency is usable, unlike 4G, it's starting to be a very competitive option. If you're stuck with 12mbps copper like some areas, it's a very obvious choice.
    • darthrupert 5y ago
      Suburbs. I don't understand the doubt. Why does everyone expect that 5G wouldn't work for this case? It's just a way to connect the last kilometer to a fiber network without expensive (and in my case, unavailable) cabling work.
• eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Interestingly (to me), I just turned 5G off on my phone yesterday. I’ve had weird connectivity issues ever since I got this phone, even when I see “5GUC” (“ultra capacity”). Out of idle curiosity I wondered if LTE might be less spotty. So far it mostly has been! But ironically it cut out in the course of writing this comment, while looking up “5GUC” to confirm I remembered what it meant.
• ugjka 5y ago
  Most of the coverage is going to be 800/700/600 Mhz stuff that will have the same problem of peak hours congestion as LTE. The 5G pipedream is based on an assumption that telcos could possibly afford to litter every inhabited place with shitload of HF base stations
  • BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    By the way, HF does stand for high frequency, but it's actually the 3 to 30Mhz band. 5G mmWave would be the SHF and low EHF bands. (Super high/extremely high)
  • giantrobot 5y ago
    5G also provides better spacial efficiency over LTE besides the spectral efficiency. So even without a forest of towers it'll provide better peak congestion performance than LTE. At the same time microcells/nanocells are more practical with 5G allowing companies to increase capacity in especially high traffic areas. For instance a couple high-band cells in popular public spaces. With LTE the only equivalent option was a lower power microcell that affected and was affected by nearby full sized cells. There's plenty of marketing dreck and hype around 5G but there's also a lot of good engineering and real capability improvements over previous cellular systems.
• jmyeet 5y ago
  The "Why Not?" section here starts with a disclaimer that the author is personally affected but doesn't actually say how. The points raised boil down to "I have enough speed so I don't see the point". Ok, but that's not a reason why not. Remember bandwidth isn't just about how much an individual can get but how many people can be serviced within a given area either in total or without subdividing into cells, which then require somewhere to put another tower. The author didn't raise this but I've seen others who have brought up the nebulous "radiation" argument against 5G. Here's a good litmus test: if someone can't tell you, at a minimum, what "ionizing radiation" is then you can safely ignore everything they say about "radiation". Here's another: if they can't describe the "radiation" in terms of the radiation exposure from eating a banana, you can also safely ignore them.
  • ericd 5y ago
    Microwaves aren’t ionizing radiation, but you still probably don’t want too many watts to the brain. That said, I have no opinion on 5G safety, I don’t know enough to have one. Do you know what the wattage of a microcell that might sit on a suburban power pole might be?
    • BenjiWiebe 5y ago
      And don't forget the inverse square law. You will be irradiated much more by a cell phone pressed against your skin than a microcell on top of a pole, just because the distance is many orders of magnitude more.
  • tejohnso 5y ago
    While you're ignoring everything they say about radiation, you can also suggest they watch "All you need to know to understand 5G" by Sabine Hossenfelder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBsP-bmDLOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBsP-bmDLOo
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • alduin32 5y ago
• nabla9 5y ago
  It's strange how everything related to to mobile networks is meh or bad in the US. tbray and others think it's the technology they are analyzing when it's actually how operators adopt the technology that makes the difference. It must be market power issue. Operators just do the minimum possible coverage they can get away with.
  • lkxijlewlf 5y ago
    > It's strange ... Not strange at all. They're "job" is to funnel as much money to investors as possible. They can all get away with being awful because there's only 3 of them left. Yay capitalism?
  • ac29 5y ago
    > It's strange how everything related to to mobile networks is meh or bad in the US. Hasn't been my experience. Over the past decade or two, coverage and speeds have increased a ton and prices have stayed low. Carriers are spending billions on new spectrum and an ever increasing build out of cell sites.
    • nabla9 5y ago
      What are you comparing against? Compared to northern Europe and rich East Asian countries the US mobile infrastructure and prices are bad in my experience.
• azinman2 5y ago
  All of this assumes we’ve reached some plateau for how the Internet will always be used. Historically that’s never been the case — as more bandwidth becomes available, new applications pop up to fulfill the need. Perhaps it feels like marketing fluff now, but generally reducing latency and increasing bandwidth has always historically lead to new kinds of use cases that become daily drivers. What would be newsworthy is if that didn’t happen.
  • ddingus 5y ago
    The carriers themselves have an impact on this beyond physical layer improvements. A big one is data cost rates and caps. I've heard more than once, "5G means I will zip right through my data and will cost me more." LTE actually works great for me, and I do video calls and such over LTE fairly regularly. Now I do pay for that, and I'm compensated. That's what the carriers would love to see continue, but that also limits mass adoption too. Many people don't like extra charges appearing on their phone account. I don't, but I'm in a position to deal with them too. Annoyance. Plenty of people really feel that extra $20, $50, more depending on what it is they did, like drive too close to Canada with automatic data roaming turned on. That can be painful. Years ago, early 90's era, there was a magazine. Boardwatch, I believe it was. There were some great voices in that one, and all these topics we discuss today are nothing new, and most of us here know that. There are some constants: As mentioned, applications fill resources. Could be RAM, storage, throughput, bandwidth. Part of that is offering choice, the next one coming up. *In broadcast / streaming, where there is a defined bitrate possible, choice will win out over quality. Here's a little thought experiment that suggests why that is generally the case: Say you've got two streams or broadcast channels to use. One is boring, but exemplary quality, the other is poor quality, but compelling as it gets. Which one do you use? Which one do you believe most people will use? That leads to, "Content is king." One of the topics Boardwatch covered regularly was diversity in ISPs. As consolidation happened, another truism did as well, and that is basic economic trope at this point: More choice = more competition = buyer gets highest value for the dollar. Less choice = less competition = buyer gets lowest value for the dollar. The fight to prevent lock-in is therefore eternal. Carriers of all types will seek to limit choice however they can. Higher cost of change = lower choice. This is also driving the one I mentioned above. Content being king means making more content options available almost always trumps quality. I do have a small nit to pick: To me, the word "bandwidth" isn't quite right. Yes, it speaks to the maximum information possible, but throughput is the more accurate word, in my view, when it comes to the impact moving more bits per second at lower latencies has on society overall. Another quick thought exercise: Say you have a choice of a very fast connection, but latency is all over the place, and or there are random slowdowns vs. one that isn't as fast, but is super consistent. Which do you use? Which one do you believe other people will use? I prefer the latter most of the time given the constancy metrics match up with my use cases. My point here is the carriers have a huge impact today! We've consolidated down to a point where many truisms about the Internet are not so true in the wireless realm. Back in the 90's, when most of us were on wires most of the time, all that discussion about carriers, ISPs (when they were two different things often enough to make that distinction), and the up and coming "cloud" computing being equated to how things were in the late 60's and 70's, has played out fairly accurately. Kudos to the people with vision back then. Too bad it didn't have a bigger impact on public policy overall.
• sparker72678 5y ago
  Another anecdote — at my house, on Verizon Wireless: LTE: Consistently 5-20Mbps down. In the first couple of months after LTE went online here (5ish? years ago), I could get more like 90-100. It dropped into the 20-ish range and never went back up. 5G: I have UltraWideband coverage at my house, and I can get 200-500Mbps download speeds. Will 5G just drop down over time (as usage goes up) like LTE did? I dunno, maybe. But, for now at least, 5G(UW) has been much, much faster for me.
  • pkulak 5y ago
    Well, that's almost entirely due to Verizon's C-Band being pretty empty right now (5G phones are only a couple years old) and it being 2-5x the frequency and bandwidth of the bands they put 4g on. If they had put 4g on C-band, you'd probably be seeing the exact same performance. So, I guess what I'm saying is, if by "5g", you mean "the giant new swaths of high-frequency spectrum that carriers are building out", then 5g is amazing. Otherwise, it's nothing to even bother noticing, as a consumer.
    • cogman10 5y ago
      Definitely the biggest boon of 5g is the high frequency spectrum.
    • sparker72678 5y ago
      I guess that’s kinda my point — for me, “giant new swaths of spectrum” is my 5G experience. (Just a part of how muddy the waters of this topic are.)
      • pkulak 5y ago
        Yeah, for me too. I'm excited about mobile again for the first time since LTE got turned on.
  • cogman10 5y ago
    Agreed. We have a limited backend that appears to be expanding at a snails pace. There's a stretch of driving I've regularly done which goes through an unpopulated stretch of the US. I've watched the tech tick up from 2g, 3g, 4g, LTE, and now 5g. Yet the download speed remains at sub 1Mbps speeds. My assumption is they are still running the same copper/fiber that was buried to the tower 20 years ago while updating the receivers.
• seltzered_ 5y ago
  I have the same sentiment of 5G working better for tethering+zoom calls as https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/03/26/-big/consultant-tethering-is-good.jpg.html https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/03/26/-big/cons... - it's noticeable as with my current provider/place I currently have to position my phone in the right area of the house to get 5G. I'm not on ultrawideband 5G or anything, but it's worth noting that I hardly did video calls before the pandemic and was fairly 5G skeptical before. I later realized video call's value not for dayjob work but for fictive kinship interest groups and study groups going past 'doing conversation' or 'feel-good conversation' but more into support and 'depth conversation'. I could get by on doing this with a wired internet connection or by doing zoom on the phone (where I think cellular bandwidth QoS prioritization comes into play and Zoom will still work over LTE), but staving off yet another thing to pay for has been nice.
• temptemptemp111 5y ago
• zw123456 5y ago
  I have 5G at my house, I am served by what the provider calls 5G ultra wide band, which is deployed on mm-wave band (28Ghz) and uses phased array technology to implement beam forming, I generally get about 2Gbps on speed tests, but of course through normal activity you can rarely get that to anything on the public net, but to Azure and AWS I can get peaks on certain applications I am working on. The latency variers because of the DRX and cDRX mechanisms but generally I see about 20 - 30ms on start of a flow and 5 - 6 ms during a flow. It will fall back to mid-band (4Ghz) which uses MIMO instead of beam forming due to the longer wavelengths PAA, is not practical, I get around 600Mbps. It will fall back usually on my mobile device even just moving around in the house but the stationary CPE device I have set up is pretty solid. Of course if you connect via Wifi, which I suspect most people would, then you are probably not going to get those speeds but would depend on all the usual wifi caveats. The service is better than the wired service (from a cableco who is run DOCIS 3.1) that I had before But nothing I have seen yet is in the 10Gig range. But TBH, I am not sure how most people would use it anyway, at least not today. Maybe there will be some future use cases but today I am un-convinced that some of the hyped use cases will ever pan out. I have read about things like "Remote Surgery" I cannot see any surgeon getting malpractice insurance to cover that. I have the same skepticism about all the various vehicle anti-collision ideas, it seems to be that DRC (Direct Radio Comm) is the only thing that would make sense, the minute you stick a network behind it you are adding a lot of risk of outages and too much latency, I just don't see where you need more computing power in some MEC (Mobile Edge Cloud) than could be put in a vehicle itself. The only that maybe needs that kind of computing power, throughput and low latency is the AR/VR type application which I think is why people seem to be putting 5G, MEC and Metaverse into the same sentence more often lately. My conclusion is that until there is a killer app, 5G will be perceived as a lot of hype. I do not know if Metaverse will take off or not, time will tell.
  • giantrobot 5y ago
    One of the interesting though prosaic uses of 5G is the ability to replace a bunch of bespoke over their air protocols for "smart" devices. These are boring devices like utility meters, SCADA stuff, and all manner of remote monitors. Since they can just be "5G" devices they can massively benefit from economies of scale. They can also end up more secure than existing devices because they can more easily be on an IP-based VPN on top of network segmentation/encryption 5G provides. One of the goals of 5G was allowing low power devices to also have a nice low power radio that can benefit from existing public networks. Not having to maintain custom base stations and relays for some custom radio stack makes a lot more remote monitoring projects economically feasible.
• ipython 5y ago
  I moved house recently and in a reasonably large suburban area was forced to rely exclusively on tethering with 4g/5g on my iPhone until the fiber could get moved to the new place. It was a miserable experience. Video calls (wfh) were impossible- laggy and cut out all the time. Several software updates happened that week - at about 1gb average for almost a dozen devices - personal and work MacBooks, and phones for a full family with kids, I burned through my tethering allotment for the month within a week. Latency with 5g is better than LTE but the best I’ve seen is in the neighborhood of 30ms. I can easily get sub 5ms on fiber. It does make a difference when doing rdp sessions for example. I get that fixed wireless may work for some but for us it’s a non starter after being used to fast reliable fiber for almost 15 years now.
• jolux 5y ago
  I used my iPhone 12 as a 5G modem while working from home for a couple weeks after I moved last year before I had my gigabit RCN service setup. It was remarkably performant and stable. I could probably use it full time if it weren't for the higher cost.
• tedk-42 5y ago
  The author lives on a boat. Imagine going back thousands of years and hearing people that lived on land saying "there's no need to live on the ocean, the land is perfectly safe and there's just no good reason for it". My stomach turns when people are against technology for reasons other than ethical ones.
  • timbray 5y ago
    Um I use our boat as an office, bicycle down to it most days. Ain't spacious or luxurious, but it's waterfront. I live in an ordinary house with decent (~300M) wired connection.
• zw123456 5y ago
  One of the primary reasons that carriers are interested in 5G is because for the last decade they have been swapping spit (trading customers between each other, carrier A lowers the prices and take customers from carrier B, who responds in kind and takes from carrier C who responds with a marketing campaign with some deal on a phone etc. and etc.) What they all are craving is new revenue. Once everyone who wants a cell phone, has one, it becomes a commodity item and service and that means, if anything, one price war after another. This is why they are interested in 5G and MEC (Mobile Edge Cloud) they are looking for new revenue. Right now, as part of the 5G push is the idea of wireless home internet, which is basically just a wifi AP that connects to the internet via the wireless network. To do that of course, you need a lot more capacity, 5G offers that to some extent, but realistically you need a ton more spectrum, which is why you have seen a spate of auctions lately. Make no mistake here, 5G Home internet is most certainly not a cost savings approach for the carriers, they are literally spending billions on it, in hopes of luring customers away from the cable cos and telcos or other wired providers. Will it work? Perhaps. Time will tell. But to be sure, in my view, this is very good for the consumer of internet services, it will almost assuredly provide the customer with a lower cost per Mbps due to increased competition particularly with all the LEOS (Low Earth Orbit Sats) also in the mix.
  • mdasen 5y ago
    > But to be sure, in my view, this is very good for the consumer of internet services This is one of the things I'm excited about. Even if 5G home internet won't lure you away from your wired connection, it will lure enough customers away that your ISP will need to treat you better (for fear that you might be lured away). Lots of people with Verizon and AT&T would say that they would never switch to T-Mobile in the 2013-2020 time-range. Still, T-Mobile lured enough customers away that Verizon and AT&T started treating their customers a lot better.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • zw123456 5y ago
      Yes, Tmo is catching up with ATT and VZ on quality, the main reason they bought Sprint (remember them) is because Sprint had a shit ton of spectrum but they weren't building it out because they were capital starved (for a bunch of reasons). So now, TMo has the most low and medium band spectrum and they are catching up on build out. Vz has the most spectrum if you include the mm-wave, but it's difficult to build out. All the bandwidth competition is a good thing for the consumer and hopefully some cool stuff gets developed to take advantage of it.
• mdasen 5y ago
  I think the issue is that 5G was initially rolled out with hand-waving and marketing. The initial 5G rollouts in the US have been on low-band spectrum (below 1GHz) with companies using 5-15MHz channels (or in the case of Verizon, not even giving dedicated channels to 5G and using inefficient dynamic spectrum sharing with LTE) and most of the bandwidth that users get is actually coming from the LTE channels on the network via carrier aggregation. So, out of the 40-50MHz of downlink capacity your phone is using, most of it isn't 5G and low-band 5G's efficiency improvements over LTE are a bit minimal (probably 20-30%). Mid-band 5G is another story. With better MIMO and such, the efficiency improvements seem to be more like 50-80%. Not only that, a lot of new spectrum is being added to networks and it's TDD (time-division duplexing) rather than FDD (frequency-division duplexing). T-Mobile and Verizon have launched their 2.5GHz and 3.5GHz networks with 60MHz of spectrum and people are usually seeing speeds around 300-400Mbps which is significantly faster than LTE (and significantly faster than the average home broadband connection). A lot more mid-band spectrum will be coming over the next couple years. Likewise, initial rollouts of 5G were in non-standalone mode. That means that LTE is running the show and the 5G is providing its bandwidth. That also means that ping times are driven by the ping times of the LTE network. 5G standalone networks drive down ping times a lot. Network and handset support is a bit iffy right now, but it'll come along. I think it's also easy to forget how LTE was a minimal upgrade over HSPA+ when it initially came out. Why not just use dual-carrier HSPA+? Even in mid 2013 (2.5 years after Verizon's LTE launch), they were averaging 10.25Mbps while T-Mobile's HSPA was 7.66Mbps (via PC Magazine). Only a third faster? Why bother, right? Of course, that hides the fact that LTE drove ping times down a lot from 3G networks which meant a much better experience for users. It also hides the fact that LTE had a lot of room to improve over the years and now we see LTE speeds 4x higher than 2013. When you're comparing a newly launched product to the last generation that you've spent years working on, the new product can often seem like a minimal upgrade (even if it has a lot more runway). T-Mobile's mid-band network is the most deployed in the US and their average speed has risen to 91Mbps (via Ookla/Spedtest.net, as of 3-6 months ago) - not their average 5G speed, their average speed. That's with less than half their network usage going over 5G and even within that 5G usage, a lot of it is probably over the low-band 5G network (which is more like LTE++). Their average 5G speed is 187Mbps and that's averaging in both the low-band LTE network and mid-band LTE network (again via Ookla, as of 3-6 months ago). I think that going from 40Mbps to 190Mbps is a pretty big difference. Not only that, it's a better real world experience. Ookla found that 13-20% of the time (depending on carrier), LTE was below 5Mbps down and 1Mbps up for people. T-Mobile's 5G speeds were at least 25Mbps down and 5Mbps up 82% of the time. So with LTE, you're going to get at least 5Mbps 80% of the time and with 5G, you're going to get at least 25Mbps 80% of the time. Plus, 5Mbps up means a nice video call compared to 1Mbps. 5G is offering better stuff in the real-world and this will get better as the networks mature - carriers are still upgrading towers. Now, if you're on AT&T, they have almost no mid-band 5G. If you're on Verizon, they've just launched a decent amount of mid-band 5G (30% of Americans covered, although people are reporting that their maps are hugely over-estimated), but it's limited compared to T-Mobile and only available on their premium plans. It might not seem like a big deal if you aren't seeing mid-band 5G. I think 5G is also starting to put pressure on home internet providers. T-Mobile gained more home broadband customers in Q4 2021 than anyone (wired or wireless). A lot of rural customers are getting real broadband for the first time and upgrading from things like HugesNet with restrictive data allotments. Starlink "isn't a big deal" if you already have good broadband. If you live in an area without it, Starlink gives you a modern internet connection. Likewise, wireless home internet will offer new options to many rural customers as well as put competitive pressure on broadband monopolies. I think part of Tim Bray's skepticism is: do we need more speed on mobile? In some ways, I share that skepticism. However, I'd also add: do you need gigabit fiber? He notes that he has fiber at home. We often don't know what we'll use speed for until we have it. Mobile data was around for a long time before the iPhone and while some people had found some uses for it, most of us didn't see utility. Then Apple releases the iPhone and all of a sudden the world starts reorienting around data. It can take time for someone to make a killer-app for a capability. T-Mobile just launched a 5G innovation center to help people figure out what to do with 5G. Sometimes technological capabilities precede someone figuring out what people will want to do with it. I mean, we had broadband connections capable of 1080p video for years before Netflix started streaming. Today, streaming is a way of life. Bray also says that "I don’t personally know anyone whose life has been changed by 5G. Yes, family members with newer phones occasionally report that the status bar says “5G”, but I don’t hear that they’re having a different experience." A big part of that is that carriers rolled out 5G before most 5G capabilities were really there. If you're on a low-band 5G non-standalone network, it can be hard for it to feel any different. Heck, my device often performs better with 5G off if there's network congestion (since so many people are using 5G in my area and my carrier isn't really good). But that's because every carrier wanted 5G to pop up on your phone even before 5G's capabilities were really in your hands. Carriers pushed things out a bit quickly in part because they wanted phones to start supporting 5G (for when the real capabilities of 5G got deployed) and because it offered useful marketing. Bray also says that 5G started in Spring 2019. That's not wrong, but it can be misleading. Verizon launched a small amount of millimeter-wave 5G in Spring 2019. Millimeter-wave spectrum typically has a range of 100-200ft and is blocked by almost anything in its path. T-Mobile launched low-band 5G in December 2019, but again low-band 5G in non-standalone deployment isn't really that different. T-Mobile really started launching mid-band 5G in Summer 2020 with Verizon following 1.5 years later in January 2022. However, it takes a while to upgrade a network. If you have 60,000-80,000 towers that you're upgrading and you're upgrading 1,000-1,500 per month, it's going to take a while. For T-Mobile, we know that it's going to be around 3.5-3.7 years to get to 90% of Americans covered. Verizon started deploying mid-band ahead of their launch (since they knew the spectrum they'd have before they were allowed to use it), but they're staying it'll still be 3 years to get to 75% of Americans covered (and given that they started deploying 6-9 months before their launch, we can say 3.5-3.7 years to get to 75% of Americans covered). Basically, we're starting to see some great capabilities some of the time, but we probably have another year or two before it becomes really common and gives people more "wow" moments. So I think if one is skeptical of 5G, one needs to talk to people that have been using "real" 5G (rather than 5G pushed out for marketing reasons) and one might need to wait a few years as networks get deployed. However, there are already so many people that 5G is making a difference for and that number will grow over time.
• dwaite 5y ago
  The author went the entire article without actually defining what 5G is. If he had, it would have made some of the discussion points more obviously moot. 4th generation has limits on total devices, power utilization, bandwidth, latency and coverage that 5th generation improves upon. Carriers are the ones who want to move to 5G - they are clubbing phone manufacturers to do so, and then both are marketing it so people buy into the new infrastructure. You'll see other groups (smart cities, autonomous vehicles and private IoT deployments) with technical need. In the US, we saw T-Mobile push for lower frequency usage at the start to improve their rural coverage, while their Sprint side pushed for more of the bandwidth-improving urban coverage. The article has several quotes from people who are using 5G for cheaper last mile for home internet - this could be a mobile hotspot or an antenna installation. This will provide more competition for internet service in areas that have had effective monopolies on broadband. The towers and frequencies are being switched over to 5G, with emulation for handling older technologies. I would expect as the networks start to go past the capabilities of LTE, there will be congestion controls which will give LTE customers less bandwidth or lower quality of service at times.
  • entropie 5y ago
    > The author went the entire article without actually defining what 5G is Iam pretty sure they actually dont know. > Is 5G a cheaper or better way to do that? I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound crazy. > The phone calls what it sees “LTE+” (I don’t claim to understand what that means) This is a guy who asks their twitter audience and wonders why there is no explicit answer.
    • oh_sigh 5y ago
      It seems like hubris. I see it a lot in very senior engineers. Basically, the belief that "I have all the information in my head to answer any tech question". The blog post would have been much better if he spent 30 minutes less on twitter, and 30 minutes more on familiarizing himself with the problem space. Announcing you're a skeptic about something, and then having your analysis filled with knowledge gaps isn't a great look.
• russellbeattie 5y ago
  There's some classic Tim curmudgeonry right there! Is he complaining about the hype or the tech? There's a continuum between "5G is an unneeded upgrade pushed by [insert conspiracy theory here]" and "5G is an essential new invention that will significantly improve our lives." The truth is somewhere in the middle, and in my opinion, leans much more towards the latter. I was pitching Vodafone business customers in Spain on the power of the coming 3G revolution back in 2001. The stuff we were selling as "coming next year" wouldn't be commercial products until over a decade later, and required the invention of the iPhone in between. That's just how it has worked for decades now. This isn't a surprise.
• charcircuit 5y ago
  >although rollback netcode is producing remarkably good results these days. Tell me you are not an online gamer without telling me you are not an online gamer. Rollback netcode makes about sub 100ms ping playable. Having a low ping is still better than having a high ping. LAN is still the definitive experience since latency is minimized. There are online competitions that are west coast or east coast only because the experience just is not good enough even with rollback netcode to handle latencies that are so high. When I tried tethering to my phone on 4G I was getting like 150ms ping and it was really spiky. You are not going to have a good time with that much latency. Also in the gaming context related to low latency is cloud gaming which also includes VR / AR rendering which needs to have an accurate location of where your head is to render the frame correctly.
  • ThatPlayer 5y ago
    It also depends on the game. Rollback netcode is for games where your client fully simulates the game. This doesn't happen on a majority of games because of hidden information. I don't even know if it scales beyond a fighting game, where you'll see rollback most commonly used. Part of the rollback is to go back to a saved gamestate a few seconds ago, and resimulate the entire game with the new (correct) input. Meaning to rollback 100ms, you would need to be able to resimulate that 100ms of gameplay in say 1 frame or 16ms.
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      >This doesn't happen on a majority of games because of hidden information. In this case you can just have the server do the rollbacks as it can view all of the information. >where you'll see rollback most commonly used Personally I have run into rollback in FPS games. Not many fighting games use rollback.
• SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
  One thing I never understood is why it is called "5G" (and not just LTE++)? All the previous "Generations" were pretty big technological leaps in the physical layer, each G was a completely different beast using a completely different physical layer, but from what I gather, "5G" is just LTE with some added frequency bands, bigger QAM, more MIMO, etc (just like LTE to LTE+ added, nothing generational). So, just "before we used to divide this thing into 64 parts and now we divide into 256 so we have 4x the bandwith", nothing that couldn't be done into LTE++ (or LTE+2, or whatever). The only breaking change seem to be the change in the orthogonality of the up-link channel modulation (down-link remains unchanged). So, can anyone explain to me what is the generational difference between LTE and 5G (not simply more frequencies and tighter parameters)?
  • Sakos 5y ago
    5G isn't LTE. It's NR. I'm not sure what the point of questioning the terminology is.
    • SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
      The point of the question is NR is not a generational leap over LTE, it is just a small evolution of LTE (just like LTE to LTE Advance), with the exception of the orthogonality pf the up-link, everything could have been implemented as extensions to LTE instead of a new thing.
• yosito 5y ago
  I found this article to be convincing in-favor of 5G. I think the real concerns about 5G are how it can be abused by providers and governments to spy on people, none of which was mentioned in this article.
• bumblebritches5 5y ago
• Foivos 5y ago
  The product you are talking about is called “fixed wireless access” and at least in Norway is a huge success. It makes sense because Norway is sparsely populated and this product can serve communities that are hard to reach by fiber at comparable speeds. At the same time it is both better and cheaper than satellite internet, including the spacex offerings. Spacex would make sense for even more isolated communities. Also, 5G, at least at this point, does not offer consumers anything different compared to a good 4G. But it makes a huge difference for commercial usecases. For example, Norway wants to stop using tetra. Tetra is a network used by police, firefighters etc, which offers robust communication but at a big cost and with very limited services. With 5G they will be able to use the much cheaper public network, with modern services (e.g. video calls), while maintaining robustness and traffic isolation.
• borski 5y ago
  This misses the fact that the increased bandwidth allows for improved applications that couldn’t have existed without it. Without broadband, we’d have fewer applications that could use it. With widespread 5G, we now have the infrastructure (or soon will) for a slew of applications that we haven’t thought of yet but couldn’t have existed without the additional speed.
• opportune 5y ago
  Sufficient 5G saturation will likely result in induced demand. Skepticism is similar to being skeptical that anybody would ever need more than 64KB of memory. Right now, 5G saturation isn’t large enough for new applications to be developed that assume 5G, but once 5G is everywhere, we’ll look back on our pathetic tens of Megabits that we pay $40-80/mo as the Stone Age. Things that more bandwidth provides: wireless home internet, cloud gaming, 4-8K streaming on multiple devices. Things that 5G provides: more efficient wireless connections which should, in theory, eventually get passed on to consumers. Many of the 5G applications do exist currently, just in their early stages. Just like 5G penetration.
• secondcoming 5y ago
  I bought a 5G-capable router because I was moving house during covid and couldn't afford to wait potentially weeks for fibre to be turned on. It was only supposed to be temporary but it's so good I never bothered getting fibre. While latencies are worse than fibre I can still play Battlefield V on it, and I spend most days ssh'd into GCP machines in various regions. I can take the router anywhere, and use any network provider I want.
• nickdothutton 5y ago
  There are features of the 5G network that will enable carriers to provision certain services more efficiently and cost effectively than they currently can on 4G networks, regardless of whether those services (and business models) have any use the for the potential extra bandwidth available. Now whether the carriers will actually launch such services, and whether there will be take-up of them is another question.
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  I think this post is sort of looking for a "special reason" for 5G to exist that actually doesn't need to be there for 5G to completely alter the telecom landscape. Bray touches on this a bit, but at a personal level the biggest difference for me is that, at home, my T-Mobile 5G connection is consistently faster and more stable than my AT&T UVerse connection. It's close to the tipping point where I'm not quite sure I need cable at all. That wasn't the case when I was on LTE. All the other marketing BS that carriers and equipment providers can dream up may just be bullshit, but switching to a world where many consumers could get all of their telecom and TV desires met from their cell company instead of their cable company would be a massive change.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• hellotomyrars 5y ago
  My takeaway from this is pretty simple and perhaps the most boring answer but: it depends. The biggest thing the author seems to say is that what we already have is “good enough” which might be true for them but isn’t applicable to many other people or applications. The technology works better or worse depending on how it’s deployed. Not a huge shocker. Deriding the marinas Wifi doesn’t inherently mean it’s bad or good as a technology. 5G certainly oversold as revolutionary but it’s fine And has a higher upper bound for obvious reasons as a technology.
• killjoywashere 5y ago
  My fundamental issue with any wireless solution for home internet is that ... I have a home. It's not going anywhere. Even with a 9.x earthquake a la Fukushima, the average probability is that it's not moving much in the next 100 years. It's got copper, most of it is for power and pipes. Seems pretty trivial to run a tiny bit more for data. Zero probability that a common atmospheric bus serving the entire area (1) is going to guarantee me as much bandwidth as I can get over that wire. Why engineer freespace optics when a few pounds of circa 1950 oxygen-free copper will do? (1) area in this case is another definitional headache all it's own, driven by power and wavelength.
• erikerikson 5y ago
  Reminds me of... "Who needs faster CPU cycles?" and "Who needs that many pixels?" I'd suggest the question should be something like "What does the lifting of those constraints enable?" or "What businesses will this make possible?"
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    That's just the same question phrased differently. I'd suggest that what we need are answers.
    • erikerikson 5y ago
      It wasn't intended to be. The point is that in those circumstances when we were expanding the resources we had been accustomed to there were many people who said we'd never use them. Disk space is another. However, the commoditization of a resource or the elimination of its scarcity invites us to use the resource in a way that would have seemed wasteful previously and perhaps may have blocked certain use cases before. The games industry has been loved and subsidized for driving consumption of resources up to drive new hardware adoption. Another example of this is disk space where it's reduction in cost has driven changes in the industry. Think of NoSql and other shifts due to the reduction in cost of storage.
  • pg_bot 5y ago
    Diminishing marginal utility is certainly a thing, and I would counter argue that the longer it takes for a technology to be transformative the less likely it is actually needed by society. At a certain point in time the answers to both of your questions are going to be "no one". Do you need a 32k resolution screen? Do you need a 8.4GHz processor? Maybe, maybe not. If you keep bumping the numbers up you will eventually see an imperceptible difference in performance that won't justify the costs to build it from the oems. The only real use case I've seen for 5G has been people live streaming themselves from a cell phone in major cities. That didn't seem possible before, but so far it's a small niche not something transformative. The only other use case I could think of was streaming live sports from people's cameras and making a digital television network out of that. However, I think you would likely get kicked out of every stadium in the US if it caught on as you would be undercutting the major source of revenue for most sports leagues.
• purplediamond 5y ago
  Hi This article, like most human opinions, is selfish. It disregards that other people want 5G. It concerns itself with only a personal preference of one human being who lives in an area where population density is probably 5 per 100 square miles........ You can't even send a photo when connected to LTE at a crowded NY International Airport,even though the signal is strong,five bars, and you're connected but there are also other people connected. It took me 20-30 minutes to send a photo via Viber last time. Yes sure they could build a second tower and use 4G but 5G might solve that with one tower and less money, it's also better........ Yes 5G will probably make more money and that's great, if it didn't make money it wouldn't make sense, and in the process maybe next time I'll be able to send a message and maybe people who want more than 20 Mbps can have more.......... It's very selfish to assume the purpose of building wireless communications is to watch football games and Netflix, while that is one purpose for some people, other people use it for something else. There are those who hoard data, I'm not one of them but I do recognize, people who work from home and need lots of speed and reliability etc.......... I would understand if this article had an argument such as "5G is unhealthy" but it doesn't. This article's argument is "I don't know why they would need 5G as 4G works fine in Canada" and then it implies people shouldn't progress on the mere argument that the need for progress isn't understood by the writer. I don't claim to understand the need for 5G but I acknowledge that I don't possess that knowledge, the writer doesn't acknowledge that he does not know why those people are building 5G. He basically argues 4G works fine for me therefore all the engineers should stop working. ....... One shouldn't make an argument on what other people should do based on personal situation and own opinion disregarding what they want and think, unless 5G causes pollution or health hazard. Let it be. ....... Yes the writer might think the word sceptic might have masked the implications of the article, it didn't. Also word sceptic doesn't actually mean what it's euphemism means today. A sceptic is someone who thinks, and here the writer only thought his own thoughts, didn't think about what others need and might think, so not a sceptic at all, in this article at least. ....... Opinions are great when they include other people, when they include only the self they're just selfish.
• setgree 5y ago
  Anecdote that Tim is asking for: I upgraded from an iPhone 2020 SE to an iPhone 12 and suddenly it was easier to use the BlueBike app in New Orleans. With just LTE or whatever it’s called, sometimes the app wouldn’t connect at all and so i couldn’t park my bike.
• kjellsbells 5y ago
  I am with Tim Bray in that there is an enormous amount of woo woo spouted about 5G. Perhaps a better question to ask is what is possible now, in our current paradigm, and what might be possible if there was ubiquitous high speed coverage blanketing a complete society. The first is dull, and dubious: a bit more speed. Great. The second is the province of speculation and the source of most of the nonsense. However, telcos are afraid of missing out on the value chain of 5G like they did with 4G (all that money going to apps, and not a bean to telcos). So they sunk billions into 5g spectrum believing that was the gateway, and they they need to hold on for dear life until those fancy use cases come alive. That could be 1 year from now, ten years or perhaps never. who knows? In the meantime their investors are watching closely at the only metric they have which is uptake in the consumer domain. However this is weak beer since you don't pay off $70B of spectrum costs $10 at a time (ie consumer behavior along wont bring ROI). So, pivot to businesses some of which really are groping their way to 5G. Metal buildings, outdoor coverage, military, these are real cases where existing solutions are not great. The gazillion dollar question is whether 5G from a telco is the solution. Maybe its CBRS with 5G, which cuts out the operator. Maybe its wifi 6E, which is fundamentally different from wifi 5 and has learned a lot of lessons from how cellular networks are built. imho there is real risk that 5G vs WiFi is tbe betamax/vhs or bluray/netflix battle of our time.
• causality0 5y ago
  5G might be great for some people. My experience with it is that in the places where I used to have poor or no connection I still have no connection. The places where I used to only have a 3G connection I now have no connection at all. The places where I get a 5G connection my phones swaps back and forth between a fast 4G connection and a pathetically slow 5G connection which repeatedly interrupts my data. I modified my settings and turned 5G off entirely. Good riddance.
• synergy20 5y ago
  5G is just a larger wifi basically, you trade high speed for short distance, it is useful for hot area(populated places, campus, factories, stadiums, etc), but it does not make much sense for wide spread locations, for those 4G is enough and much much cheaper with a much cooler radios(and in much less quantities) on cellar towers. IMO, 4G is already an optimized tech considering its price, distance, speed,etc. in the future, it's more likely 4G will still be dominant while 5G can used in those hot zones where 4G speed is not enough(again, the crowed areas as mentioned above).
• D13Fd 5y ago
  For me the problem is that you often can't even tell if you are really on 5G. Some carriers label certain types of 4G as 5G, and my understanding is that even if you have "real" 5G, it probably isn't mmWave 5G in most areas. So even if you are sitting there with a good connection on a mobile device that says "5G" in the corner, it's hard to say that 5G is really making a difference. For example, I'm sitting here in my car far away from Wi-Fi. I just did a speed test with 5G on and off. On 5G, I got 63mbps up/16 down. With 5G off, I got 100mbps/25mbps (much faster).
• HNHatesUsers 5y ago
• Reason077 5y ago
  > ”Question: How often do you need more than the 50M or so LTE offers in a situation where it’s cheaper to provide it with 5G than with a wired connection?” Here in the UK, you can get very fast 5G for significantly cheaper than a wired connection. I’m on the Vodafone network and get 300+ Mbps for £30/month. My mate just got a SIM on the Three network which gets up to 800(!) Mbps for £20(!)/month - although his has a 12 month contact. Plus, many 5G routers are tiny and have batteries in them. I can pop mine in my backpack and have super-fast internet wherever I need it. Fixed wire connections typically come with long contacts, they don’t move with you, they cost more and they’re less reliable. They do have lower latency however!
• torginus 5y ago
  Sorry, does the implementation of 5G take away frequency bands from 4G and 3G? That would mean a form of planned obsolescence, making 5G faster, by making the older tech slower.
• kbumsik 5y ago
  Okay, 5G is obviously better than LTE for people who needs a better wireless experience, or for people who does not have wired connections. But my question is, is it significant enough to change industries? In case of LTE, we finally have reliable bandwidth to watch Youtube and Twitch. Even those social media have existed before LTE, but I believe they exploded since LTE. Then what about 5G? A lot of marketing said 5G is needed for VR, MR, AI, Autonomous driving, and etc. But did they really need 5G?
• spacexsucks 5y ago
  I am using a 2015 Nokia Lumia 830. I have been using it over the pandemic as my work modem taking video calls. LTE is great with multiple computers paired. 5G is overrated marketing garbage. Especially on the Galaxy Fold 3 on t-mobile. Where it keeps going in and out. All this obsoletion of old devices just so the networks can keep pushing more marketing data and sell more shiny. At the cost of environment.
• tim333 5y ago
  I phoned 3 and complained that my 4G internet in central London was so terrible that I might switch - it was going down to 0 bits per second so you'd fail to call an Uber. They said, sorry they were installing more gear for 5G and things would improve and they have, although I'm still on 4G. I think the networks constantly upgrade with faster and higher bandwidth stuff and the terms like 3G, 4G and 5G are mostly for marketing. So I'm all in favour of 5G upgrades but feel no desire to get a handset that has '5G' printed on it.
• lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  I tested LTE in my city and the places I go I range from 20 megabits to a smidge over 100 megabits. Honestly, for what I do on my phone while I'm out and about 20 is perfectly adequate. I simply do not need faster. The only benefit 5G could bring me that I see is maybe less congestion. But ... I don't really see and issue with that either.
• adultSwim 5y ago
  I would find this compelling if I hadn't heard this argument many times before. "What could we ever do with 1GB of storage?" "What could we ever do with 1GB of memory?" "What could we ever do with a much faster internet connection?" etc