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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

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.

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.