7 ms·

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,

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.
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  I prefer my fiber connection to a 5G connection. My fear is that they will do the math and find they can't compete (I don't know if this is actually the case). It could be the end of physical connections.
  - zw123456 5y ago
    Me too, nothing beats fiber if you can get it. I used to have Fios where I used to live and nothing beats it, but where I live now, you cannot get any fiber to the home, but I can get the mm-wave 5G and that is a pretty close second, the speed on my mm-wave is actually faster than the Fios I had before but now there is NGPON2 which is the new tech behind it and that can actually get you to 10Gbps. Fiber will always be faster most likely.
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    A lot of people don't have fiber options to begin with (especially rural users). I wonder if 5G/NR will give them better service than 4G/LTE. I doubt wireless carriers will ever be able to seriously compete with built out fiber in the long run. Once it is there, the costs have been paid and the provider is mainly just raking in residuals while keeping the lights on.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - TreeInBuxton 5y ago
      Rural user here - yes, 5G is an absolute godsend, 4G was over congested and had extremely unreliable ping (the other option was 2mbit ADSL), I now have a fairly stable 250/100 Internet connection, with much lower latency
    - shagie 5y ago
      > A lot of people don't have fiber options to begin with (especially rural users). I wonder if 5G/NR will give them better service than 4G/LTE. The flip side to that is the "many rural users are at the edges of existing coverage networks". A 4G network can reach about 10 miles (16km) - a 5G network is about 1000 feet or 0.2 miles (about 300 meters). Unless the providers are placing these on every other power pole, most rural users aren't likely to see 5G coverage. For what it's worth, my parents' house is about 0.1 miles from the road and 0.5 miles from the next nearest neighbor. I believe that it is unlikely that wireless 5G will get out there (they don't have 4G service either - they're in a valley and use a femtocell for home phone use). They don't have cable or fiber either and switched from a load balanced pair of DSL lines to Starlink.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > it will lure enough customers away that your ISP will need to treat you better (for fear that you might be lured away). I'm worried that the end-game is that you'll still be stuck with equally-shitty providers, just that instead of having to take one turd you'll be able to pick between two equally-smelly ones. It's not like Comcast support or billing is any better in areas where they have competition, and outside of rare areas where there are local competitors (municipal broadband, etc), Comcast's competition in the form of Verizon/Cox/Spectrum isn't any better and has exactly the same flaws. The only thing they can potentially compete on is price, but my understanding is that price is never really the problem, it's all the hidden costs such as surcharges/billing issues, technical issues where tech support is horrible and you end up with no internet for days/weeks, etc - something you can't predict in advance when choosing a provider. As someone who's dealt with a number of providers across multiple countries, my takeaway is that the entire telecoms industry is rotten and the only solution is to expect them to be shit, plan in advance for when they screw you over (such as maintaining a backup connection) and not give them any leverage (no long-term contracts) so that you can just walk away when they become a problem.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  If your ISP is AT&T or Verizon, switching to 5G is not switching ISPs.
buu700 5y ago
So in short, 5G isn't particularly better than 4G all else being equal, but it is a prerequisite to expanding and improving service in ways that matter. Does that sound right?
- zw123456 5y ago
  Basically, 5G introduces some new technology that increases the so called spectral efficiency (bps/hz) that is how much tput you can deliver over the allocated spectrum. 5G introduces things like mm-wave tech using phased array antennas, better massive MIMO etc. But even with the tech, it's probably not enough to handle the demand they are hoping for, hence they spectrum buying spree they have been on lately. It goes back to the Shannon law talked about here, you either have to build more cells to make the signal better (better signal lets you pack more bps per hz, or you need more spectrum. Both are expensive, and most of them are doing both.
- youngtaff 5y ago
  My 5G connection is better (faster, more reliable) than my fixed line connection and only £20/month more for 10x download, 10x upload speed of the fixed line connnextion
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    Genuinely, how's the ping, could you play FPS games? Are you including the overhead of paying the line rental?
    - youngtaff 5y ago
      VSDL2 — Plusnet £35/month 39mbps down, 8mbps up, 30-300ms RTT (it can be very variable depending on time of day) 5G — Vodafone £50/month ex VAT, 350-390mbps down, 40mbps up, 30ms RTT (and stable) Cell tower occasionally goes offline but in general the Vodafone connection is way better than the fixed line one
      - petercooper 5y ago
vladvasiliu 5y ago
> 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, [...] in hopes of luring customers away from the cable cos and telcos or other wired providers. I'm not saying they're not trying to create new demand, but this particular argument may be dependent on local context. Over here in France, there's also a strong campaign for 5G. But in the consumer market, wired internet providers are the same companies that provide cell phone service. This may help in low-density areas, although there's also a big push from government to deploy fiber even in rural areas.
- zw123456 5y ago
  You make an interesting point because here Verizon and ATT are local telcos as well so they can potentially cannibalize some of their own customer based in their serving areas, but both have had wired broadband service options in their serving areas which as stalled in terms of growth over the past few years. So I think they are looking at wireless, which is a cash cow for them, and probably figure they may win more customers from the cableco in their serving areas with a wireless option that does not require any installation or retrofit work at their homes. Bringing fiber into the home can be expensive, and DSL (copper) will not get you the speeds people are looking for these days for broadband service. You are right, this is all a very U.S. skewed view of things. I do not know the European market but my guess is those providers are probably also looking for some revenue boost from 5G.
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    > DSL (copper) will not get you the speeds people are looking for these days for broadband service The German Telekom (same company running T-Mobile, coincidentally) has been surprisingly good at milking their existing crappy copper lines using vectoring. They run fiber up to the distribution boxes on the side of the road (up to a few hundred meters away from houses) and vector their way from there with speeds of up to 250 Mbit/s (which is great for German standards and honestly I'm okay with less). Maybe they'll be able to increase the rates with 5G or save on distribution cost, but I'm not so sure about either. The distribution boxes are quite large and power hungry with serious cooling nowadays, but they're probably still below the complexity and cost of a 5G tower.
bsder 5y ago
> 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. The problem is that all these services improve download--which doesn't matter all that much. Technology, however, is driven by upload. Every time upload speeds jumped by an order of magnitude, we saw a whole bunch of new computers applications. Sadly, computers have been knecapped by a maximum 10M upload speed for almost 20 years now. NAT was just an extra gunshot wound to add to the misery.
tomxor 5y ago
> [...] in hopes of luring customers away from the cable cos and telcos or other wired providers. For some, like me it's not a mere lure but a liberation - out of sheer bad luck, the fixed line internet speed at the last 3 places I've moved in a UK city have gotten slower each time, ending up at <2Mbit in the centre. There is no fiber, if you have fiber know that you are merely lucky, for everyone else it's a question of how noisy your copper twisted pair is, which will only get worse. LTE internet is my only practical option, and it's not simply competitive, it completely obliterates the fixed line competition in my area providing me with 30-100Mbit (depends on time of day), for £35/mo no contract. I know this is different in the US, but right now in the UK there are 3 major LTE providers which all have unlimited data plans! - even better, 2 of them have unlimited plans without a contract, which IMO is vital because you must test out reception. LTE definitely beats ADSL in this country, only fiber can compete, but availability is very patchy.
- celsoazevedo 5y ago
  > £35/mo And you can find cheaper. For example, Smarty (Three sub brand), £16/month, unlimited data, 30 days contract. When on 5G (their 4G sucks), I get up to 800Mbps up and 100Mbps down: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/random/Screenshot_20220326-130250_Speedtest-3c0.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/random/Screenshot_2022032...
  - tomxor 5y ago
    I tried them first for quite a while, but they have a high contention ratio, that's why it's so cheap... although it may depend on where you are. I could pull 100Mbit in the middle of the night but it would go down to 3Mbit in the middle of the day (you can burst higher but the average even over 20 seconds was very low and not very usable). I'm using it for work so 3Mbit in the middle of the day didn't cut it, vodafone/voxi gives me 30Mbit at that time so well worth the extra money. Only issue I have with vodafone is some weird MTU stuff going on. These LTE modems have some kind of end point MTU negotiation which is quite low on Three (1300 ish), on vodafone it starts on 1500 but then later the effective mtu changes to 1464 which is kinda maddening because the modem doesn't seem to detect this and your larger outbound packets will just vanish (doesn't even send back a fragmentation packet)... so now I have to manually set all the wifi interfaces to 1464, which is pretty silly (also silly that consumer LTE routers don't let you set this, but to be fair it's highly variable between networks and it makes sense that most people shouldn't be playing with it - if only it worked properly)... anyway other than that little issue it's pretty damn smooth. Oh also I tried EE... which I recommend avoiding, I will never try them again unless they release a no-contract service, they couldn't even activate my sim, customer service is a nightmare, failed promise after failed promise, took me 6months to be rid of them and didn't get all my money back after they didn't deliver even 1 byte. Was a good reminder of why not to do contracts where possible. I think these issues will work themselves out as more and more people start using this stuff for home broadband.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
> but realistically you need a ton more spectrum, which is why you have seen a spate of auctions lately. There are huge amount of spectrums in the mmWave bands... instead of pulling FTTH to huge apartment buildings, just set a few fiber-connected towers, and tell customers to put the APs on windowsils pointing towards the tower.
nixpulvis 5y ago
Except, wires are better than wireless at transmitting information. Yes they require maintenance, but that's why we pay a service fee. Internet is a utility, it's high time we start treating it like one. When was the last time your water supplier started offering "premium ultra-filtered water"?
chiefalchemist 5y ago
Put another way, finally more consumers will have more choices for home internet. Yes, there are multiple home services providers. But they have carved - conspired? - to ensure that in many markets they don't actually compete. So where there could be more than one, there isn't. Sounds like some political races ;)

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.
Seattle3503 5y ago
I prefer my fiber connection to a 5G connection. My fear is that they will do the math and find they can't compete (I don't know if this is actually the case). It could be the end of physical connections.
- zw123456 5y ago
  Me too, nothing beats fiber if you can get it. I used to have Fios where I used to live and nothing beats it, but where I live now, you cannot get any fiber to the home, but I can get the mm-wave 5G and that is a pretty close second, the speed on my mm-wave is actually faster than the Fios I had before but now there is NGPON2 which is the new tech behind it and that can actually get you to 10Gbps. Fiber will always be faster most likely.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  A lot of people don't have fiber options to begin with (especially rural users). I wonder if 5G/NR will give them better service than 4G/LTE. I doubt wireless carriers will ever be able to seriously compete with built out fiber in the long run. Once it is there, the costs have been paid and the provider is mainly just raking in residuals while keeping the lights on.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - TreeInBuxton 5y ago
    Rural user here - yes, 5G is an absolute godsend, 4G was over congested and had extremely unreliable ping (the other option was 2mbit ADSL), I now have a fairly stable 250/100 Internet connection, with much lower latency
  - shagie 5y ago
    > A lot of people don't have fiber options to begin with (especially rural users). I wonder if 5G/NR will give them better service than 4G/LTE. The flip side to that is the "many rural users are at the edges of existing coverage networks". A 4G network can reach about 10 miles (16km) - a 5G network is about 1000 feet or 0.2 miles (about 300 meters). Unless the providers are placing these on every other power pole, most rural users aren't likely to see 5G coverage. For what it's worth, my parents' house is about 0.1 miles from the road and 0.5 miles from the next nearest neighbor. I believe that it is unlikely that wireless 5G will get out there (they don't have 4G service either - they're in a valley and use a femtocell for home phone use). They don't have cable or fiber either and switched from a load balanced pair of DSL lines to Starlink.
Nextgrid 5y ago
> it will lure enough customers away that your ISP will need to treat you better (for fear that you might be lured away). I'm worried that the end-game is that you'll still be stuck with equally-shitty providers, just that instead of having to take one turd you'll be able to pick between two equally-smelly ones. It's not like Comcast support or billing is any better in areas where they have competition, and outside of rare areas where there are local competitors (municipal broadband, etc), Comcast's competition in the form of Verizon/Cox/Spectrum isn't any better and has exactly the same flaws. The only thing they can potentially compete on is price, but my understanding is that price is never really the problem, it's all the hidden costs such as surcharges/billing issues, technical issues where tech support is horrible and you end up with no internet for days/weeks, etc - something you can't predict in advance when choosing a provider. As someone who's dealt with a number of providers across multiple countries, my takeaway is that the entire telecoms industry is rotten and the only solution is to expect them to be shit, plan in advance for when they screw you over (such as maintaining a backup connection) and not give them any leverage (no long-term contracts) so that you can just walk away when they become a problem.
pessimizer 5y ago
If your ISP is AT&T or Verizon, switching to 5G is not switching ISPs.

buu700 5y ago

So in short, 5G isn't particularly better than 4G all else being equal, but it is a prerequisite to expanding and improving service in ways that matter. Does that sound right?

zw123456 5y ago
Basically, 5G introduces some new technology that increases the so called spectral efficiency (bps/hz) that is how much tput you can deliver over the allocated spectrum. 5G introduces things like mm-wave tech using phased array antennas, better massive MIMO etc. But even with the tech, it's probably not enough to handle the demand they are hoping for, hence they spectrum buying spree they have been on lately. It goes back to the Shannon law talked about here, you either have to build more cells to make the signal better (better signal lets you pack more bps per hz, or you need more spectrum. Both are expensive, and most of them are doing both.
youngtaff 5y ago
My 5G connection is better (faster, more reliable) than my fixed line connection and only £20/month more for 10x download, 10x upload speed of the fixed line connnextion
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  Genuinely, how's the ping, could you play FPS games? Are you including the overhead of paying the line rental?
  - youngtaff 5y ago
    VSDL2 — Plusnet £35/month 39mbps down, 8mbps up, 30-300ms RTT (it can be very variable depending on time of day) 5G — Vodafone £50/month ex VAT, 350-390mbps down, 40mbps up, 30ms RTT (and stable) Cell tower occasionally goes offline but in general the Vodafone connection is way better than the fixed line one
    - petercooper 5y ago

vladvasiliu 5y ago

> 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, [...] in hopes of luring customers away from the cable cos and telcos or other wired providers. I'm not saying they're not trying to create new demand, but this particular argument may be dependent on local context. Over here in France, there's also a strong campaign for 5G. But in the consumer market, wired internet providers are the same companies that provide cell phone service. This may help in low-density areas, although there's also a big push from government to deploy fiber even in rural areas.

zw123456 5y ago
You make an interesting point because here Verizon and ATT are local telcos as well so they can potentially cannibalize some of their own customer based in their serving areas, but both have had wired broadband service options in their serving areas which as stalled in terms of growth over the past few years. So I think they are looking at wireless, which is a cash cow for them, and probably figure they may win more customers from the cableco in their serving areas with a wireless option that does not require any installation or retrofit work at their homes. Bringing fiber into the home can be expensive, and DSL (copper) will not get you the speeds people are looking for these days for broadband service. You are right, this is all a very U.S. skewed view of things. I do not know the European market but my guess is those providers are probably also looking for some revenue boost from 5G.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  > DSL (copper) will not get you the speeds people are looking for these days for broadband service The German Telekom (same company running T-Mobile, coincidentally) has been surprisingly good at milking their existing crappy copper lines using vectoring. They run fiber up to the distribution boxes on the side of the road (up to a few hundred meters away from houses) and vector their way from there with speeds of up to 250 Mbit/s (which is great for German standards and honestly I'm okay with less). Maybe they'll be able to increase the rates with 5G or save on distribution cost, but I'm not so sure about either. The distribution boxes are quite large and power hungry with serious cooling nowadays, but they're probably still below the complexity and cost of a 5G tower.

bsder 5y ago

> 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. The problem is that all these services improve download--which doesn't matter all that much. Technology, however, is driven by upload. Every time upload speeds jumped by an order of magnitude, we saw a whole bunch of new computers applications. Sadly, computers have been knecapped by a maximum 10M upload speed for almost 20 years now. NAT was just an extra gunshot wound to add to the misery.

tomxor 5y ago

> [...] in hopes of luring customers away from the cable cos and telcos or other wired providers. For some, like me it's not a mere lure but a liberation - out of sheer bad luck, the fixed line internet speed at the last 3 places I've moved in a UK city have gotten slower each time, ending up at <2Mbit in the centre. There is no fiber, if you have fiber know that you are merely lucky, for everyone else it's a question of how noisy your copper twisted pair is, which will only get worse. LTE internet is my only practical option, and it's not simply competitive, it completely obliterates the fixed line competition in my area providing me with 30-100Mbit (depends on time of day), for £35/mo no contract. I know this is different in the US, but right now in the UK there are 3 major LTE providers which all have unlimited data plans! - even better, 2 of them have unlimited plans without a contract, which IMO is vital because you must test out reception. LTE definitely beats ADSL in this country, only fiber can compete, but availability is very patchy.

celsoazevedo 5y ago
> £35/mo And you can find cheaper. For example, Smarty (Three sub brand), £16/month, unlimited data, 30 days contract. When on 5G (their 4G sucks), I get up to 800Mbps up and 100Mbps down: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/random/Screenshot_20220326-130250_Speedtest-3c0.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/random/Screenshot_2022032...
- tomxor 5y ago
  I tried them first for quite a while, but they have a high contention ratio, that's why it's so cheap... although it may depend on where you are. I could pull 100Mbit in the middle of the night but it would go down to 3Mbit in the middle of the day (you can burst higher but the average even over 20 seconds was very low and not very usable). I'm using it for work so 3Mbit in the middle of the day didn't cut it, vodafone/voxi gives me 30Mbit at that time so well worth the extra money. Only issue I have with vodafone is some weird MTU stuff going on. These LTE modems have some kind of end point MTU negotiation which is quite low on Three (1300 ish), on vodafone it starts on 1500 but then later the effective mtu changes to 1464 which is kinda maddening because the modem doesn't seem to detect this and your larger outbound packets will just vanish (doesn't even send back a fragmentation packet)... so now I have to manually set all the wifi interfaces to 1464, which is pretty silly (also silly that consumer LTE routers don't let you set this, but to be fair it's highly variable between networks and it makes sense that most people shouldn't be playing with it - if only it worked properly)... anyway other than that little issue it's pretty damn smooth. Oh also I tried EE... which I recommend avoiding, I will never try them again unless they release a no-contract service, they couldn't even activate my sim, customer service is a nightmare, failed promise after failed promise, took me 6months to be rid of them and didn't get all my money back after they didn't deliver even 1 byte. Was a good reminder of why not to do contracts where possible. I think these issues will work themselves out as more and more people start using this stuff for home broadband.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

> but realistically you need a ton more spectrum, which is why you have seen a spate of auctions lately. There are huge amount of spectrums in the mmWave bands... instead of pulling FTTH to huge apartment buildings, just set a few fiber-connected towers, and tell customers to put the APs on windowsils pointing towards the tower.

nixpulvis 5y ago

Except, wires are better than wireless at transmitting information. Yes they require maintenance, but that's why we pay a service fee. Internet is a utility, it's high time we start treating it like one. When was the last time your water supplier started offering "premium ultra-filtered water"?

chiefalchemist 5y ago

Put another way, finally more consumers will have more choices for home internet. Yes, there are multiple home services providers. But they have carved - conspired? - to ensure that in many markets they don't actually compete. So where there could be more than one, there isn't. Sounds like some political races ;)