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Having the 5G logo on your phone doesnt necessarily mean your phone is speaking 5G. It's...complicated. - Most US operators do not have ubiquitous 5G radio cov
by kjellsbells 4y ago
Having the 5G logo on your phone doesnt necessarily mean your phone is speaking 5G. It's...complicated.
- Most US operators do not have ubiquitous 5G radio coverage, so, they do what is called 5G NSA where your traffic ultimately ends up veing processed by the 4G core infrastructure that they have. Which is already overloaded and a bit creaky.
- Some operators can do real 5G, "5G SA", where the whole flow end to end runs on 5G infrastructure, but whether this is faster than LTE or not depends on the spectrum band in use. Verizon have some high bandwidth spectrum, but it doesnt propagate as well as lower (and slower) frequencies like what Tmo has. But if you expect to get those blazing multi gig speeds, you really have to be on that high bandwidth stuff. For most people, most of the time, they wont, so they wont see much improvement over LTE.
- I assert that it is dawning on operators that consumers are not interested in paying $10 extra per month for 5G. This is a bit of a problem when those same operators spent or borrowed billions to obtain the spectrum in the first place. Did I mention that the era of cheap money is now over and those debt payments are due?
- Telcos desperately need a killer app or use case that drives 5G adoption. They havent got one. And remember, the app must be one that telcos can monetize. They still have scars from their failure to capture the value of smartphone applications in the LTE era.
- tqi 4y ago> They still have scars from their failure to capture the value of smartphone applications in the LTE era. That's makes a lot of sense and truly, fuck telcos.
- optymizer 4y agoHaving worked with telcos in multiple countries, I can assure you, we cannot have a lot of nice things because of them.
- cycomanic 4y agoWhile I am not big on defending telcos, let's not forget that they are under enormous price pressure (for the fibre backbone essentially they need to double available throughput every 18 month or so without increasing cost) at the same time it's the software/service companies who really made enormous profits based on these developments, while data capacity is becoming more and more a commodity.
- bobkazamakis 4y agoman, can you imagine if we had payed some telcos money to drop fiber that they never did?
- daddylongstroke 4y agoStill waiting on Centurylink (or whatever they rebranded to now) to start on their piece of that "bridge to the 21st century". Not holding breath. 3Mb/.5Mb, at a cool $50/month. :-O
- namibj 4y agoWhen they figure a way to bill users differently between "long-distance" and "local" packet transmissions, they can start to see applications/services put in effort to adapt. Also, mechanisms like L4S for high-fidelity ECN feedback allow for higher link utilizations without end-to-end QoS impact. IPv6 reducing routing table fragmentation should enable reasonable prefix based peering, along with billing senders according to the used peering. We don't need fast flat rates, we need cheap bulk traffic and flat rates for effectively-not-oversubscribed bandwidth. Maybe with a way to roll over unused priority bandwidth at some multiple into the next billing period to count against that period's bulk traffic usage.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoThat is because data capacity is a commodity, and should earn profit margins of near zero, like any utility does. Also, no one asked ATT to lose billions of dollars by buying Time Warner HBO and DirecTV. Or Verizon with Yahoo. But they wanted to chase that Comcast vertical monopoly dream. And it will never yield any utility for customers. It should all be a utility, like water, gas, and electric. And do the one job, installing pipes (and upgrading them) to people’s houses and delivering the goods.
- tqi 4y agoimo Telcos have delivered jack shit in terms of "developments" except extract rent from their monopoly positions.
- CottonMcKnight 4y agoVerizon even markets "5G Nationwide" as "performance comparable to our award-winning 4G LTE". So what's the point? You have to spend more $$ to get "5G Ultra Wideband" on your plan, which is the real deal.
- clnq 4y agoWow, they actually said the "quiet part" out loud.
- saghm 4y ago> - Most US operators do not have ubiquitous 5G radio coverage, so, they do what is called 5G NSA where your traffic ultimately ends up veing processed by the 4G core infrastructure that they have. Which is already overloaded and a bit creaky Interesting! The first time I ever remember my phone claiming it had a 5G connection was late 2020/early 2021 (I forget the exact month, but it was within a few months of me moving to a new city). I had taken an Uber downtown, and when trying to do the same to return, I was surprised to see that I couldn't get anything to load, and my phone claimed it had a strong 5G signal. I couldn't find any way to tell it to try to use LTE instead, so I ended up having to walk maybe 10 minutes back in the direction of my apartment before my phone finally could load anything, which coincided with it showing LTE and not 5G. never knew exactly what had caused the issue, but I suspected it might have something to do with a cell tower reporting 5G to my phone but there not actually being infrastructure to support that in the area. I wonder if something similar to what you describe was happening, and due to an OS bug or something my phone had different expectations of what communication would look like when the other end reported that 5G was supported. Does "5G SA" require any different behavior on the phone's side of things, or would any communications it receives be indistinguishable from those of "proper" 5G?
- spookthesunset 4y agoThe “real” 5g isn’t for your phone, it is to replace your home internet. For that, you want fast and low latency and that means a dense amount of cell towers. The fact that “real 5g” has a shorter range is actually a positive. It means you can make your shit super dense.
- headsoup 4y agoIt's almost like we could just go back to cables and have a plenty good experience again...
- guhidalg 4y agoBut why? If you had the choice of EQUIVALENT (bandwidth, latency, jitter, reliability, etc…) network connectivity, why pick a wire over wireless?
- gmokki 4y agoWireless consumes more energy. So it is more enironmentally friendly to go with wires, especially fiber. Personally I like to have both, wired main connection and wireless as backup.
- mattmaroon 4y agoIs it though? What’s the environmental footprint of manufacturing, installing, and maintaining all of those wires?
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoA lot lower than manufacturing chips to do the complex signal processing needed for fast and reliable wireless.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoWhile not as much, installing and maintaining the 5G endpoints also requires all that, and they generally have to be wired to achieve low latency, meshing only does so much and the speed of light is going to win out for backhauls.
- Animats 4y ago> Telcos desperately need a killer app or use case that drives 5G adoption. They haven't got one. * Self driving cars? No. * Internet of Things? No. * Metaverse? No. * Remote surgical operations? You gotta be kidding. Everyone in a big stadium can watch the show on their phones, though. If someone was willing to pay for the hundreds of tiny cell sites required.
- harpratap 4y ago> If someone was willing to pay for the hundreds of tiny cell sites required. We are already doing that, it's called WiFi. 5G SA is nothing but a souped up WiFi signal, and it should be treated as such and not how we have been treating 4G up until this point. Telcos need to change their business model otherwise the tech giants might end up eating their lunch
- godzillabrennus 4y agoThe tech giants spy on us to sell advertising inside of their products. If Verizon starts listening into my calls to sell me products I would switch to any carrier who wasn’t doing that.
- pooper 4y agoThis sounds very familiar. I hope they get a hundred billion dollar fine and life in prison for the CEO and the board if they do this because they have already been fined before for this. > Verizon is settling with the FCC over its use of an ad targeting technology known as a "supercookie," which tracks the websites visited by phones on its network. Supercookies allow websites to better target ads to visitors with Verizon cellphone service; but those visitors — for a period of time — weren't informed of the tracking or given the option to opt out. Because of that, Verizon will pay a fine of $1.35 million and will now have to receive customer permission before sharing tracking data with other companies or even within its organization, including with sites owned by AOL. - The Verge Underlying FTC press release Full Title: FCC Settles Verizon "Supercookie" Probe, Requires Consumer Opt-In for Third Parties https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-settles-verizon-supercookie-probe https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-settles-verizon-supercookie... > WASHINGTON, March 7, 2016 – The Federal Communications Commission today announced a settlement resolving an investigation into Verizon Wireless’s practice of inserting unique identifier headers or so-called “supercookies” into its customers’ mobile Internet traffic without their knowledge or consent. These unique, undeletable identifiers – referred to as UIDH – are inserted into web traffic and used to identify customers in order to deliver targeted ads from Verizon and other third parties. As a result of the investigation and settlement, Verizon Wireless is notifying consumers about its targeted advertising programs, will obtain customers’ opt-in consent before sharing UIDH with third parties, and will obtain customers’ opt-in or opt-out consent before sharing UIDH internally within the Verizon corporate family.
- baxtr 4y agoWorked in Telco too. I always wondered if it wasn’t enough to have 1 infrastructure provider like with streets or anything else. Why build the infrastructure twice or three times?
- dehrmann 4y agoIt's not as bad as you think. A lot of towers are owned by someone other than the carriers, and the all lease space on the same tower.
- throwanem 4y agoWash your mouth out with soap. I live in Baltimore - if cell towers here got fixed at the same rate our roads do, we'd be an unofficial annex of the National Radio Quiet Zone.
- geysersam 4y agoTwo wrongs don't make a right..
- efitz 4y agoWe used to have that - Bell Telephone. It never improved; there was zero need to innovate. Consumers had to fight like hell for the right just to buy their own phones. Telephones were OWNED by Ma Bell and leased to consumers; their argument was “how can we guarantee stability of the network if anybody can connect anything they want to it?” [ed] Government broke them up in the early 80’s; overnight we saw innovation like slimline touch tone phones and non-acoustic modems. You do NOT want to return to that. And the only reason that you like monopolies on utilities is because it’s been like that for generations; we honestly don’t know what innovations would happen if utilities and roads were privatized and not enforced by government monopolies.
- simplotek 4y ago> You do NOT want to return to that. I'm not sure your assessment is reasonable. You're putting up a strawman by claiming that the only way to have shared infrastructure is to have an abusive monopoly that stifles innovation and screws consumers over. This is false. It's quite possible to have a single infrastructure provider that does it's job, such as a consortium of telcos shipping in to deploy and run shared infrastructure. There are plenty of examples of those types of initiatives in other areas, such as shared ATM networks, which provide a far better service than "everyone for themselves" deployments.
- dehrmann 4y ago> I assert that it is dawning on operators that consumers are not interested in paying $10 extra per month for 5G I agree with this. For the most part, LTE is enough for everything from casual web browsing to streaming video. There just isn't that much of an improvement jumping to 5G in the end-user experience. The is very different from the 3G to 4G jump. I still remember using an original 2G iPhone. Maps basically couldn't load over 2G.
- jl6 4y agoAlso, providers by and large still haven’t delivered on the original promises of 4G.
- joecool1029 4y ago> Verizon have some high bandwidth spectrum, but it doesnt propagate as well as lower (and slower) frequencies like what Tmo has. Eh.... nitpick. Let's ignore mmwave for a minute and focus on bands that matter for most people. T-Mobile and Verizon both have midband spectrum which is overall most useful. Verizon's is C-band 3.7ghz T-Mobile's BRS 2.5ghz midband is mostly backhaul limited where it's deployed, it'll do ~700mbit/s down but the actual spectrum is capable of at least double this. (in my market I can get 100mhz + 20mhz of N41+N41 aggregated, this is 2.5ghz spectrum). It doesn't matter if I'm next to a tower, it's limited by the backhaul. I get between 600-700mbps real world if I stand outside my house. I live in semi-rural area and the tower is about 6 miles away nearly line of sight. Indoors the attenuation hits and I mostly use the other bands to reliable pull ~150mbit/s, which is fine for me (and traffic goes mostly over LTE). > - Telcos desperately need a killer app or use case that drives 5G adoption. They havent got one. The 'killer app' is called home internet in markets that have trash CLEC's which haven't upgraded infra in 20+ years. Mine is Blightspeed selling 'up to 3mbit/s' copper DSL in 2023. Other option is Comcast, which works but is ludicrously overpriced because there's nobody el> Verizon have some high bandwidth spectrum, but it doesnt propagate as well as lower (and slower) frequencies like what Tmo has.
- disordinary 4y agoYou have to pay extra for 5g in the US?
- jdofaz 4y agoSome do, but AFAIK T-Mobile doesn't
- discordance 4y agoHere in Australia 5G is awesome: https://imgur.com/gallery/BFTTMRS https://imgur.com/gallery/BFTTMRS Measurement was taken a decent distance from the city in the suburbs.
- yawnxyz 4y agoWhoa what service are you using? I’m on Vodafone 300gb plan and it’s always one bar on 5g. I rarely see speeds that fast too; downloading a game pass game is usually 1MB/s for me
- PaulHoule 4y agoThis is a story I see a lot in the US. Two customers, even with the same carrier, seem to get very different coverage. I thought circa 2010 that I got the same coverage with a prepaid as a postpaid phone but starting around 2018 I would go to New York City and have trouble w/ my prepaid phone. There seems to be some phone and plan that gets better coverage than another but it is by no means documented. Maybe it just ‘works better the more money you spend’ but without any explanation of what the rules are I am afraid of spending a lot and still getting bad coverage.
- discordance 4y agoTelstra post paid, 100gb/month for $70 AUD/month
- gerad 4y agoHere in the US I think the killer app is breaking the local cable company’s monopoly on providing high speed internet to the home.
- PaulHoule 4y agoSomewhat, but the carriers are kinda half-hearted about it, particularly when they talk with investors. FWA users use a lot of gigabytes per dollar that they spend and if the carrier thinks in terms of that metric it may see it as bad for business, possibly cannibalizing more expensive mobile plans. FWA is a spotty solution anyway. Economically it works best in the ‘WebPass model’ where you server a whole apartment building in an urban area that has a clear line of site. Rural carriers are averse to maintaining their copper networks, never mind installing fiber. If you are fortunate you have a line of site to a tower but probably you are less fortunate. When you head south from Ithaca, NY you encounter a dissected plateau at an altitude around 2000 feet. There is no ‘highest hill’. A tower on one ridge can sorta see into the immediately adjacent valleys (though the sides may be steep enough to still make shadows) and under 1 GHz maybe into the next valleys over. Heading South down to Alabama the mountains get bigger but it is basically the same story, where FWA goes to die. It is delusional that it could be cost-effective or even effective universally because in a lot of cases there isn’t even a road or a power line at the top of the ridge. FWA really does create competition for people where geography is favorable but it is no answer for the many people still stuck with slow DSL.
- jaredhallen 4y ago> Rural carriers are averse to maintaining their copper networks, never mind installing fiber. My rural area is served by an independent telco/ISP. They would agree with the part about maintaining copper, but installing fiber has actually been their solution due to the lower cost of ownership over the long term. I wish more carriers saw it that way.
- _huayra_ 4y agoI went to tmobile's 5g internet after Comcast refused to negotiate better terms on renewal. I live in a HCOL metro but have yet to be hooked up to the local fiber company, so although this 5g home internet isn't so great (high latency, trash-tier upload speeds), download is good and it is great to have an option against the Comcastopoly.
- throwaway892238 4y ago> This is a bit of a problem when those same operators spent or borrowed billions Not to worry, they'll just pass the cost to customers or ask for a bailout and get it. Being a giant corporation is awesome.
- antihero 4y agoIn London 5G is definitely way better, tested with Vodafone and Virgin (O2? Voda?)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jaredhallen 4y agoI live in a rural area, so I obviously have my bias associated with that. But for me, investment in more coverage would have much more value than investment in higher bandwidth for areas that are already covered.
- browningstreet 4y agoEither way, my 5G iPhone is far less capable of connectivity out in the world than my last one, more so if I go indoors. Even just inside a door.
- minton 4y agoI live in a rural area (not a single Starbucks in the county), and in 50% of the town, my phone has 5GUW coverage. I can download apps, playlists, and movies quickly. I recently downloaded UPBGE (430MB) on my iPhone in only a few minutes. This wasn’t possible on LTE and is worth the extra $10 for me.
- xyst 4y agoI find your definition of a “rural area” hilarious. The lack of a corporate coffee store does not necessarily mean it’s a rural area. Been to plenty of small population counties and there was at least one starcrack store in the area, including a McDiabetes, and other low cost crap. Usually a rural area is defined upon the population size and density.
- samhuk 4y agoI'm a bit confused about your last point. Could you elaborate? Telcos are (in theory, at least) private utility companies, so why does it make sense for them to create the application/use case? Do you mean that Telcos like Verizon are reeling from not creating their own platforms (say, apps or app stores) that charge for use of LTE etc.? Basically, why and how do you think that Telcos are reeling from not capturing LTE value? Didn't they already by charging for use of their network? Side-note: If I'm not wrong in my assumption of what you meant, then you conjecture a rather depressing idea that companies feel the need to capture value from an increasing number of market segments and crave hegemonic monopolistic control, for example Microsoft since forever.
- pgeorgi 4y agoTelcos set up LTE at huge cost, drove up prices a bit (as much as they could bear given competition) and the over-the-top content cashed in on having much more bandwidth available. In their ideal world, they would put up the investment for the infrastructure (or even better: have gov't pay for it) and then turn on the money printer.
- kjellsbells 4y agoBasically, telco is a fee for carriage service. You pay for transport on some network that they build: cellular, fiber, etc. They figure out what to charge you based on historical models of what you used the transport for. In the days when all that you transmitted were telephone calls, this was easy. Then people started sending IP packets and it got a little harder, but ok, the telcos would just charge a per byte fee. The money was in charging to carry your phone calls and SMSes anyway. Then the smartphone exploded and suddenly consumers did not give a hoot about phone calls. The sole reason to have a cellphone plan was to get data. The telcos had to expand the network capacity by several orders of magnitude for a customer base that had absolutely no desire to pay by the byte. This blew up their model. Moreover, telcos saw that people were paying $$ every month to folks like netflix, watching video on their phones, chewing up network bandwidth, and the telcos werent getting any piece of that action. Hence the whole net neutrality thing. The aim isnt that telcos have app stores. They know they cant compete with that. The holy grail is that a telco finds some use of the network that commands a premium price that users will accept. Verizon trades on having the best-est network. AT&T tries to bundle, eg HBO. Tmo goes after the younger customers with discounts. Now 5G is here and telcos are desperately, desperately trying to find uses for it that cant be satisified by the existing network and biz models. Will they succeed? I wish I knew.