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The “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.
by spookthesunset 4y ago
The “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.
- JohnFen 4y agoIf it costs more, I wouldn't pick wireless. Losing the wire for my home internet gains me nothing.
- jmopp 4y agoI don't trust that the wireless solution would be equivalent, though this may be because I've been burned too many times living in concrete houses that block cellphone signal rather effectively.
- pshc 4y agoIt isn’t equivalent. Optical fiber beats 5G on those criteria.
- rocqua 4y agoWireless is inherently easier to accidentally get disrupted. When wired internet fails, it is rarely the wire. More importantly, if it is the wire that is easy to check and fix. With wireless internet, disruption can be caused by many things. That makes diagnosing a problem so much harder. Incidentally it also tends to be less reliable. Besides that, the massive complexity of the technology stack makes wireless harder to manage, configure, figure out compatibility for, and more prone to software bugs.
- HPsquared 4y agoWireless does has an advantage in terms of redundancy. If the nearest tower fails, you can probably also use another one nearby. Not so with wired connections, where the whole signal chain needs to be intact. Even if the whole network fails, you can probably switch SIM and use a different network.
- headsoup 4y agoI suppose you don't live rurally... But they both have trade-offs. Wireless allows many connections at once rather easily at the cost of interference and (potentially) speed and reliability, cable is more expensive up front if infrastructure isn't already there.
- renonce 4y agoYou can have such redundancy for wire too. People simply figured out that it’s so reliable there is no need for extra redundancy.
- thefz 4y agoWireless should be the exception, not the norm. When you really need a device to move.
- headsoup 4y agoWell I could make that assumption... and make the whole conversation pointless.
- nerdbert 4y agoI would hate to have all the devices in my house connect directly to a wireless signal from the ISP, for example. I manage the DNS and firewall to control what goes on. Giving up that control means more ads and more tracking and nothing good for me. Having fiber come into the house has no drawbacks that I can see, so why trade that away for something worse?
- ilyt 4y agoIn dense permanent environments a bunch of cables will most likely be cheaper than having enough 5G cells to give everyone few hundred Mbits of transfer. In scattered environment the range is too short to excuse the cost of covering it with 5G There is no niche for it except for "my landlord didn't install proper internet so I use 5G" coz it happened to be alreadhy in range
- spookthesunset 4y agoI mean you aren’t wrong. But cable has a monopoly on most peoples home internet today. If you could (theoretically) kick their ass with fast internet that completely bypasses asshole cable companies, more power to you.
- PaulHoule 4y agoIf you hate the cable company, try the phone company. The cable stops 2 miles down the road from where I live so I have ADSL from Frontier. It was terrible for a long time, I didn’t do much better than 1 Mbps until they added some analog hardware to the line that got it close to 3. Recently they put in ‘fiber to the node’ to a nearby crossroads, I now have two 18 Mbps lines which, fortunately, give about 100% of the rated performance so I can’t complain much. I can even use Docker now, YouTube, Netflix, and online gaming are all pretty good. (The Samsung TV, outside of game mode, and some monitors, like the monitor on an Alienware ‘gaming’ laptop, add more lag than the DSL does.). I have a load balancer that sends different connections on different lines so collectively the system meets the FCC broadband definition. Still the people down the road get better speeds without the load balancer for less money. I’d say it is not just a ‘lack of competition’ but ‘pernicious competition’ that is going on here. For instance, the cable company has less reason to serve my valley because people who want TV can get it from satellite. There are plenty of old and poor people who would rather spend $65 a month for 1 Mbps DSL than $70 for 300 Mbps cable and they will go to public meetings to try to keep the better service away. So in some sense competition from legacy satellite and legacy telco makes service worse. (TV of course is a great case study of ‘pernicious competition’ because of the structure of the industry. Your local OTA TV station tries to keep a secret that you can tune in free with an antenna because they get cash when you subscribe to cable. There is cable, multiple satellite providers, plus a number of IPTV providers but they all provide the same bundle at the same price. There is no way I can say I want CNBC and Bloomberg and the BBC but CNN, Fox and MSNBC can all go to hell. Given that they get paid no matter if people watch they have no need to maintain quality or a brand promise. CNN tried to go direct-to-consumer but decided it didn’t want to threaten the current cash cow even though it may be a doomed business…. It’s hard to tell because there are powerful forces that will try to rebuild the bundle out of Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus and all that.)
- tremere 4y agoWhy would I want to replace my home internet with something less secure, less reliable, lossier, and slower?
- indy 4y agoIt may be worse for the end user but it's great for corporations. Samsung could sell you a smart TV with built-in 5G so that it can always serve you ads even if you never connect it to your wi-fi.
- selcuka 4y agoCan't they already do this now? Is 5G necessary?
- kunagi7 4y agoWell, they can just stuff a 5G NB-IoT modem inside of newer TVs, using eSIMs received by OTA (either WiFi or a previous valid eSIM). As long as the manufacturer foots the eSIM bill (and it's profitable) they can serve ads.
- mlindner 4y agoOr better yet, serve you ads when you're not using the TV where it randomly comes on from time to time and displays an image ad and then turns off again.
- indy 4y agoYes, and not just TVs but any piece of electronic equipment with 5G built-in will be capable of serving ads and sending usage information back without needing access to the user's WiFi or router
- raverbashing 4y agoThe same arguments apply to wireless headphones. (And I'm not disagreeing with you)
- raverbashing 4y agoSo whoever doesn't live in the city center gets a poor signal? Sounds like short sighted view of the decade
- throwanem 4y agoDon't be silly. If anyone wanted to live outside cities, people would build cities there.
- rocqua 4y agoBefore 5g city centers often couldn't cram in enough cell towers to give everyone enough bandwidth for their home connection. 5G has an option for higher frequency towers with signals that drop off much quicker, allowing you to pack towers closer together. Hence giving city centers much more bandwidth. Down in the suburbs you can still get away with fewer towers with larger range and still give everyone bandwidth. Out in the countryside is where the problem you propose starts occurring. When the people are so spread out that a single cell is going to be woefully underutilized, and hence not built close enough to your home. But that cross-over is beyond the suburbs, not around the city center.
- pmontra 4y agoIn getting my home internet from a 4G tower some 3 km away. It's anything between 10 to 40 Mb/s upload and download. I think that we'll never have dense 5G towers here because the area is not dense. At most one tower where most of the houses are.
- dehrmann 4y agoSupposedly lots of India will never build out data networks that go to homes because it makes no sense when you have LTE and 5G.
- Gigachad 4y agoWireless is probably good enough. Wired is still much faster, more reliable, and has lower latency, but if the cost is unaffordable, none of that is essential. I expect the future is that rural moves to mostly wireless and inner city areas continue to be connected to fiber.
- HPsquared 4y agoThe trend I've seen is the opposite: it's much easier to dig trenches and install cables in suburban/rural locations than it is in a densely packed city, so they often have better wired internet.
- Gigachad 4y agoIt's still more expensive because you are digging 100km of easy trenches to connect a thousand people vs 1km of complex trench to connect tens of thousands. In Australia we have mostly failed to provide good wired internet to rural areas so they are moving to starlink while the cities are largely connected to fiber now.
- PaulHoule 4y agoThere are two kinds of 5G. One of them is the mm wave which is very high performance over line of site, makes the most of diffraction so it often does well near-line-of-site, then quits working. It is particularly unsuited for handsets because your hand and other body parts can block the antenna. This is a great answer for FWA in favorable geography. The other 5G is similar to 4G but a bit better performing and my understanding it is actually a bit cheaper for the carrier. 4G infrastructure manages a higher level of spectral efficiency than people thought possible before because of the very close coordination between towers, they actually pipe the baseband signal (around 100 MHz bandwidth) by fiber optic to a central location and process the signals collectively. My understanding is that 5G has a system for coordinating the towers that is still efficient, but not so crazy expensive. So it is ironic that carriers market 5G as something that costs consumers more money because the real driver for it, from the telco perspective, is lower costs.