There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast.
I can only assume it's a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)
Counterpoint: streaming audio and video were singularly enabled by faster internet. That is restructuring multibillion-dollar industries. The iPhone, one could argue, and through it real-time social media, are products of mobile internet.
There are legitimate new capabilities that will likely erupt from cheaper, faster mobile internet. If the playground is in Shenzhen versus Silicon Valley, that’s where resources should be allocated to explore that potential.
I’m not arguing for 5G. (I don’t know enough about it.) But “it’s just faster internet” is a facile counterargument.
Funny how people even on a tech website seems to be stuck at "640 KB is enough for everyone".
When technology gets a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful, a lot less power consuming, the magic of the market creates completely new categories of use that unlock new demand at consumers.
Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.
Obviously sentiments like "640 KB is enough for everyone" hilariously failed to predict the value of faster and more powerful computers. At the same time, most people's personal use of computers hasn't kept up with the capabilities of the high-end of consumer grade products. Lots of people only really use a web browser, and even an ad-infested website will run fine on most 10-20 year old computers.
You can say "we don't need to frantically rush to deploy 5G" without also saying "nobody will ever benefit from 5G".
Right, which is exactly what this race is about. The first widespread 5G adoption creates numerous companies around the space, which will out compete companies as they have a leg up. When other companies adopt 5g, your companies sweep in, having the expertise and the know how from years of tinkering in domestic markets.
This is what the US did with 4G and is one of the main reasons for the US's web dominance in the past decade.
How would and how many lives will be made better with 5g? Will it help people with debt? Will it increase housing supply to lower home ownership/renting costs? Will it help people stop overdosing? Maybe cool the climate a little?
No. Itll help people watch someone on youtube play Fortnite.
Just because you’re mostly correct doesn’t mean you’re correct. My watch is always asking me if I’ve fallen and need emergency services (I horse around a lot), but wearable connected medical devices are and will be a big thing. I have lots of friends and family who kill time taking online courses or watching educational videos.
This is the same argument badmouthing the Internet because of social media which ignores that the presocial media Internet is still there and just as vibrant.
> but wearable connected medical devices are and will be a big thing
And most are served perfectly by Bluetooth Low Energy, using a smartphone as local compute, storage and network uplink. The few cases where that's not ideal are so few that they may as well use a regular 4G uplink without much downside (it's not like they need the bandwidth or will create a high device density)
You can already stream online courses and watch educational videos with 4g... same with wireless medical devices. What does 5g offer that 4g already hasn't?
5g has higher capacity, but shorter range, so cells will need to be closer together, i.e. greater density - therefore location tracking precision will appear to improve, so the big corporations will be better able to finely tune targeted ads in HD to a more specific demographic of consumers.
5G offers:-
- bigger numbers and promise of a brighter future for consumers that are impressed by that kind of thing and are happy to trade their privacy for perceived benefits / status.
- And probably some more tangible benefits for those who would attempt to track or advertise as much as possible to monetize the masses.
- And as you clearly understand, nothing particularly beneficial to the rest of us, but we'll join in when eventually forced to through one upgrade or another as usual.
There might be incidental location disclosure, but even with 2/3/4G the network operator has pretty good location information, typical precision being 10s of meters or even less.
Ok, everyone says this. But by how much? Half a second? I load a video on youtube now with maybe 3 out of 5 bars and it starts playing in one maybe two seconds. I need to buy a new phone for what now? I need to agree to higher taxes or cut community spending in my city for what now? So my video goes from a 1 second load to half a second?
Time to video start is a bandwidth thing. Latency is the time it takes a packet to do a round trip. Typical 4G latency in the US is about 50mS and 5G is not yet faster because it’s still heavily reliant on the 4G infrastructure. It is expected to drop to 1mS as the rollout continues. This will have a significant impact on interactive content.
I think you’re conflating a few things though.
1) 5G spec improvements which do exist and are measurable today
2) your perceived value of those improvements
3) the FCC mandates in the US, which is currently being challenged
You might not want the improvements. Others may. The real issue, IMHO, is the FCC mandates. Although the challenge has a risk for technology too. If the courts agree that there is a possible health risk to RF I have no idea what kind of pandora’s box that opens.
The article is about opposition to small cell 5G pole mounted antenna, which are millimeter wave transmitters to replace legacy telephone and perhaps cable. These things will be used with fixed antennas, as they cannot penetrate buildings.
5G with traditional towers is completely different and not an issue.
Prove me wrong. That's the point to a discussion. You share points of view. But if I follow your path of discourse, I could just say you're a sheep that'll believe whatever silicon valley tells you.
Hey man, I get what you're trying to do and it works on reddit and hackernews, but in real life, it sucks when talking with a person who always wants a debate (re: You saying that's the point of a discussion). Stupid people like me (maybe southern attitudes?) sometimes just encourage whatever someone is talking about. If they're talking about 5G and how it could improve society, you could help them think of ideas that would work in that system rather than just begging them to prove you wrong.
I think the point being made in this thread is that we don't know what improvement it might bring. But making it available will probably spur a lot of innovators to create something amazing and useful that could definitely make your life better.
Okay, that's a very fair statement I can agree to.
However, I mostly argue that the taxpayer cost doesn't justify the gains. It's expensive and most counties and cities have to foot the bill or heavily subsidize it. If the telecom company wants to foot the bill. Good on them. No arguement here. If the city has to, go fuck yourselves. Its diminishing returns to a ridiculous level.
Some are saying ‘no’. I just hope the courts don’t overrule them. Personally I’m ok with also allowing some to say ‘yes’. 5G’s short range nature should allow this just fine. In low population density spots the economics of 5G probably won’t work out. It’s best to let communities and companies figure it out themselves rather than have the FCC blanket it everywhere.
5G will probably drive AR and VR adoption. Enabling remote surgery, and other things like that. Who knows what else.
Really we have no idea of the the doors it could happen. In the 90s many people thought the internet was a gimmick or a fad. Today the most successful companies are built on it. It's very likely the same will be true for 5G enabled technologies and companies.
Ignoring the fact that memory allocations as of 1999 were somewhat more generous than that, the problem of backwards-compatibility is more induced resource wastage by current low costs than insufficiency of earlier computers.
We've been at a plateau of roughly 1-2GB RAM for most of the past decade, masked by the fact that devices have been shrinking (phones replacing desktops) rather than resource allocations growing. Which is a fairly frequently-encountered trend in technology.
We create some design, it proves useful, and for a time, focus is on increasing size, power and performance. Then a shift occurs and the focus is on smaller, more distributed systems.
James Watt's steam engines typically produced 5-10 horsepower output, and he built 500 of these by 1800. Following expiration of his patents, and the adoption of high-pressure steam engines, a period of increasingly large and more powerful systems began ... until the realisation that mobile power was a thing, and electric generation, leading to steamships and locomotives.
With electrical power distribution, whole factories were transformed from shaft-and-belt distribution from a 10-20 hp prime mover to electrical power distribution to individual motors, some of which rivaled or exceeded earlier entire steam engines, but many of which operated with fractional horsepower, delivering motive force precisely where needed.
Locomotives grew more powerful and faster, until internal combustion engines allowed 10 horsepower cars to reach speeds of as much as 30 miles an hour on city streets or country roads, without rails or being bound to fixed routes.
Console radios became portable became handheld became a smudge of silicone you probably don't realise still exists within your phone (virtually all are FM receivers).
Warehouse-sized computers shrank to refrigerators, cabinets, towers, pizzaboxes, luggables, portables, laptops, notebooks, tablets, and phones. There's little reason for even a desktop computer to be much more than the size of a paperback beach read these days, other than port size.
The IoT (the "S" stands for "Safety") is the equivalent of putting compute power where it's needed (or not, as the case may be), but it's so cheap to do, and cheaper than equivalent non-compute-based means, that it's become increasingly difficult to buy silicone-free basic appliances and components.
Many of these small systems don't have huge resource allocations, but they're sufficient to the task. They're not end-user interactive devices ... except where they are, with the Twitter-enabled refrigerator (that's a Web browser running on the display).
Web designers have been buidling on the assumption of ample resources, or have used "requires recently-acquired hardware" as a market-segmentation technique (the poor won't buy your dosh but can't afford the kit required to run your website, so feature-block them out and pre-slim your conversion funnel -- I don't condone this at all, but it apparently works).
But there's no inherent need in transmitting a few kb worth of actual text and a few ten-thousand-word pictures to do so. 20-year-old kit should handle that fine, really.
That margin is slim. For many users, vanishingly thin.
Somebody like you or I might frequently max our our cellular connections, but I wager most users never do. And how would they? Streaming 4k YouTube videos onto a screen smaller than a postcard? It just won't make a difference for them.
Being able to download a move at the gate? Potentially game changing. Being able to stream video from a drone or car on the road to centralised servers? Potentially game changing.
People with capital are willing to bet this technology has legs. Your not being able to figure out why is not a good reason to block the investment.
You are unable to convince me I should look forward to it. Since we're apparently getting rude, I'll say your argument is nothing but naive dogmatic futurist optimism. Numerous potential harms to users (relating to privacy, not EM bullshit) have been raised in this thread and all you're offering up in return is vague nonsense about cyber-chauffeurs.
Services and products that will utilize more bandwidth aren't being built, because they're not usable without 5G. 5G needs to become ubiquitous before we'd find out what the new applications will be.
G5 will also reduce latency a lot, which is another vector that will open new possibilities.
But again, nobody wants to talk about how the reduced latency will empower even further the continuous surveillance we're being subjected to by our own devices.
Even as a techie, at some point I want to draw the line.
> But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.
For stationary objects like TVs and lights we already have wifi, and a range of simpler low-power options used by IoT basestations. What does 5G bring to the table here?
WiFi makes it easy[ish] for consumers to firewall their IoT bullshit to inhibit spying. IoT devices with cellular radios promises to remove even this small level of control from consumers.
That's the point. We don't know all of the future applications. But it's very unlikely to be nothing interesting. Do you think everyday appliances in the 50 years will function essentially the same as today? It's a very general enhancement in capability with lots of potential but currently unknown use cases.
I say this while also recognizing that most IoT stuff today is overhyped BS.
A refrigerator will still keep things cold. A stove will still heat things up. An AC will still AC. Other than home automation systems that go belly up when their servers go offline, most things do the same thing they did 50 years ago.
5G is a step back. It's a short range link, which may be nice in a densely populated area, but is useless outside that. And it already seems like providers are rolling back 4G support in rural areas.
Depends what you’re optimizing for. If you want improved bandwidth and latency it’s definitely not a step back. If you want larger cell sizes it is. The good news is they are not exclusive. One can have 5/4/3 G all coexist, as we do today. Unless the FCC wins it’s court case that is...
> Right now your phone has a sim-card. [...] But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.
You don't need a SIM card or 5G for that. Technologies like 802.15.4, or even simpler, are more than enough.
Ethernet over Powerline LANs could also theoretically be used for those applications, since your TV, lightbulbs, etc will be running off mains power anyway.
> But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.
But it won't be cheap for the consumer. At best, our data plans will stay the same price. But more likely they'll rise and, well, I just don't think people give a crap enough about having a sim card in their TV to pay the extra. Maybe if you make SF money, but most people don't.
I think, too, people are starting to get teched out. Just a little for now, but it's happening.
>But it won't be cheap for the consumer. At best, our data plans will stay the same price.
...for entirely political reasons. Here in the UK, you can get unlimited 4G data (with 5G in some areas) for $25 a month. If you pay through the nose for shitty service, take it up with Ajit Pai.
Where I live 4G is good and so cheap that I am thinking about dropping my DSL connection.
I would still need a wifi-router as my laptop and my tv does not support 4G. But my guess is eventually those devices will support xG mobile data and my wifi-router will be a thing of the past.
Been doing this for a few years now..AT&T UL data hotspot SIM ($20.mo, aka 'Mobley' plan) plugged into a TMobile ASUS AC1900 router...tripled my speed of Sonic DSL, for 1/3 the cost of Sonic DSL. Do it.
Being able to mount buttons anywhere is nice, and Philips even has a switch that works without batteries (the power for the Zigbee radio comes from the button press). Sending a signal over 5G to the internet and back however sounds like peak inefficiency for two devices in the same room that could choose any local wireless protocol
Or a battery maybe? I don't know ... if you try to think ahead of what is within the realm of physics but not yet economically or technologically viable there are actually quite a few possibilities.
For the record. I don't think that there will be a physical sim card in your bathroom light but I think that all these wireless communication standards (infrared remote controls, wifi, bluetooth, 4g mobile data ...) will converge into one and the use of that will be so cheap that it will be used everywhere.
I'd be happy to have all the switches in my house be networked and smart as long as the switches, the devices they control, and the network in between are under my control. But sadly they won't be because the companies that sell me the switches will want to monetize me by owning and monitoring that network. To which I say "No thanks, I'll stick with dumb switches."
> "But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option."
It already is. I've got wireless light buttons in some rooms because it's too expensive to put new wires in the walls.
> Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.
Hopefully we don't get there before proper regulation of tech companies is put in place.
Faster, yes. But "cheaper" is just marketing hype. There's no way the telecom companies are going to pass any potential savings on to any end user. Shareholders will poop a brick if they adopt technology that reduces RPU.
But it will or should bring competition to Comcast and cable companies alike!
I'll believe it when it happens.
DSL was going to break the chains of the dialup overlords.
Cable was going to break the chains of the DSL overlords.
Fiber was going to break the chains of the cable overlords.
Fixed wireless was going to break the chains of the fiber overlords.
My prediction: 5G data providers will pull the same tricks as what we have now. Pricing will be about the same as it is for legacy methods/speeds. You can only get the highest speeds and pay the highest prices even if you don't need all that bandwidth, unless you're part of a government poverty program. In which case, you'll get DSL speeds for cable prices. Signing up will be easy. Getting out of the contract will be hard. There will be mandatory fees for things you don't need or want.
It's the same group of companies. Why would we expect any different just because the delivery method has changed?
It's not correct to say that prices never fall. I purchased 5 mbps fiber from Verizon when it was brand new - $60 / month in 2005, I think. Today, Comcast's bottom tier is 15 mbps, at $30 / month. DSL-speed internet (768 kbps) isn't even available as an option.
The market might not function as competitively as it should in the US, but it still functions - new, cheaper tech eventually results in lower prices for consumers.
I was going through some old papers a couple of weeks ago and found some bills. My cable ISP bill from 2002 that I found was $103/month after taxes and fees. Seventeen years later, I pay $106/month.
Back then, the only other choice I had for internet was dialup. Today my other choices include DSL, fiber, and fixed wireless. So, I have more competition now; but I don't have a lower bill.
Streaming pre-recorded video (e.g. movies) over the radio is wildly inefficient considering flash memory costs peanuts. The primary reason it's done is because we're in desperate need of copyright reform (streaming is being used by the video industry as a form of DRM.)
That's not true though. It's not like the people who currently spend lots of time watching niche videos on YouTube (myself included) would start ordering flash memory with those videos instead if only it wasn't for copyright. The case for movies is a bit stronger, but my family's movie/TV show routine is to figure out what we want to watch last minute, then find that on netflix or crunchyroll or piracy sites and then stream it.
I also think the current copyright system is insane, but streaming genuinely is more convenient than buying physical media. If anything, DRM makes media available through streaming _less_ convenient.
No, but they would download their content once and store it locally instead of repeatedly re-streaming it every time.
IF you have children, you're probably familiar with the concept of streaming Frozen for the 50th time. If you're using netflix or spotify or similar, you're probably also familiar with the concept of something that was previously available just vanishing because of circumstances outside of your control.
Streaming is mostly a DRM/copyright enforcement tool. The only time streaming is actually adding value is live streaming.
Agreed. If 5G delivers as promoted, there is no reason to 'stream' any static content...it simply caches to your flash memory in milliseconds (song) or seconds (movie, Netflix already has mobile downloading). I can see a case for streaming in VR/AR or active content (live/multiplayer,etc), but streaming static content isn't efficient.
That is the promise of faster networks. Static content would no longer need 'streaming', as in caching these bit chunks...you would simply get the entire segment, and the device would deliver it to you at the appropriate 'speed'.
I don’t need a faster network for that - YouTube doesn’t download at line speed, it downloads in real time.
If it was line speed, a 40 minute episode would download with current 4g while I was waiting for the next train. On WiFi it would be down before I walked out of range.
As chipsets improve it also means the same download should require less power from the device’s battery, if you believe the race the idle argument, which has always held in the past.
I get that you would want something local if you happen to re-watch the same things again and again. I don't, and keeping local copies of something in case I want to re-watch it is a waste of space.
Stuff being available exclusively through streaming is certainly a way to enforce DRM, but that doesn't mean people wouldn't still largely be streaming even if stuff was available for download without DRM too.
People binge-watching a TV series could certainly anticipate their near-future media demands and download the series through means other than cellular networks. Downloading video and storing it on flash memory could eliminate a huge chunk of the demand for streamed video.
Streaming is just downloading in order. Data downloads while I watch/listen. That's super convenient. That's the big advantage of streaming. Keeping that data or dumping that data is a different issue.
Streaming is downloading, but without the timeshifting properties you get from storing the media to flash. With properly downloadable media, you can download in the evening, on your wired residential connection, and watch during the day when you only have a cellular connection.
You don't know that. Currently consumers don't have the (legal) option, so extrapolating their current behavior to their potential desires is fallacious.
I could've been doing this with iTunes for TV shows for years.
It would be way less convenient, though. So I don't. I don't know which device I'll end up watching on, and don't want to deal with syncing and all that shit.
Which is way more expensive than streaming services. Prohibitively so for wide swaths of the general population who don't have tech industry salaries. The cost of one TV show from iTunes can approach the price of several months of Netflix.
With copyright reform, that needn't be the case.
(Note that for many consumers, Netflix is already considered too expensive. Several people sharing the cost of one account is pretty common from what I've seen.)
Alright, so I should just download a significant portion of YouTube and news websites because I may want to watch those videos randomly? Or I have to wait to get home. Unless we're talking about terabytes of storage on my phone, I don't think this is feasible (for all the video and music I could want at a given time).
Fact is that streaming is just convenient. Like really convenient. I wish there was more stuff that I could download and listen to offline, but it's naive to suggest that streaming has no advantages. We stream while data connected because we download things in an ordered manner (vs how normal downloading is done). That's nice that I don't have to wait for a full movie or song to be completely downloaded to listen to it.
Is there any particular reason why your phone or laptop couldn't opportunistically download all the latest videos from your YouTube subscriptions on WiFi while you sleep?
Maybe you don't subscribe to channels and the system could never anticipate your whims and desires... but I wager it would work great for most users.
I subscribe to a lot of things but I'm not quite sold on the predictive algorithms. Mostly because the recommendations I get aren't really what I want. I have this problem with YouTube, Netflix (which used to be spot on), Spotify, and prime. So I'm not sure if I really trust their prediction models.
The movies most in demand tend to be recent movies, so unless "sane copyright expiration" means a few months, I don't see how it would change the streaming situation.
If that truly is the distribution of demand, then the media industry should have little to fear from such dramatic copyright reform (of course they would disagree!)
Sure, livestreaming videos to VR headsets would be great, and the desirable 2x8k@120hz would require 5G. But if that's the use case then there's no need to hurry with 5G since most applications would be just fine with local wifi and haven't proven significant demand.
You can't necessarily prove demand for even retroactively obvious products without the products sometimes. I don't think VR is something you are extremely likely to do on the go.
360 video is not going to take off because it’s a sucky experience. “Real” VR with positional tracking makes you feel like you’re in another space, and has lots of potential for that reason. 360 video does not.
AR stands for Augmented reality, the overlay of information and artificial constructs over the real world in such a way as as one can both perceive the artificial constructs and interact with the real world simultaneously.
Nobody will view this by holding their phone up and looking at the world through their phone screen. Real products in development use glasses. Science fiction depicts contacts, currently impossible, or some sort of implant, even less realistic.
Remember we wrote about going to the moon prior to being able to actually go there.
A 360° video is one which has been recorded with a 360° field of view. Add in software + a head mounted display, and you can turn your head to view the video in different directions.
It's a fun novelty, but it should not be conflated with VR. If you move your head forwards or backwards (as opposed to rotating your head), the environment does not adjust itself to match your new position, because it's just a prerecorded video. Without this ability, you can't trick your brain into believing it's in a real place.
I only brought up 360° video because the GP mentioned "livestreaming videos to VR headsets [at] 2x8k@120hz", and there's no other type of video you can stream to a VR headset†. Real VR, with positional tracking, needs a 3D modeled environment, like a video game. We may be on the cusp of being able to stream traditional video games, but VR needs much lower latency than that—around 30ms for absolutely everything in the chain.
I don't think AR is any different in this regard. If the processing is being done on-device the assets are small and you don't need 5G. If the processing is being done remotely, you've got that same latency problem.
How does 5G benefit AR?
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† Well, okay, there have been some weird experiments, but they preclude standard resolution measurements. They also require an order of magnitude more data—5G won't cut it.
I'm certainly open to a future with a Google Glass that works well (or even Google Contacts?) and its users aren't widely viewed as "Glassholes." But, in the meantime, a lot of use cases can be explored with devices that many people already own and that aren't considered obtrusive in many contexts the way that computer eyewear is.
And if the AR processing is being done on device—which I think it has to be due to latency, even under 5G—the data to be downloaded really isn’t that large. We’re talking images and 3D models.
> data to be downloaded really isn’t that large. We’re talking images and 3D models.
I think you underestimate image sizes for modern AR/VR applications. For example, good quality light-field can take few gigabytes for one image. Also there is a big UX difference between downloading full image ahead and downloading parts on-demand (similar to modern video streaming - today we never download full video ahead).
At the type of latencies needed for good VR, I’m not convinced any type of streaming from a remote server is going to work. You can’t beat the speed of light.
We’re only just starting to be able to do this with traditional video games (Stadia), where significantly higher latency is acceptible, and even that’s largely unproven.
If I’m wrong, well, I still think we should proove this tech over traditional cable + ethernet connections first, which already exist today.
But what media is still constrained by bandwidth? There isn't really anything else. We already stream audio and video at pretty much the highest fidelity humans can perceive.
Video is still pretty constrained by bandwidth. I still have songs buffer at times. So I wouldn't even say our current media isn't constrained. Additionally we'll probably see new uses for that bandwidth, just the same way we have found new uses in the past and every people again said we already have enough. That notion is ridiculous.
We can already guess at some use cases. AR, VR, or other types of environment simulation. Data processing for vehicles: cars, trucks, drones. And I'm sure that people will figure out more things they can do. But the notion of "there isn't anything else" so why do we need more, is like saying 640K is all you'll ever need (I know he didn't actually say that, but the myth stands)
I'd posit that happens not because your connection is too slow per se, but because your Wifi/LTE coverage is spotty, and speeds on the margins of coverage can be very slow.
Exactly. There are lots of places where coverage and bandwidth are still bad, but 5G is actually less suited to solve that problem than 4G, especially given where it's being deployed. They're pushing on the already-high peak instead of filling the massive gaps at the lower end.
Well if you have download more data per second then you can deal with more spottiness. Because the goal is to download something. A 1Gb/s connection for half a second is better than a 100mb/s connection for 5 seconds
That's not the point; the point is 4G is still mostly just in major cities, and 5G is only in very select major cities. There are places where you still can't even get a reliable 3G signal. It'll be decades before those places get 5G.
From data I've seen? No. 500ms is a pretty short time.
But my point is that there's the consideration that it takes half a second to download 500Mb (roughly a 720p video). So if you have 0.5s uninterrupted that's pretty convenient. I'm also pretty positive that coverage will increase from current conditions (I don't see a reason why it wouldn't). So the speed helps with the spottines. Basically what I'm saying is you don't need as long of a connection to download the same amount. If your spottiness is the same then you get more on 5G. Alternatively since it is 10x the speed, that would be equivalent to 10x spottines (which were not considering a fallback to 4/3G).
The issue is, there’s so many other things in the “faster internet” story than 5G that it really seems like a bit of a scam...
Personally, I’d much appreciate full-coverage, limitless, unthrottled, can-be-tethered, cross-border, always available (unlike in Central London) 4G. If mobile network operators can’t even achieve that, maybe they’re not up to the job of setting up 5G.
I'm saddened that streaming is seen as something important.
5G may add IoT which can have value for everybody if done well (or not if it ends up as a sensation of being monitored 24/7 even without privacy issue)
What does this mean? Multiplayer video games? Video calls? Communal karaoke?
I can see how all of these things might benefit from 5G's higher bandwidth and lower latency, but they should also be more than possible right now. So if there's some untapped audience for a communal online karaoke app, I really don't think 4G networks are what's holding them back.
This type of thing is where I get pretty frustrated with 5G talk. It's a lot easier to come up with ideas than it is to build them, so if we can't even come up with concrete ideas, I don't think 5G networks are going to make the difference.
All of the proposals I see either don't make any sense under scrutiny (live streamed AR), or could easily be accomplished in another way (smart light bulbs).
Faster mobile data is great. I'm just not expecting it to transform society.
I think 'streaming' is a poor selling point, because it is already done efficiently, and will simply be made more efficient by faster networks offloading static content to cache/flash, as in Netflix/song downloads are presently. We just wouldn't need to call them 'downloads' anymore, just cached content. There are use cases where a centralized database and processors would need interaction to complete the experience, such as online gaming/VR/AR..but I wouldn't call that 'streaming'. These definition are mutable, like you don't 'dial' a number to make a call. I remember when the phones transitioned from dial to button, and thought 'what a time-saver'!
Streaming, maps, voice to text, and most other technologies you can think of already existed before moving to phones. The bandwidth lead to mobile usage, but not the innovations themselves.
It's usually a huge hassle to get stuff working on a phone, especially if it requires hardware support. It's not the greatest platform for innovations.
Some of the advantages of 5g come from using it as a home connection. My building is locked in with spectrum and I'm limited to 100mbps, despite ATT serving fiber all over town. I can't do anything about it because it would require having a telecom wire our building for their service, the equivalent of moving heaven and earth.
If I could pick up a 5g signal I could opt for that instead. It's like suddenly having an option for installing a dish instead of whatever the cable company serves you.
As far as speed, I'm not holding my breath. In a previous apartment I did actually have fiber but it wasn't the game changer I thought it would be. Downloads and streaming are capped at a point. The only way to actually use all of this horsepower I had was with bittorrent, and boy it downloaded stuff so fast that the write speed on my drive became a significant bottleneck. I even demoed Googles project stream and while that worked OK, I still got a lot of hickups and low quality stream moments that showed how far away the delivery technlogy was (AC:O was playable but there was way too much latency for a multiplayer game to stream with this technology), even if I had the very best internet on the market.
Even mobile phones are now getting 90hz screens, yet we struggle to stream anything with more than 30hz at decent quality. This might not be noticable in most movies, but game streams could be much better and sports events could benefit a lot too.
But we already have fast mobile internet. If there was going to be this kind of buzz, it should have been for 4G. What makes 5G so game changing over that?
It's pretty clear that the widespread adoption of faster mobile technologies has enabled technology companies like Facebook, Google, Youtube, Netflix etc to thrive. Investment in infrastructure has unforseen benefits that only seem obvious in hindsight. America basically "owned" the 4G world and reaped the benefits.
Not doing this for 5G will basically just hand hundreds of billions of dollars in jobs and growth to China.
Netflix, youtube, and facebook can stream fine on lower bandwidth links.
The economic value of high resolution mobile streaming seems rather low, at best. Most likely negative, because most content is just time-wasting, and because content that actually matters tends to not depend so much on resolution beyond SD or basic HD (720p).
Other potential applications, as mentioned elsewhere, tend to run into 5G not being fast enough either (once you figure average speeds and not max theoretical speeds), or latency being too high, or the bottleneck being on the remote side.
4G, despite being ubiquitous, costs a lot for service and is power-hungry, not good qualities for most IoT-type applications. 5G might be better than 4G for mobile side energy use, but unless it's close to 802.11ax levels and mobile providers offer cheap bandwidth-limited service plans, I don't see why anyone would use it for IoT applications. That leaves mobile device applications, and people are already too glued to their mobile devices. I'm sure new businesses will capitalize on increased bandwidth from 5G, but I'm doubtful that it will benefit society.
5G antennas near the ground can be easily vandalized.
> Netflix, youtube, and facebook can stream fine on lower bandwidth links.
They really cannot, at least with quality levels that make people actually want to watch them.
> The economic value of high resolution mobile streaming seems rather low, at best.
Many multi-billion dollar companies and streaming services would disagree. As would many investors.
> Most likely negative, because most content is just time-wasting, and because content that actually matters tends to not depend so much on resolution beyond SD or basic HD (720p)
This is entirely your opinion about what content you prefer. Once again, there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars that says otherwise.
> 5G might be better than 4G for mobile side energy use, but unless it's close to 802.11ax levels and mobile providers offer cheap bandwidth-limited service plans, I don't see why anyone would use it for IoT applications.
This is not the problem 5G solves. It solves latency, availability and throughput.
> I'm sure new businesses will capitalize on increased bandwidth from 5G, but I'm doubtful that it will benefit society.
You are doubtful that the creation of numerous companies, highly paid jobs and adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the US economy won't benefit society?
This is the big point that everyone is missing. If we aren't at the forefront of the technology curve, then someone else will be. It's literally choosing to be a winner or loser but you also don't have to put in the time or effort you just have to voice an opinion.
To be fair though... are you willing to pay to run miles upon miles upon miles of copper or fiber? For free? Someone has to do it. And they really dont feel like doing and flip burgers too.
I do believe it changes by state, but they do get payouts for doing a large portion of the project. However, the way it worked in the past, they pay a monthly lease to the city for using the land. For example, cell towers can cost 2k-10k a month. Depending on the land owner. Thia can also be private property, like farmers.
However, like in Florida, telecom lobbied the fuck out of the state to cap the lease rate to $150 a box and a lot less out of pocket for the telecom. I'm a capitalist and a Republican. But that shit right there, can kiss my hairy butthole.
I guess what also angers me is the unicorn dreams and wishes people think 5g is. It's a business. Telecom gives zero shits about innovation or making the world a better place. They want their pound of flesh and will take the blood too. 4g payouts have slowed for them. That's why they want to suck more blood using 5g.
You can hear some particularly wild assertions like this in the long running commercial throughout the past few episodes of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast. They are formatted as conversation between Gladwell and an AT&T exec.
It always starts with "what are some things that might be enabled if bandwidth improved and latency decreased" and then just jumps immediately to some Internet of Things utopia.
Edit: weird it's a 3 short episode advertisement thing, a "live-read" ad in an interview format. These Pop science people are a great marketing/hype vector. I'm curious how much AT&T paid for this.
The ATT guy said 5g will solve bike deaths by having your bike talk to the stop light and other cars, but with machine learning!
It seems to have the same disconnect from the real world implementations that the AI sales hucksters are pushing, like those IBM Watson ads that were very obviously (to every programmer) being over sold to big businesses.
The ATT guy said 5g will solve bike deaths by having your bike talk to the stop light and other cars, but with machine learning!
Reminds me of all the garbage that went around in the transition from AMPS to digital. I had a co-worker tell me her phone was better than mine because mine was only Edge, but hers was PCS!
The AT&T guy should have put an "e" in front of it to tap the nostalgia for 90's marketing nonsense.
eMachines, eBike, etailor, etc...
People will love 5G because it's one more G than 4G. And then AT&T can call it's version 6Ge.
Funny you say that - my AT&T phone currently shows that I’m using “5G E”, where the “E” apparently stands for “evolution”, which means while it’s not 5G speed yet it might become that fast in the future. It’s basically marketing fraud. https://www.heapooh.com/apple-iphones-5ge-att-network/
The telecom companies got away with that the last (few) times so they are going to do it again in the future. Just like "4G+, 4GX, XLTE, LTE-A, VoLTE"
Fortunately most people know not to take it too seriously or don't care either way. People typically only buy a phone when their last one dies so the sales pitch is usually between two very similar models in a store/website, with a possible up-sale for 5G (until 5G is standard). A small price bump because someone believed the sales guy's technobabble is not that big of a deal really, which is probably why there's no lawsuits unlike drug mislabeling.
Which is different than people buying a whole new phone just because they heard about 5G, which is a small minority of early-adopters who are always getting burned by tech churn.
Half or more product differentiations they think up for cell phones is mostly useless or quickly adopted everywhere. 95-99% of the UX will be the same thanks to the Android or iOS and highly competitive hardware specs.
Decreasing latency seems more like a material improvement, but I wasn't aware 5G impacted that. Our current peak of bandwidth, on the other hand, is pretty much as much as you could need for any given media.
5G impacts it because the high frequency parts need a lot more cells. Therefore the overall available airtime per user/device is goint waaay up. Which is good for low latency.
Provides more throughput for mass surveillance systems, that will totally reshape society. Think 'social credit' systems. Servicing these customers will be the bread and butter.
I can understand why “faster internet” is good or even great thing. We’re seeing all kinds of new streaming tech that can take advantage of more bandwidth.
Something that does confuse me though, is the way 5G is being touted as the solution to better home internet in the US. It only going to fast in cities, which are the perfect place for fibre or even wireless ISP using normal WiFi running point-to-point between buildings.
US poor home internet seems to be driven by lack of competition, 5G is one way of increasing competition. But surely trying to legislate local-loop unbundling (which is what happens in most of the world) would be a cheaper quicker way to drive competition?
Coming from the privileged position of living in a place with a cheap unlimited 1Gpbs home internet connection, it’s hard to see what 5G brings to the table, except perhaps a better mobile connection in train stations and concert arenas.
Well, if 5G brings base station prices (and all the related equipment's) even further down, it could help poor communities.
But so far the problem seems to be simple density related. Laying/installing new cabling does not worth it in many places, because of the overhead costs. (The fixed costs.)
Everything I've heard about it indicates that it's a trash technology. Unless you're standing next to an emitter, it's no faster than 4G and potentially even slower. Like you walk one block or behind a wall and it's not good anymore. So you gotta put one of these up on every block. I'm banking on it being a complete dud, like 3D televisions.
You have heard wrong - it's amusing that you're so confident in its failure despite having the wrong information.
There are two phases in the 5G NR standard. The first phase relies on some elements of the LTE control plane to coordinate data services. These data services use new numerologies for their OFDM modulation, vastly more flexible resource block, allocation, improved error control coding, lower maximum latency, better channel allocation, and standardized MIMO support - all of which will improve reliability and throughput, especially in crowded channel conditions.
Phase 2 formally introduces millimeter wave signaling - this is what does primarily propagates through line of sight (LOS) channels. Clever beam forming and beamsteering can alleviate this to an extent but these cells are intended for dense urban environments or interiors of large buildings. These will supplement the lower frequency bands when available but 5G NR devices will still use the lowband when mmWave is unavailable. Phase 2 also switches over to an entirely 5G NR backed control plane (Standalone, or 5G NR SA) which has its own reliability and throughput improvements though these will all happen in the lowband since mmWave isn't suited for these tasks.
> Phase 2 formally introduces millimeter wave signaling - this is what does primarily propagates through line of sight (LOS) channels. Clever beam forming and beamsteering can alleviate this to an extent but these cells are intended for dense urban environments or interiors of large buildings.
Thanks for all the info. Why don't we just skip phase 2 and continue using wifi?
Fair point, my thought too. Something tells me "big telco" is too valuable to economies to sidestep with a public service/open mesh network relayed via routers and phones as nodes.
"In the context of 3GPP 5G standardization contributions, the term numerology refers to the configuration of waveform parameters, and different numerologies are considered as OFDM-based sub-frames having different parameters such as subcarrier spacing/symbol time, CP size, etc." (source: https://red-colmena.com/f/JyY1ajY1JmhhZSFpdC91JGcmIyEsYGU/18... which I found with a quick web search for "OFDM numerology")
Not my area of expertise. The main study I'm aware of showing some harmful affects uses an unrealistic amount of power and curiously only showed effects for male mice. I'm hesitant to dismiss it, because effects from heating caused by non-ionizing radiation are well documented but that amount of power is just not present in cellular systems whether that's LTE or 5G NR.
Interestingly, it might not be the experiment but rather the experimenters themselves. When this study came out, I mentioned it to my girlfriend at the time (a veterinarian), and she pointed to research [1] that suggests a correlation between the presence of male researchers and stress in mice. It's plausible that if male researchers were present, the increased stress response could contribute to greater susceptibility to certain cancers (it was only the male mice in the 5G study that were affected).
I have no idea how the study was done or the genders of the researchers who participated, but it's worth considering that other variables may be at play. Perhaps it should be replicated under an all-female research environment if it wasn't originally.
Why don't you demand actual reproducible evidence before worrying? Nonionizing radiation has not been shown to be harmful, but self-inflicted psychological stress certainly has.
it's amusing that you're so confident in its failure despite having the wrong information.
Why would that be "despite"? That would have to be being confident in its failure despite having information that it would be a success. Surely they're confident in its failure because the information they have says it will be bad?
And then your comment becomes "I'm laughing because you're confident in your beliefs" which is content-free smugness, or "I'm laughing at you because you don't know what I know" which is more or less the same, if not worse.
I mean my sources are the actual 5G Standards, the test equipment I've used, and my knowledge of cellular systems stemming from experience and and formal education so yeah, I think it's a fair assumption that my knowledge is more than "some things I heard". My job does not depend on the success or failure of 5G, I don't know where you got that from.
Information is not equally likely to be valid regardless of the source it came from.
This is the curse of being an expert (on anything) and engaging with kooks who think they are experts because they read something on the internet.
If you had direct experiences and you share them, those shouldn't be ridiculed, but if you pass on information that is not from your direct experience and which people who have direct experience believe to be false... that's also, as you say, "not a good look".
The point is not that information from all sources is equally valid, the point is the parent is dismissing information without knowing what the source even is. I don't know the original commenter, their knowledge, or their source. But as the replying person says "assumption that my knowledge is more" - that is an assumption. Why not check that assumption?
Then they go on to say "I mean my sources are the actual 5G Standards," - And it's never been the case that a standards document sounds great, but doesn't work well or is implemented badly? Or tries to address a problem but doesn't? "and on implementing electronics" - so not actual experience of trying it?
I don't follow what you're suggesting; Where are you implying that asciident heard that 5G is "trash technology" and "doesn't work well"?
"I heard someone used it and it didn't work well" is the same level of evidence as product reviews, and is strong enough for all of us to make day to day judgements on. "I read the spec and the spec says it should be good" is not strong evidence - all spec would say that, or be revised until it said that. Yet still bad products abound.
They picked up some random news articles and some hearsay. Maybe product reviews are where you get your info, then don't be surprised if you talk to actual engineers and they don't have a lot of respect for your opinions.
Is it not a common trope on HN itself, the software engineer who stridently argues that their service is good because it has $list-of-tech, ignoring the users who don’t like it?
I would edit, but too late; here is a HN recommendation thread about non-Macbook laptops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20795113 In it, there are people saying that Intel - nVidia GPU switching has problems on some laptops.
If I take your position as stated: 1) Those claims, by the time they to us, are hearsay and therefore have no value. 2) An Intel engineer stating that they have more knowledge and it should work well, is not hearsay and does have value. 3) Whether the Intel engineer respects the reader or not, matters.
Am I misrepresenting anything in your position here? If not, then I feel the opposite about all three points. This isn't about engineer vs user's knowledge, it's about differences between design-intent and real-world result.
> Am I misrepresenting anything in your position here?
Yes.
1) I never said "no value". The claims have value. Call it 2 bits per claim, with diminishing returns after the first few.
2) The Intel engineer has considerably more context, and more on the line, so their claim has considerably more weight. Call it... 8 bits. If they say it should work, then it should work, and if other people say it doesn't work, that doesn't mean someone is wrong, it might just mean that it should work, but for someone it isn't working, for whatever other reasons.
3) If the Intel engineer tells you your opinion is wrong or out of date, you should probably give that considerably more weight than if some random person on the internet without that context says it.
The engineer working in the field can be expected to know a lot more about both the intended design, the actual build, and the real-world issues arising in practice compared to what any individual user would know about any of those things. This is generally why experts don't like to engage with non-experts; the non-experts' priors on who to trust are likely to be all out of whack.
Maybe you'll be interested to hear from actual 5G users before making uninformed claims.
I have home wireless broadband in central London (no other good broadband offering in my street) and was upgraded from 4G to 5G last week.
I went from an average of 5-10Mbps at peak times and 20Mbps max on 4G, to 150-250Mbps peak time and 350MBps max on 5G, on the same carrier (Three). Enough said.
I have 150Mbps right now (checked on fast.com) with 4G in Central Denver. It’s not about the number before the G, but whether the carriers are building enough infrastructure to support it.
The population density in London is an order of magnitude higher than in Denver. That has an obvious impact on air congestion, which is one of the primary limiting factors on cellular network performance.
That depends very much on your definition of "London" and "Denver". Your first figure refers to the population density of Greater London, a vast area covering much of what used to be the Home Counties. Your second figure refers solely to Denver City rather than the broader Denver-Aurora-Lakewood metropolitan statistical area, much of which is functionally suburban Denver.
I don't think it's particularly useful to attempt to pin down a fixed definition of the boundaries of either city, particularly one as amorphous as London. Suffice it to say that London is densely populated, Inner London is even more densely populated and rush hour on the tube is genuinely insane; Londoners regularly encounter densities that simply don't occur in most US cities outside of a football stadium and have a subsequent need for far higher throughput than 4G can deliver.
I think the problem may be that "order of magnitude more" means different things to different people. Colloquially, it does get used to mean "a lot more", and some people use it because it sounds more scientific. But in a more correct sense, it means "closer to 10x than 1x or 100x": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude#Definition.
I personally dislike the phrase and try to avoid it. But if one is going to use it, I think it should be used correctly.
(I agree with jdietrich that the definition of "city" matters)
It is definitely about the number before the G. With perfect infrastructure investment like what your carrier seems to have done with 4G in Denver, 5G could reach 1-2GBps.
In other words, real world imperfect 5G is ten times better than 4G with all stars aligned.
It doesn't look like like your old "4G" was legitimate full performance LTE. Cell carriers lie and demur about what performance they actually provide. You can't trust the number to mean anything.
I don't know much about the specifics behind 5G but if asciident's claim is true then towers on every block should perform very well under high load. What kind of performance are you referring to? Throughput? Latency? Availability? Reliability?
It was definitely a busy area and dozens of Mbps are more typical on 4G. My point is that real world 5G is an order of magnitude faster than real world 4G, much like 4G was in comparison to 3G.
Your 5G, and your 4G. That doesn't mean it is the 5G that is the difference, unless you did an exhaustive root cause investigation of the poor performance of the 4G.
Backhaul matters as well. If you do carrier comparisons at scale, it becomes obvious that the connectivity to the towers varies dramatically, as do network conditions, quality of proxies on the carrier network and other factors.
A fancy new 5G tower also has underutilized connectivity to it.
Maybe it just works fast because there still are only a very limited number of users? And will speeds and latencies drop as the airspace gets more saturated?
In short - some but not really. 5G NR allows for extremely efficient resource block allocation and can handle ~10x more concurrent users than 4G. The latency should not degrade as long as the carriers don't do weird things with traffic allocation - the standard allows for ~4ms worst case latency.
But does it matter for you? I know it would not for me. I can certainly find counterexamples, but for me the last leg bandwidth is seldom the bottleneck. My 2c.
Back in the day I didn't think upgrading from a 56K PSTN modem to DSL broadband would matter that much to me.
I was naively thinking in terms of downloading things a bit faster, the classic futurologist mistake of seeing things through today's frame of reference.
What happened instead is that it enabled Youtube, Skype, Facetime, and that did change the world.
I get the feeling and have been asking the same thing. It wasn't like this for 4G.
Is it because it will replace wired internet as well? Or the ubiquitous nodes allow detailed location tracking? It will be managed by a skynet inspired AI? Or the fact China has taken the lead in implementing it?
Whatever the case it's a bit weird and I wonder what we don't know.
I definitely didn't understand anything about 5G being better at fixed locations, e.g. factories, where the comparison isn't really against 4G, but against wifi. What benefit does 5G have over the latest 802.11 spec?
You only need about 70 Kbit/second to use 22 GB in a month. Would you be happy with a wireless plan that only gave you 70 Kbit/second? Probably not.
For the large number of people, probably a majority, who in most months don't hit their caps their two main annoyances with wireless performance are poor signal and things taking too long.
Yep. I'm just making the argument that there's no quality of life difference between a 40 megabit mobile connection and a 700 megabit one. If 5G came with a massive range improvement instead of a speed boost I'd be excited, but it doesn't. I can't check email at my grandparent's house now and I still won't be able to after 5G deployment.
That wasn't true for 3G/4G. Unlimited 3G plans were truly unlimited, and for a while 4G plans were also truly unlimited. My highest data usage in a month was 144GB. At no point in time were "unlimited" plans more restricted than they are now and there is no evidence that trend will suddenly reverse itself with 5G.
Among other things, 5G holds the promise of making traditional wired telecom regulation obsolete, by getting rid of the last mile problem, reducing the tendency toward natural monopoly, and enabling competition.
On a cautionary note, the past 25 years of technology have promised that they "enable competition" (anyone else remember the late 90s ethos of "anyone with a computer can publish on the web!"), yet here we are stuck with Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. which are some of the largest monopolies in world history.
I don’t see how it reduces competition since the technology requires even more bass stations then does 4G. More infrastructure equals more cost equals more investment required. Only the big players can afford this, and there’s only a few big players left.
5G drastically eases the bottleneck on available spectrum. There’s tons of spectrum up in the millimeter wave bands, which means you don’t need to spend billions up front on spectrum to start deploying the technology.
At the same time wireless dramatically reduces the cost per household served. The fan-out problem for wired internet is brutal. It can cost almost as much to bring fiber from a subdivision into each house as it does to bring it to the subdivision in the first place. (It’s way easier to just string fiber along some utility poles to the edge of a subdivision than to then trench it through a couple of hundred yards.)
They want to be able to easily boil the organs of any target by simply typing coordinates in 3D space for multiple towers to focus their beams on. It's a weapon pretending to be a useful innocent technology so no one will protest its widespread deployment.
This is remind me of when Trump gave a statement about 5G. He said something like "Right now we have 5G, which is great. Soon we will have 6G which will be even better."
> All I’m asking is that the next time you hear a wireless industry person talk about the “race” to 5G, stop and ask them why it’s a race. Ask who the competitors are, and what happens if we come in second place. See if you buy the answer. I suspect you won’t hear anything convincing.
Faster internet is of course great in and of itself, but I'm not convinced it's deserving of public subsidies or regulatory exemptions, particularly in large cities that already have access to fast broadband. Furthermore, I'm quite concerned about NASA's warning that 5G will weaken our ability to forecast the weather, including life-or-death phenomena like hurricanes.
> I'm quite concerned about NASA's warning that 5G will weaken our ability to forecast the weather
NASA issued no such warning.
5G would interfere with one satellite-based moisture measure around populated areas. NOAA’s commentary was around how that one measure would need to be statistically tweaked or supplemented. (The headlines resulted from NOAA’s head warning the Congress that if the latter didn’t give him funding for these tweaks, our forecasts would become dramatically worse.)
Hurricanes, moreover, build over oceans. AT&T can’t keep a call in my Manhattan apartment; it’s going to be a while before 5G signals are making it to the middle of the Atlantic.
I was repeating what I've read. When The Washington Post reported[1] about NOAA director Neil Jacobs's testimony before congress on the issue, they wrote:
> With this reduced forecast skill, the European model would not have predicted 2012′s Superstorm Sandy hitting the Northeast coast several days in advance, Jacobs said. Instead, the model would have steered the storm out to sea. Lead time to prepare for the storm would have been cut short.
No, they’re reporting on a valid dialectic. The topic of the story is the discussion, not the science. (The Post is a political paper. That their May story produced zero further reporting from reputable sources is a hint.)
In lieu of listening to the hearing [1], the American Institute of Physicists (AIP) provides a good summary [2].
TL; DR The Science Committee is debating emission limits. Nobody suggests scrapping 5G.
Neither am I! I am suggesting (and advocating) that we slow down so that these concerns can be taken seriously. Quoting from The Verge again:
> How did the wireless industry respond to [meteorological concerns]? By writing a blog post accusing meteorologists from across three government agencies of “risking our 5G leadership.” The implication, of course, is that worrying about detecting major weather events could make us lose the race.
In tech, there are tons of historical instances of imperfect implementations gaining high market share because of first-mover advantage. It’s a really effective tech strategy. Switching costs, vendor lock-in, and technical debt are huge driving forces for this.
This editorial was written within the context of countries. I understand why Verizon wants to get 5G before AT&T, but I don’t think the US should allocate public resources to help. If the result is that China gets 5G before the US, fine.
I’m not sure the US should allocate resources to do that either. But that’s irrelevant, all countries have an interest in the success of their industry, and the strength of their utility infrastructure. These things have been a matter of political interest for millennia.
Besides the simple economic downsides of not selling the product, there are concerns about implementing critical infrastructure with a more nebulous chain-of-custody or engineering governance model.
Companies that manufacture critical infrastructure within one's own legal/political jurisdiction(s) can be held accountable -- whereas those actions wouldn't be as possible for those outside of that jurisdiction.
Or to put it more bluntly -- cyber warfare has been going strong for at least a couple of decades now and has only escalated in recent years.
By "industry person", I don't think Nilay Patel was referring to standard retail workers. I read that sentence as targeted towards other journalists and professionals.
This is a shitty issue, because you have the uncertainty of health claims, with extreme claims that may even be ginned up to discredit opposition.
My beef with 5G is the arguments for these disruptive rollouts are almost entirely bullshit. The United States is not in a race to drop a telephone pole with a short range antenna in front of my home.
In the name of national security, Verizon and AT&T essentially get to do whatever they want, with no third party input. The FCC mandates lower rates for pole rent and allows new poles to be placed anywhere. In my case, Verizon put a pole in my neighbors lawn about 12 feet from an existing pole.
Why does Verizon get a government subsidized ability to roll out infrastructure? Why doesn’t Spectrum or Comcast get it for their fiber and coax plant?
Really surprised to see the beating heart of tech that is HN turn into a luddite forum on this occasion.
Last week I got upgraded from 4G to 5G for home broadband here in London, UK. It just became commercially available in my area (on Three)
As I said in another comment, my average speeds went up from 5-10Mbps to 150-250Mbps and peak ones from 20-25Mbps to 350-400Mbps.
It absolutely is the game changer it's advertised to be in terms of enabling new real-world use cases.
Remember how video streaming was theoretically possible on 3G but totally shit in practice until 4G came along ? 5G is a similar kind of step up. You can expect an order magnitude more bandwidth on mobile than with 4G, and that matters.
I had a similar experience (also on Three) when 4G first rolled out. Blazing speed, low latency, low contention. Unfortunately as the technology became more mainstream, the speeds dropped and peak contention increased.
A small scale roll-out is absolutely not indicative of real-world performance.
In Glasgow, I'm getting around 5Mbps on Three over 4G. In Japan and South Korea I regularly got far in excess of 100Mbps over 4G.
It's more about backhaul bandwidth and capacity planning than radio technology. 4G is more capable than you'd think, and any speed real-world increase we see with 5G is almost certainly down to better network design.
Edit: autocorrect typo - "tech logo" to "technology"
In the particular case of Three there's a simpler explanation and it means things will be very different this time : they completely lost the 4G spectrum auction war to competitors (EE and Vodafone mainly), but they didn't repeat that mistake with 5G : they're the only carrier with >100Mhz of spectrum and are likely to dominate performance comparisons for a while.
I won't go into great detail, why Three failed to acquire 4G spectrum and how it was subsequently awarded significantly valuable frequency from EE in the process. However, there is a lot more to how Three (Broadband) came to acquire frequency in the 3.4─3.8GHz spectrum. There was no auction neither were there any wars. It was via the acquisition of UK Broadband & Relish, which was already a part of PCCW. It was originally awarded the spectrum, contingent upon certain stipulations ie. building, maintaining and continued investment in telecoms infrastructure.
The current 5G product might bear the moniker, but it is still using the infrastructure put in place by UKBG Relish in parts of Central & Greater London. The speeds are also dependent upon relevant upgrades to the masts, operator equipment, backhaul etc., more importantly the UE has to be up-to-date to take advantage of any speed boosts. It will still not count as real 5G for sometime yet, as there are standards which are still being ratified and other players have yet to join the game.
It would be naive to assume that Vodafone, the biggest operator by spectrum holdings, followed by BT/EE, will just defer their incumbent position, without bidding next year!
My 4G connection in Austria has been able to do 120Mbps for years now, sometimes even 180Mbps. What you are seeing might simply be that you are mostly alone in your cell, and not really 5G related. Once more people have a 5G modem, things will get worse for you again.
>Remember how video streaming was theoretically possible on 3G but totally shit in practice until 4G came along ? 5G is a similar kind of step up. You can expect an order magnitude more bandwidth on mobile than with 4G, and that matters.
5G-NR standard only gives a 15-20% gain in data thoroughput over the same bandwidth as compared to 4G LTE. The vast majority of the increase in thoroughput has to come from the millimeter wave bands. Think about streetlights to get an idea of coverage and propagation. Now think about running internet fiber to every streetlight. It's quite a task. It'll only be done (and has only been done so far in the USA) in areas that require high bits/khz/km^2 like entertainment stadiums and parts of the largest cities.
Additionally, almost no two countries actually have overlapping 5G bands. It's a mess of competing standards. So it'll be different frontend modules for controlling the antenna arrays required on the handsets (high power usage and space requirements) due to the integration required. Handsets are going to have to get bigger. Unlikably big and specific to region.
And beyond that the 5G setups being implemented now aren't stand alone. They're both LTE and Non-Standalone (NSA) 5G. The 5G just provides extra bandwidth and isn't used as a control for the handsets. It more than doubles the complexity of setups because of the trouble RF designers have to take with harmonics and intermodulation. All the competing national freq band standards mean different filtering solutions.
An increase in upload speed would be a game changer.
That download speed can stream 4k w/o issue. The upload speed could use some improvements, I can imagine better scenarios if I could stream high res video off to a cloud AI processing system!
Is data going to be cheaper too? Otherwise, it's not going to change anything for most people. It'll just mean I can blow through my monthly quota in a day instead of a week.
It’s very weird to see so many tech people siding with NIMBYs and hypochondriacs against technological advance.
This is just a microcosm if a larger problem: municipal governments hold back progress. Right now, my Maryland county is lobbying to get veto power over a much-needed expansion of bridge capacity between the western and eastern shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Folks are also lobbying hard to shut down already-built light rail stations in the county. Municipalities make it impossible to densify urban areas, demolish obsolete buildings, build transit, build fiber, etc. Remember when San Francisco used to stop fiber deployment because some people thought the fiber cabinets were ugly? 5G is just the latest in a long list of things where a minority of loud voices holds up progress for everyone.
Technologists are jealous of why places like Japan have such great infrastructure. They do because they don’t give local interests veto power over infrastructure. They don’t let environmental and historical preservation laws turn every attempt at infrastructure development into years to decades of litigation. Tokyo is criss-crossed with spiderwebs of fiber on utility poles. They don’t hold that up because some NIMBYs complained about the view. That’s how you make progress.
>Tokyo is criss-crossed with spiderwebs of fiber on utility poles. They don’t hold that up because some NIMBYs complained about the view. That’s how you make progress.
As a Marin county resident..you and I have a different view of progress.
I can't stand the term "NIMBY's". What does that really mean? Is "NIMBYism" actually that surprising? When someone settles down somewhere and invests in a home, they will complain if you come in and try to do something to worsen their environment. What else can you expect? Is being a NIMBY just the opposite of being a pushover?
Investing in a particular plot of land doesn't mean you get to veto everybody else's choices of what they do with their invested plot of land. Pure democracy violates individual freedoms.
Usually when someone invests in a plot of land, they're also considering what surrounds their plot of land. Obviously you don't own the rights to the surroundings, but it's reasonable to expect you would have something to say about it if those surroundings were to get ruined somehow.
I remember the abundant “cell phones cause cancer” and “WiFi is like a microwave” scares 20 years ago, they all ended when people got their hands on nice and shiny touchscreen smartphones.
They're still present. I used to answer their phone calls when I worked for our government's radio spectrum regulator, and I would patiently explain to the caller freaking out about a new tower on the hill behind their town that a) the inverse square law is a thing and b) ionising vs. non-ionising radiation.
They generally chose not to believe me and stick with the "the government is going to give us all cancer because... ...money?" narrative, but I did change the occasional mind.
And yeah, all the people who freaked out about radio towers and electrical transmission lines are now freaking out about 5G. The best bit is how an article that stated "5G could interfere with weather radar" was converted by their hive-mind panic into "5G will change the weather!!!"
Kinda. It would be like if all you knew of cats were vicious lions, then one day a house cat came about and a journalist correctly called it a cat. Is your perspective wrong or baseless? Absolutely not, in this world most cats are lions and can rip your face off. Your perspective just hasn't expanded yet to include the docile cat, so of course you react in fear.
You aren't at fault, neither is the person telling you that both lions and house cats are both cats. Over time, these early misunderstandings iron themselves out, and everyone sees a lion for a lion and a domestic cat for a domestic cat. Ignore the early public recoil from any new concept, it's not worth fretting over.
Microwaves operate using standing waves (that's what does the cooking). Wi-Fi doesn't.
People who say "WiFi is like a microwave" aren't trying to educate other people about the EM spectrum. They're trying to fearmonger by saying "WiFi is cooking you like a microwave".
Or, as I suggested, they simply misunderstand. It's not a difficult analogy to respond to. Many people have microwaves, and they're safe, even though they even leak some of their radiation. We have standards for microwave emissions just like we have standards for wifi power limits.
We're not maximally rational actors. People follow the group, authority figures, the status quo, and fear what they don't understand. A Facebook post is read much more than a 30 page peer reviewed statistical study.
Yes. The physics of radiation and it’s medical impact is the single most studied subject in the history of such things, thanks to untold trillions sunk into research and development of nuclear weapons.
Ionizing radiation cause DNA damage and cancer, the damage level can be both computed and measured.
Non-ionizing radiation only causes temperature increase - lightbulb and microwave alike. The only difference is how deep the heat penetrates, and how many watts are pumped into the subject. The WiFi router is damaging in the same way as a very small lightbulb, and much less so than sitting in the sun.
One thing that a lot of people do not understand is that 5G can operate in any frequency band. In fact, for many 4G radios it is nothing more than a software upgrade, no change to the physical device or power levels, just faster and lower throughput.
The fact that the general public doesn't know this is a failure of the carriers and FCC. Instead of clearly stating what the differences are and maybe not putting everything in the 5G bucket they got greedy and thought they could get it all.
If the high frequency set was left out of 5Gs first round no one would have objected to the upgrade.
I find the "We need 5G so we can have real time translation and autonomous cars" one of the dumbest arguments that can be made and it's pandering to an uneducated public. Why do we need more speed and connectivity for those things when we have better and better ML processors on Teslas and Google moving some voice recognition algos directly to devices? It's a bullshit argument.
This title summarizes it - https://boingboing.net/2019/04/10/ai-8k-5g-ecosystem.html ; after falling back on their promise of building a TV factory in Wisconsin, Foxconn said the would be instead doing “AI 8k 5G” the online buzzword missing was blockchain.
one of the major reasons that so called mm-wave is far safer than previous low/ mid-band (i.e. < 6GHz) technologies is the following.mm-wave frequencies (e.g. 28Ghz) allow the use of array antennas (i.e. Phased Array Antennas, PAA's).
The reason this is so much safer is because the PAA's produce "pencil width beams" that is, the beams are very narrow. Rather than blasting away in all directions like the sub-6Ghz bands, the beam is focused on the PAA antenna. Why is this safer?
because, if something, like, let's say a human, comes in between the transmitter and the receiver, the signal will be completely lost. Hence, at this point the PAA controller will stop transmitting or scanning in that direction. So there is no radiation in that direction.
So, if you are worried about it, just turn off mm-wave capability (e.g. turn off 5G UWB). But honestly, you don't have to worry, the beam (and energy) is very focused, if anything comes in the way, even a wet piece of paper, or a person, it stops. This means that mm-wave is far safer than previous 4G in the mid to low bands. 5G in the mid to low bands are basically the same as 4G but have a much more efficient use of the spectrum.
So overall, 5G is faster, lower latency and safer than 4G or 3G or anything that came before.
Of course there is a lot of misinformation from various propaganda sources that want to confuse the public.
We cannot rely on devices always cutting communication when something goes in between. Do you trust all Chinese manufacturers to correctly implement such features? If 5g was a 5mW laser beam that would cut out on interference, would you trust it always working?
Mm waves may not be harmful to humans but there are some studies that show retinal damage in mice at certain frequencies. Until at least some studies on humans have been done we should not all jump into this like nothing can go wrong and it's guaranteed safe because communication is cut automatically on interference.
I suspect the clear presentation of facts on 5G would not have mattered. At all. In fact it could have had an opposite effect, merely by increasing visibility of the "topic".
I think he was referring to 4G having lower throughout.
Saying 4G->5G for most modems is just a software upgrade for most modems is not quite accurate. The RF hardware itself is generally not a full SDR. There are predefined RF paths tuned for the bands in 4G/5G. So it’s a little more than a software upgrade. Theoretically this is possible but I think companies like Qualcomm are too worried about pushing their new hardware instead of software. I do think it should move in this direction and it would benefit companies like Qualcomm to do this by selling software updates.
The most important information in this piece is the FCC making rules favoring the very telecoms they are supposed to be regulating. Not that anyone familiar with this administration (or that scumbag Pai) is surprised.
Yeah, specifically the sub-6GHz C-band that it is basically ripping out of the hands of traditional radio media companies (ie, npr, etc) that use it for satellite distribution of radio shows. There's been a lot of complaints from radio people about this but the telcos have more money so they'll get it.
I don't use a wheelchair at all, but I see value in having laws that mandate accessibility. Public policy needs to be set on the basis of societal goals, not individual impulses.
> 90 percent of Americans over age 12 listen to AM/FM radio at least once a week — down 2 percent since 2009. (This does not include public media, which Pew covered in a separate fact sheet.)
There's something to be said about the utility of old analog systems during emergency situations -- which is part of the responsibility of the FCC to account for.
Dead phones and offline towers are not unheard of in disaster situations.
It didn't say once a week, it said 90% atleast once a week. It could be that 89% listen for 4 hours every day. Likewise, 12 minutes for checking the phone was an average. It could be 1% of people staring at their phone every waking hour.
I doubt it's either of those things. We can't begin to make quantitative comparisons with those bare facts. I just thought we could make a very simple qualitative deduction--that terrestrial radio is far more popular than many people believe.
Reality is, it's also far more expensive to install 5g. It requires more fiber lines to run to more poles. Also, the telecom companies lobbied on state levels the max cities can charge for renting out putting stuff on poles. Plus trying to get cities to foot the bill. We are at the speed point of diminishing returns, 5g being said point. It's more money for not a real quality of life increase. I dont want my city to spend tax money on that.
It's more money for not a real quality of life increase. I dont want my city to spend tax money on that.
This is what it comes down to for me. We have housing crises, debt crises, infrastructure funding crises, and opiate crises all across the country. There are real and significant returns to investment on fixing those. Let's start there.
Agreed. Especially the opioid crisis. I think it's a "relatively easy" problem to solve. I'm totally for tax money to go to people who truly want to get cleaned up and put on the right path. I think that'll help a good chunk of people with a well funded program of the drugs that help kick the cravings and a work reentry system. Much better than having my municipality or county pay for 5g.
Since I don't download uncompressed 4k video anymore, I'm personally getting practically all of the value of the internet (to me) from merely having a cheap cable connection at home. I've never been certain who 5g or fiber is really targeting. Amazon works fine, Netflix works fine, downloading an OS or language tool set isn't too heinous. High data speed to a phone is uninteresting, but YMMV. As usual, improvements become less useful on the margin.
The one use case I've run into might be robot cars, probably lower latency/higher bandwidth. I don't know enough about where the intelligence actually lives or how much in the way of inter-car communications is actually required though.
Faster upload speeds enable new applications -- easier high res streaming, self-hosted storage (stream from home to your phone regardless of whether what you want is on a commercial streaming platform), just plain less waiting when creating and uploading creative work
Faster upload speeds is something that I wish was more prevalent. Most ISPs that I have experience of prioritise download speeds over upload, but for my use case there is a point where increased download speed doesn't give me any measurable benefit, but being able to upload at a decent rate would be a huge benefit.
Can someone with know how tell me if 5G is actually good tech? I feel like carriers just wanted to launch a new product called 5G, and just threw together some not that great tech behind it.
Is 5G actually innovative? Are we talking order of magnitude improvements over 4G?
Cause right now all I hear is that 5G achieves faster speeds and added throughput by simply putting more towers and access points around. That doesn't sound like innovative engineering. At that point, just wire fiber everywhere and create a giant Wifi mesh network with an access point at every house. Like that would give faster internet, but not very innovative.
Normally a good innovative tech would cost less, take up less resources, and achieve higher speeds and throughput. I'm not sure 5G is that from what I heard.
EDIT: Even if you downvote, I am asking a question that I'm interested in hearing answers for, so please still try and answer my questions. Thank you.
>Is 5G actually innovative? Are we talking order of magnitude improvements over 4G?
5G theoretically is similar to when cable modems moved from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3. Docsis 2 ran over a single channel (a single frequency range) and if that channel filled up it could switch to another channel. Docsis 3.0 allowed modems to bond to multiple channels at once, significantly reducing the ability for the line to fill up, and giving people much greater speeds. This is when average speeds in the cable modem internet world went from 12mbps to 100mbps.
In a similar vain, 5G can span the entire frequency range (up to 96ghz I believe), so the closer someone is to a pole the higher their frequency range can span, reducing bandwidth on lower frequencies and providing higher speeds. Those who are far from the pole might be running 5g at the 4g frequency range, but because that will be only a few people far enough away, the bandwidth should be faster and more responsive, even on the 4g range.
People on this thread are saying things like, "The more people that adopt 5g the slower it will go." but as counter intuitive as it is, the more people who are on 5g the faster everyone's speeds will be.
All cell companies have to do is upgrade their existing 4G towers to 5G and over time everyone gets better internet, even if no more poles are laid out. Though, without more poles, the improvements could be mild.
It's my impression that the vanguard of the anti-vaxxer movement have long since moved on to 5G as their battleground of choice. And to be fair, of all the places they could try to incite another mindless panic, this is probably the most harmless they could have chosen - at least this time around no children will die from it.
It's a shame that so much activism is spent on nonsense and even outright destructive nonsense. All that energy could be going toward improving things that matter.
Of course I think maybe what we are seeing is the activist arm of what I've heard called "conspiritainment." It's a way for people to LARP as activists at no real inconvenience to themselves. They get to feel self righteous at no real cost.
It also feels a bit like the domestic version of what I've heard Africans call "white savior tourism" where people from the West go to Africa to fill their Instagram with how they are saving the world.
Picking a real issue usually means confronting and speaking truth to power. That often has real life consequences. Attacking windmills (even literally! that is a thing too!) does not.
Edit: I once heard an investigative journalist and PI make this joke: "How can you tell if a conspiracy theorist is right?" "Check for their name in a missing persons database."
I dunno,
Anti vaxxers are definitely going against power. (Not to mean they are correct)
I think call conflating 'white saviour tourism's with this phenomena is missing the point.
We live in an age where basic trust in authority has eroded. The erosion is perfectly rational. We've seen large corporations manipulate the media in crazy Orwellian language.
We've become accustomed to PR stooges going on media outlets and blurbing new speak and falsey truths .
This in tune with weaponizing of almost all form of discours, meaning we are almost always at a debate where our goal is to annihilate the other person ability to convince, rather than find common grounds. Have left us totally detached from truth. Not in a sense of total objective truth, but in the sense of common ground for discourse even though we don't agree on everything.
Anti vaxxers , anti 5g, flat earthers, regardless of the validity of their claim, are a symptom of this.
1. We can't blame them for not trusting authority, when authority is found lying again and again.
2. They formed a social construct where common ground , i.e. truth, finally exists.
I believe this is an epistemological crisis. Not just virtue signaling, or a weird form of entertainment
> It's a shame that so much activism is spent on nonsense and even outright destructive nonsense. All that energy could be going toward improving things that matter.
I did not vote on it, but this is obvious pablem. An analysis of "why" is an interesting question, but aiming for platitudes repeated throughout every age in every society, is the epitome of discussion "noise".
Some of the fear of 5G is driven by Russia. RT has run several segments about it. Here are some:
5G Wireless: A Dangerous 'Experiment on Humanity' [1]
Could 5G put more kids at risk for cancer? [2]
How To Survive Dangers of 5G [3]
Cancer risk? 5G wireless speeds could be dangerous [4]
‘Totally insane’: Telecomm Industry ignores 5G dangers [5]
According to the New York Times, citing a declassified U.S. intelligence report from early 2017, RT videos on YouTube average 1 million viewers per day, and that is the highest among news outlets. They also say that lots of blogs and websites are picking up RTs claims and repeating them, without mentioning where they came from.
Here's a Times story on this: "Your 5G Phone Won’t Hurt You. But Russia Wants You to Think Otherwise" [6]
I’m reminded of the way the galactic empire in the foundation series descended into deliberate ignorance, with people actively turning their backs on technology, even while relying on it.
Anyone up for starting the church of 5G and sending out priests to install cell towers?
Nucleics gave the people so much more than what 5G gives to us. I would imagine that it would be very difficult to impress anyone with the advantages it brings, versus being able to levitate and emit light.
Well, I do RF for a living, and have designed some mmWave transceivers. Time to grow a long beard and through on a robe. I just need a chair that levitates.
I can't see any way Russia benefits from the 5G hysteria directly. So I wonder if they use this as a way to screen for impressionable people in the West that they can then later use for spreading more 'useful' misinformation?
Russia benefits from all its disinformation projects directly each time the US is distracted or wastes time discussing Russia's talking points. That is one direct negative ongoing consequence from the 5G scare propaganda.
Really? You can't see how Russia benefits from sowing disinformation and confusion about a possible next-gen technology? One that has the possibility of adding hundreds of billions of dollars and high skilled jobs to the US workforce?
I just finished the NYT article and it claims the move is because Russia doesn't have a 5G play, so they try to undermine everyone else's. I guess that might hold some credence.
Even if they did have a play, they'd be smart to sow disinformation and slow down or stop adoption of next-gen technologies, as those represent huge economic boons and advantages to the countries that adopt them first.
Similar to 4G, the first to 5G will create companies and startups taking advantage of the new infrastructure. As countries onboard onto 5G, these well placed companies will out compete any native companies. This is what happened with 4G in the US, and why US tech has dominated the space in the past decade.
Russia's goal is to weaken the West in any way it can.
This is what happens if a large number of people bear externalities and few get the benefits. Unsurprisingly, people block the changes. Countries that don’t slant the benefits directly towards the big providers don’t suffer from these problems. You can screw people over with regulatory capture, but it’s hard to hide that you did it.
My next door neighborhood is filled with the stupid 5G debates. The ignorance of some of my neighbors is breathtaking. And I live in a highly educated neighborhood. Go figure. At least the mayor and the council is on board for 5G rollout due to the current poor reception of 4G among some providers.
With the current equipment and spectrum assigned it does have that problem.
MKBHD goes over this is a video. It is awesome if you stand right underneath a 5g site, 1-2 gbps. If you head down the road a hundred feet/30 meters the signal drops to much closer to 4g speeds.
I’m ambivalent. Cellphone internet is already faster than cable internet for many people. Even if the 5g health risk is complete bunk, do we really need 5g?
Usually when I want internet that fast I want it at home or work. As such, I am a bit more excited for Wifi 6.
Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices, and bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc.
There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places.
You can imagine stadia running on mobile on the extreme. Everything cloud streamed.
Faster internet means when it matters you wont have to wait downloading a large binary, even though you dont need to be utilizing it 100% of the billing cycle.
A mobile surgery center can be operated by a world renowned md, at the comfort of yheir home
>Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices.
If these new things rely on 5g, how well will they work as soon as they move out of range of 5g internet?
>Bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc.
>There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places.
But wait. Doesn't 5g have more limited range than previous wireless generations? It seems existing LTE towers would be a better solution if you just wanted to cover the earth in high speed internet.
>If these new things rely on 5g, how well will they work as soon as they move out of range of 5g internet?
That's... true for all network-based technologies. Electricity is great, but if you don't have a grid connection, battery or means of generating it... you can't use it.
>But wait. Doesn't 5g have more limited range than previous wireless generations? It seems existing LTE towers would be a better solution if you just wanted to cover the earth in high speed internet.
5g includes a high-frequency version which is extremely high-throughput but short range and murdered by walls. There is a lower-throughput version at a much lower frequency which has solid range comparable with low-frequency 4g.
There are definitely a lot of ideas and research behind them that are just waiting for more accessible low-latency internet connections. Robotic surgery was an interesting one for me, as the latency was a tremendous bottleneck for remote applications.
Yes! From the days of 14400kbps(my first dialup connection), to 56kbps, to 128k, 1mb and now 1gb, each one of them found more use few years after they are introduced.
Same here. I see all this marketing hype about 5G but I just don't know what I would do with it. Maybe I could some day get gigabit internet on my smartphone then... but what for? Streaming 8K video on the go? I fail to see any use case, at least for me.
Well, that it certainly isn't going to do unless wireless providers suddenly decide to stop capping data so tightly. I don't think wireless providers are cheaper today if you include things like that in the calculation.
Not to mention many people already use AT&T and Verizon for their home internet...
People with things like nest cameras routinely go over 1tb data cap on comcast fiber. These people started moving to att. Over time, i do expect competition to work its way, on data cap matters at least.
Take a look into 5g, eg Verizon, - it’s aimed to be last mile competition, and have the same caps. Comcast is capped at 200gb, I imagine 5g would be similar.
It seems the cap is not a universal constant - my cap with Comcast is actually 1024GB. I honestly thought 1024GB was enough that I'd never actually get very close to it, but wow, I don't have a single month under 200GB. In fact, most months are above 500GB for me.
Of course not everyone uses 500GB a month. But still, I think the data cap story has to change if 5G is really to compete with other last mile options.
Also, Today, wireless providers segment the crap out of their market, upcharging for basically anything, including "tethering." With Comcast, for all of their many faults, I can at least use my own modem, connect my NAS and have it accept connections from the open Internet, and of course connect a boatload of computers and network devices with no problems. Wireless providers, to gain parity, would have to suddenly cede control and offer plans that essentially offer no restrictions with dedicated IP addresses. It isn't clear to me that this will be priced any differently from existing last-mile providers. It's not like good wireless plans are cheap today in the U.S. as it is.
5G may in fact improve wireless speeds, but the hype has been that it will be game-changing and industry-shifting and I just don't see it. I'm sure the market will get segmented up such that many people will basically pay the same amount or possibly even more than they did for effectively the same outcome.
Verizon 5g home is uncapped, 300mps, and $50-$70/mo.
That’s already better than Comcast for me - faster and cheaper. Soon as they come to my town I’m switching.
But the main point is that competition will drive down prices even more.
I don’t think you appreciate what 5g is - it’s not just an improvement over 4g in speed (LTE is already fast enough), it’s a dramatic improvement in the throughput per square mile. The caps in place today are preventing small number of people from hogging the bandwidth in the area, which is no longer a problem.
OK. That does at least improve my outlook on 5G. I actually was just skeptical wireless providers would do better even if they could, but this looks interesting. Some thoughts:
>"A state-of-the-art router"
This is not going to be a sticking point for most people, but I hope they don't try very hard to lock you into some horrible modem-router combo. I don't even trust a Comcast modem, but here we are, with probably no standard 5G home modems... I know I can always just hook another router/AP on top, but it's obviously going to add complexity, especially depending on how head-ass the router portion of the device is, and personally as someone moving towards 10 GbE at home... it just feels like it would be unnecessarily complicated.
>300mps, and $50-$70/mo.
I think it's going to depend a lot on where you live. It would be $70/mo for me because I don't use Verizon phone plans. This does in fact beat my current Comcast plan: 250 Mbps at $96.95/mo. But despite how much I don't really like Comcast, I have to say: my uptime has been impressive, and the reliability of the performance has been good. I would not want to trade this for worse ping/jitter/reliability at a lower cost.
>But the main point is that competition will drive down prices even more.
This would be nice. It would be beneficial to people who don't even care about 5G.
The thing is, I think that it will only practically benefit people in regions where 5G exists. I remember hearing a lot about how fiber would drive down cable prices too, and it may have, but despite promises I pretty much know nobody who actually has fiber home internet.
Since 5G is wireless, perhaps it will have better odds than fiber. Still, it has a lot of challenges to go through. Even 4G is still not available consistently everywhere.
I'm less skeptical now, but I think I'll just wait and see. I'm still more or less ambivalent about the rollouts hitting roadblocks for now, until it's obvious that it really will be transformative. I'm sure mega corporations like Verizon that stand to gain a lot from this don't need our support to push this to market if its actually that big of a deal.
I'll admit I've quite understood this ambivalence about WAN links, and particularly not on tech sites. Consider: would you find no different on your LAN going back to 10Base-T, or being restricted exclusively to 802.11a-1999 for all networking (no wired at all) in a spectrum crowded environment, and thus with double-digit latency at all times? Or is gigabit or even higher actually useful in a variety of ways? How about for your persistent local memory speed, is SSD or even modern HDD of no benefit vs something on PATA or IDE or whatever from the 90s? I don't think I'm going out on a limb in saying that yes, having more bandwidth available has and continues to be quite valuable.
So then take that and remember that there is zero fundamental difference between LAN and WAN except latency based on distance and even that isn't that restrictive on Earth, particularly within a country. It's about 93 miles per millisecond RTT under ideal vacuum/air/photonic-bandgap fiber, or 70% of that in standard optical fiber, so 1/90 of a second say could easily be enough for a round trip to anything within a good 300-500 miles. And at a minimum, any application done on a LAN right now could apply directly. For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections. A lot of things that many people currently centralize could be decentralized again if it was ubiquitous that the population just WireGuard into their LAN from anywhere within a hundreds of miles or more and have an experience essentially the same as being on the LAN itself.
I mean yeah, we can imagine all sorts of future AR/VR applications or enhanced privacy via onion routing and the like (essentially being able to burn some spare bandwidth on it for the same experience as present) and the like too. But is it even necessary to imagine that far? We use LANs right now, and that for most people there is a dramatic split in their LAN/WAN experience isn't down to physics (most people aren't going more then 500-1000 miles away with great regularity).
> For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections.
A repeated dream. In reality thin clients suck even on a LAN. Remoting from a Windows PC to a Mac Mini sitting right next to it had unacceptable latency.
Which is rather confusing given that modern machines can encode video at over 60fps....
Same OS to same OS is better, but not great. Every few years someone comes along and tries to deploy thin clients, and it never takes off en masse, good enough for a few limited scenarios though.
>A repeated dream. In reality thin clients suck even on a LAN. Remoting from a Windows PC to a Mac Mini sitting right next to it had unacceptable latency.
It's the tech you're using. It's most likely streaming jpeg images.
Try, for example, Steam Sharing, but share something like notepad. You can minimize it and it will work as remote desktop. You'll find yourself on another computer with virtually no latency, as if it is native.
At 5pm after work I get around 0kbps because everyone is leaving work and uploading selfies, starting music, playing a video or whatever. 5G would vastly improved the congestion problem so I could at least message I’ll be late as I’m stopping for milk, or I’ll be late as I’ve been in a wreck and am about to be airlifted.
5G has nothing to do with the problem you’ve described — a symptom of insufficient tower backhaul. It’s typical for 4G LTE operators to deploy a minuscule 100Mbit fiber connection per tower. We should be investing in 1Gbit backhaul of LTE.A, but that’s not a sexy message for consumer TV ads.
The farce of 5G is that it’s a pure marketing ploy. It’s not driven by technical need.
Are you sure 5G is the only answer, or could your telco invest in more 4G infrastructure? (which they are probably reluctant to do with 5G around the corner)
If 5g is reasonable to run on existing spectrum (I think this is generally true, but I don't know if mobile devices are configured for it), and it allows for more concurrent use (this is the promise, yes?), and if there are sufficient deployed devices to make it useful, refarming the spectrum to 5g would be useful for improving user experience in the situation described. Most carriers already went through this with 3g and LTE.
You could invest in more 4g infrastructure in theory, that usually means adding more towers to shrink the cell size in congested areas; it's often the case that tower density is limited by municipal agencies rather than carrier budgets.
One of the most important points that is missed about 5g is what 4G did for us. It's pretty clear that the widespread adoption of faster mobile technologies has enabled technology companies like Facebook, Google, Youtube, Netflix etc to thrive. Investment in infrastructure has unforseen benefits that only seem obvious in hindsight.
What will 5G bring us? Who knows. But if the past is any indication, it will benefit American companies if we invest in it. If not, all of that growth will go to China instead.
My city is looking at a total 5G ban. A city charter re-write is going to be needed to topple the current municipal administration. Moving to non-partisan elections would probably help since some of the current city council incumbents either didn’t graduate high school or only graduated high school over 50 years ago. Party structures protected those incumbents with this literally disconnected population.
This feels a lot like the battle of Blue-ray vs HD-dvd back in the early 2000s. While Blue-ray did win, it was less relevant to the industry than the original CD format. Things just moved online, flash storage and everyone got high-speed internet. If public WiFi becomes more ubiquitous, especially in densely populated areas, 4G vs 5G will be just as irrelevant as the battles for next CD format.
Handover on public WiFi is generally horrible, the tech is simply not designed for that kind of use. I spend half of the day with WiFi turned off on my iPhone because it catches weak nearby signals even when they're simply not strong enough to work. iOS has "WiFi assist" which is supposed to be smart about that and fall back to a cell connection, but that simply never works in my experience.
The whole "aesthetics" thing against new technology always struck me as bizzare and selective given all of the far uglier things already in place that they actively like.
It seems to be the Oscar Wilde practically satirical "Anything which is of practical use is ugly and anything which isn't is beautiful".
I don’t disagree with your sentiment but the 5G modem pictured on a pole in Atlanta looked like a mess with lots of exposed wires. I’ve never seen anything like that outside of a messy set up in a home office.
I’m fairly certain that the carriers could fit the antennas and wiring into a more clean looking packages to put on poles.
Isn't this also a facet of our "war" with the rest of the world to be at the forefront of technology? There are those that think ceding being the first in things like AI would be so detrimental to the US economy that we'd never recover.
I have this feeling that 5G is more about cheaply deploying faster Internet (ie. comment about these things going up next to people’s bedrooms) versus a more expensive fiber deployment to the premises.
Having driven around Dallas and seen a few of these things in residential areas, I can say that yes they are ugly. Unlike a regular cell site, it doesn’t appear that there is any kind of permitting process around these deployments as they just pop up suddenly.
I’m all for progress, but there are ways to make utility infrastructure less noticeable to the urban landscape. Unfortunately with the approach I’m seeing with 5G deployments, the telecom companies will take the cheap way out.
Imagine you are the leader of a country with a large military budget, strong central control over domestic media and policy, but little influence over global technical standards or device manufacturing.
Game theoretically, it would seem that a tempting strategy would be to spend money on influencing the debate in other countries to make them mistrustful of new technology, to slow their economy and relative growth. If the influence campaign isn't completely successful, then you get the additional benefit of having the populace divided amongst itself, and not trusting its own institutions, which further weakens their ability to work together and project power internationally.
Surprisingly, this strategy also works against old technology too. Imagine if you wanted to cause health crises in other countries by convincing enough of the population to be afraid of vaccines that herd immunity is lost. I know this sounds like its own conspiracy theory, but it would explain a lot about some of the weird fringe views that seem to be popular on the internet right now.
I know you're getting downvoted for this controversial insinuation ... but I must admit my mind went there while I was reading these comments. The amount of FUD in this comment section, especially at the top, is almost suspicious.
I get it that 5G doesn't exactly match the hype, that the cost of rollout is high, alternatives like improving 4G coverage and back-haul from towers are available, there are hints of problems with saturating the air in such high-powered/high-spectrum radiation etc. But how a group of supposedly tech savvy, future thinking, entrepreneurial types seem single-mindedly focused on the negative aspects of a technology seems to not match the normal crowd on hacker news.
5G isn't revolutionary but it is the exact kind of incremental improvement I expect to see in tech. It has some benefits (higher speeds, lower latency) and some drawbacks (proximity to towers, interference from large objects, cost to rollout). The discussion here seems to be entirely limited to maximizing the drawbacks and to limiting the benefits.
In my experience with tech, increasing speed and decreasing latency has always netted noticeable benefits. From CPUs, GPUs, memory access and network access - even small improvements in speed/latency have enabled major improvements in features. In addition, rolling out 5G is going to force the rollout of infrastructure enabling 5G, e.g. the fibre lines needed to supply all of those new base stations. For those reasons I am excited about 5G.
The first sentence of my second paragraph is literally: "I get it that 5G doesn't exactly match the hype, that the cost of rollout is high, ..."
And the "5G overhyped, too expensive, not worth it" meme is what I am talking about as being suspicious. It's curious, the last time I commented on this very issue the responses were all that same meme. One can say "I hear the meme but have an alternative opinion" and the response is always "yes, but meme". When several voices are parroting a meme and somehow that saturates almost all of the top comments ... I get suspicious.
I mean, I haven't been paid off by anyone but that's exactly how I feel about it too. HN has a lot of memes -- you probably just agree with most of them and don't notice.
Fake news and unfounded beliefs are as old as humanity. Blood-letting, female hysteria, witch hunting, even the Y2K problem. People still read and believe the Bible, thousands of years later.
I have heard suggestions, that the drive for 5g is to increases the density of wifi signals, since the technology developed for airport scanners can passively image people in areas of high wifi-signal density.
Regarding the health impact of cellular transmission, has anyone noticed that even the google search results for this are a total trash heap? I have a friend that turns off bluetooth transmission for all his devices every night, uses only a wired headphone for his phone, and even unplugs his wifi router every night. He's someone that doesn't know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. I was tempted to make fun of him for all of this, but after searching on google and seeing what came up, I can't really blame him.
It's just faster internet. They may have something with "aesthetics" but that smells of NIMBYism which is driven by rich locals when 75% of the populace has no problem with it. There are no health risks either, that is just the imagination of people who follow Alex Jones or who believe in crystal energy. The FCC needs to bully them.
I've been reading by through comments and I see only one mention of hazard to physical and/or mental health. That one mention is "EM bullshit". Could I kindly ask for anyone to point me to a site/s that make you believe there is no potential harm to humans from 5G? Thank you in advance :)
I find the argument that 5G is at all unsafe on a pole to be a bit silly. I think there are a couple of much more serious issues:
1. Is a millimeter-wave transmitter in a phone safe? The power output is moderately high, and these wavelengths are absorbed near the surface of your skin or your cornea. Cellphones are held near faces all the time. So I’d be much more concerned about using a 5G phone than about living near a 5G tower.
2. The 5G wavelengths May interfere with weather radar. I think that good weather forecasts are generally more important than cat videos.
No one is even putting millimeter-wave transmitters in phones right now.
But the more obvious point is that millimeter-wave 5G can only work with beamforming, and a beam that is going through your head where it is fully, entirely, fucking completely absorbed not a millimeter in, well, that's not going to yield a lot of throughput.
Um... Yes they are. The Galaxy S10 5G has a mmW radio in it that’s transmits mmW waves for the uplink.
The 5G spec also requires certain protection when the UE (phone) Tx wave might go through tissue. But you’re correct that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to attempt to Tx/Rx on a beam pointed at your head since it will lead to drastically lower SNR
> these wavelengths are absorbed near the surface of your skin or your cornea
And they'd cause a... slight heating effect. That's about it. So yeah, if you held your voice transmitting phone directly to your face for several decades, you might create enough tissue damage to up the cancer risk.
But then the radio engineers I used to work with climbed radio towers with microwave emitters putting out far far far more energy than a cellphone, and their only rule was "don't stick your head or crotch in front of a microwave transmitter as you're climbing up".
5G represents the end of the oligopoly maintained by Comcast and Verizon. There is a lot on stake for these giant companies, and the fight will be ugly. Chinese companies have a clear advantage in developing this technology because they have a huge country with new networks developing, free from the constraints of an established oligopoly.
I can only assume it's a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)