5G is an umbrella for different types and technologies, and I believe that’s the confusion part of what the artice mentioned and the reader views. 5G has three main categories (technically two but separating the 2nd one to further explain it), 5G NSA (non stand alone), where the 5G RAN uses an existing 4G LTE core, 5G SA (stand alone), as the name implies, is stand alone from previous generations and has its own architecture and core, new radio, etc., and the third one -which is still a SA by the way- is the mmwave, what the article is referring.
This article has a thorough explanation (1)
In most nowadays 5G implementation is the first one, where you get a slight enhanced LTE, as it’s easier to implement, SA, which provide extra features is still not widely used -although it’s changing, and then you have the least adopted one is the mmwave due to its new bands (unlike the sub-6GHz) that require new radio/towers/etc. on a higher frequencies (also higher noise), and also new UE (or user equipment/device), which so far only very limited devices support that. In Canada, we did some cell surveys utilizing robots/drones to map the areas at different altitudes to find the deadzones and coverage, and you can say in most of the results, NSA can have the coverage as the LTE, mmwave in some cases we had not just to maintain a clear line of sight to get any signal, but also we have to be relatively close. So mmwave adoption might still in its early stages, it’s also why so operators went with C-band instead.
5G mmWave is best used in dense - ie. not so often in North America - urban areas. I's going to work great in busy metro stations, shopping streets/malls, concerts. Not in suburbia.
I’m in NYC and use mmWave for my home internet and it’s genuinely game changing: ~1Gbps internet with no wires at all. Given the monopolies internet providers have in NYC it’s liberating.
But my nearest antenna is a block away with pretty good sight lines. If I move my radio even 6ft in the wrong direction my speeds go through the floor. I think the 5G hype was excessive for a technology that only works in very specific circumstances and it’s led to some disappointment.
If mmWave is also known as 5gUW, I have been very underwhelmed and I would prefer that I could turn it off in favor of traditional 5g.
The push for 5g in general has been a bit of a head scratcher for me. I don't think consumers have been clamoring for multi gigabit wireless en mass. If they're like me, they would prefer consistency and reliability.
Speed is less important when you can use WIFI at home and in many places, which is going to be faster and more reliable. I always suspected something else was pushing the massive investment and marketing of 5g. Maybe cost massive savings on new spectrum leases?
I don't know for sure, but when the I saw a commercial that said 5g would help doctors at a hospital diagnose illness faster (using networked equipment) I was like why the hell would hospitals even want to use 5g?
> Speed is less important when you can use WIFI at home and in many places
In my experience 5G provides that consistency: Wifi (outside of my reliable home connection) is often super flaky. With 5G on my phone I find myself connecting to (e.g.) coffee shop Wifi much less often and I tether my laptop to my phone rather than use it.
It depends on where you're at, but "WIFI at home" may indeed be much slower than 5G at some locations served by traditional DSL and cable modem technologies.
At my house I can get 250 mbps down/35 mbps up with some clever placement of the 5G unit. This blows any other ISP out of the water.
One street over I get 1000 mbps down/250 mbps up which I am a bit salty about. There is a terrain feature that makes it impossible for me to see that same tower from my house.
I keep 5G off on my phone because it in general doesn't work when I'm out and about. Conversely the 4G network seems to always have usable signal levels and may be less busy now that everyone's phone is using 5G by default.
In China it is about SA only now, maybe since 2022 if I remember it correctly, all cell phone that support SA can only be allowed to enter the market. and all base station shall support SA too.
I live in a large European city and am very often out and about and use my phone to navigate and consume content. I simply don't see the need for 5G.
4G was a major stepup in speed and given the rise of smartphones and platforms like YouTube, the speed increase made sense. There was an actual use for it. The speed increase for 5G seems to not really be needed though? At least for a majority of people 4G seems to do exactly what it needs to do.
(Outside Zürich) I see 5G as motivated by carriers, being able to pack more customers into the same cell. And I would never pay extra for it.
My carrier once called and wondered if the 5G is working, and how I experience it. I'm guessing that was a PR stunt, since otherwise I wouldn't have noticed the awesome things they do for me in the background... But I might be too negative on this point. Maybe they actually wanted to know if their technology was working, by calling me and asking...
AFAIK It’s your operator that decides the roaming charges, based on your contract (they may be different based on the country though). So you may want to check with them
Yes, it's definitely something that you (I) need to solve with the own carrier. I do still feel that there is something iffy about that, because Switzerland and Austria being direct neighbors it seems strange that they don't have at least a somewhat reasonable roaming agreement by default.
Similar if you are from Switzerland and cross any border. If you are in Switzerland semi-regularly, either get a plan that has cheap roaming in and out of EU, or two SIMs.
Swisscom, for quite some time now, includes roaming in EU countries and the UK with unlimited calling and SMS and 40GB highspeed Internet per month.
Ironically, calling a friend in Paris from Prague is free, while calling from Zurich is 70 cents a minute.
My sister, who lives in Vienna, is shocked about our subscription prices (ca 70 EUR a month, unlimited everything and EU roaming as described above) while I'm more surprised by costs she incurs while visiting.
To me the deal is fine. It may not be the cheapest but I never incur any additional costs.
Even globally you get 100MB free internet with your subscription per month and can buy additional packages for about 20EUR per GB, which I don't think is unreasonable.
Other carriers are more on a rip off spree. While SALT intices customers with cheap subscription offers they may hit you very badly with internet roaming costs. Until very recently they didn't even allow to set a limit.
I pay around 19EUR but get only 5GB data, and I'm fine with that. When in CH I buy an extra bundle, but even then the costs stay very far below a crazy 70EUR. Data is blocked when I haven't paid for roaming, so no risk there.
All European Telcos were like this before the EU banned them from doing it. Unfortunately, Switzerland decided not to follow this particular EU regulation.
I think this message should have been at the top of the 5G marketing, and would have helped the reception of the technology as bringing an altruistic angle.
Right now, as it was pushed as something we're supposed to want for ourseleves and allow us to do rocket surgery from our phones, people just got burned and either learned to kill it in the settings or bitch about it all day long.
I was watching a wireless home bridge review, and half of it was the reviewer looking into the settings and documentaton how to force 4G to get better speeds (spoiler: 4G was effectively faster). And that's a bog standard consumer targeted video with 700K views at launch.
> I think this message should have been at the top of the 5G marketing, and would have helped the reception of the technology as bringing an altruistic angle.
Meanwhile, 3 out of the 4 big networks in Poland market it as a premium feature, and only offer 5G to the customers on more expensive plans or for extra fees. (The network that gives 5G to everyone is Plus, and their plans are cheaper as well.)
At least here in Italy, we were hassled with those kind of "rocket surgery from your phone" :) ads, and told (whether right or wrong) that we had to change most of our TV's so that they could narrow the video transmission band to allow for more band for this marvellous 5G.
It has been (and it will be) a major cost for families, besides the complication, especially for the older people that have now to deal with either a crappy external decoder or a crappy smart TV (as "normal" TV are in practice unobtanium).
And all we got (where it works) is just a lot more people viewing videos on Tiktok.
They are, and so are 99% of articles ( even Tech Enthusiast focused ) on the internet.
One could understand, why they need to market the hype ( or bait ) to switch to 5G. On the other hand, most of the marketing point, like self driving vehicles, remote surgery operation, mmWave for everyone, or so called up to 20Gbps are by most's [1] people's standard "lying". They could have used other marketing points , but somehow marketing for tech has become something else.
If you talk to most if not all engineers working on 5G, whether that is the 3GPP spec, or actual network implementation in both software and hardware. They would all tell you the truth, 5G is simply a better 4G. And to be honest, as an Engineers, Tech Enthusiast, and also a consumer. That is good enough for what it is.
[1] May be not America because it seems you could get away with Tesla type of marketing and hype without immediate penalties.
They really are, but you can’t convince people to upgrade their handset on ‘our network is going to get shittier and shitter unless you move to a new technology’.
But it's not like they're dismantling the 4G infrastructure yet right? For a while at least I would have assumed people moving to 5G would steadily free up capacity on 4G bands.
Exactly, the same way 3G became unusable for internet anytime your phone reverted to it, even thought at as a protocol it is perfectly appropriate for things like loading basic websites. Throttled 3G makes 4G look amazing. Rinse and repeat for 5G.
It's crazy to me that some carriers still charge extra for 5G when this was the real goal. They're actively incentivizing me to stay on 4G and increase congestion.
Faster speeds might not seem necessary, however you have to remember you are sharing the bandwidth. The quicker you can get your data the less time you spend using bandwidth.
If I can halve the download time that allows another user to use the bandwidth sooner.
Am I charged less for that data transfer when it’s 5G? To me the important consideration is the cost of the data. 1Gbps seems pointless if the cost is still $10+/GB.
Agree. I have an Android tablet that is a few years old, and the bottleneck is already the device's processing power, not the network, when it comes to rendering fancy web pages, for instance. This is clearly visible on both 4G and wi-fi.
Of course, the counterargument is that higher speed enables a new generation of (web) applications. Perhaps that materializes one day, but at this point it mostly remains irrelevant for the consumer.
Where I live, mobile base stations are a popular form of home broadband since it's cheaper than fiber (the only other option for most homes). The 4G networks have long been inadequate as they are too overloaded and only with expanded 5G coverage have these solutions actually worked well.
Our providers offer that as well, but its significantly more expensive for the same speeds you'd get from cable/fiber/dsl. 500Mbits is 49 for wired, but 79 for having a 5G modem. And typically, if you have a 5G station close to you, you usually also have a fast wired internet option so baring edge cases, it doesnt make sense here.
I've just found that any time my phone says it's on 5G, it barely works at all.
I've actually gone in and set the preferred network to LTE and every now and then I try setting it back, and almost every time I set it back within the day.
Doing some speed tests back and forth, LTE tends to have significantly less latency, higher bandwidth, and just works while every single web page load on 5G feels like a gamble.
I think phones lying about their connection strength is a much broader problem. My phone isn't even 5G capable, but it will show me 4/5 bars or even 100% strength with full LTE when it is provably unable to transfer data. Carriers know that lying to people's faces makes them less likely to complain about poor service, just like how they lie to our faces about their service maps. There really needs to be some kind of legally codified standard for how phones report signal strength.
it's also misleading in another way: namely that your connection to the cell site tells you absolutely nothing about that cell sites ability to forward your connection onto the greater internet; and absolutely nothing about the number of cells connected to the same cell site (some of whom could be consuming considerable airtime).
Boiling it down to "connection strength to the cell site" is, literally, the same as using wifi strength bars to evaluate internet speeds at home: it doesn't even begin to tell the whole picture.
When I worked on femtocells many years ago it was Apple who did their own thing with the signal strength bars, it was a source of massive frustration. They were also the ones least receptive to reports of radio layer issues.
Though coming back to the original discussion a lot of issues with 5g are backhaul problems which aren't indicated by the signal bar.
FWIW I’ve experienced this a lot with an iPhone on Verizon. 5GUW literally won’t load a thing. If I put it into airplane mode then out again it’ll reconnect to 5GUW and work fine.
In India, 5G has been a godsend (Mumbai & Hyderabad). I'm sure it's because the number of people on 5G is drastically lower than the number of people on 4G/LTE. Let's see what the experience is like when everyone gradually starts using the 5G network, but for now the difference between 4G and 5G is massive.
Even in remote areas (various parts of western Maharashtra), whenever 5G is available, it's a noticeably better experience than 4G.
Rural coverage is the only problem I had with 4G, even living in the city, etc. These days, the land line phone company has abandoned our area, and the cell companies carpet bomb us for unlimited 5G home internet service that doesn’t exist near us (despite the fact that we get a 5G connection at home). So, it is starlink for us.
Count me as unimpressed with 5G. I wish they’d focus on better geographic coverage and more reliable coverage instead.
Anecdata: in Sydney, Australia, 5G on Telstra is incredibly fast (I get more than 1 gigabit at my apartment, but more typical / busier cells seem to be between 300-500Mb), and my experience using it mostly just for web browsing is it’s streets ahead of 4G.
I get 250 on 4G, so it seems like it's far from streets ahead. 4G can do 10x 4K streams at once, while 5G can do 15-20? A solution in search of a usecase. Not to mention 5G is significantly more unstable and patchy. Good luck with latency with a single wall between you and the tower.
Back when it was 4G western suppliers were under really strong competition from Chinese suppliers (ZTE and Huawei). Now these suppliers are banned/effectively banned in most Western countries. And we are left what seems to be just Ericsson and surprisingly things have gotten a lot more expensive, only slowly built-out, and not really that good.
Having said that, I just went through Copenhagen airport and the 5G network there is really good: Very low latency, very fast initial connect, and very fast download speeds.
So 5G can deliver the end-user experience it promised.
Is LTE and 5G performance degradation due to the wireless technology or is it somewhere upstream of that? Like what good is throwing more radio capacity at a stadium if it’s the backhaul, peering, or some other appliance in the middle that is getting overwhelmed?
I think it's a combination of all of the above. Plus, 5G is still new so there's still way fewer towers and less spectrum dedicated vs. LTE
One other thing is that 5G as it stands now is a bit of a hybrid, still relying on LTE networks and control planes to do management functions. Some networks are working on, and have partially built out, 5G-native control planes but it's not done, it's new, and that also means those functions are still working out the bugs
When Sprint first built out its digital cellphone network, their slogan was "you can hear a pin drop".
It was basically true, this was more clarity and intelligibility than the full-quality land line POTS.
After a year or two their airwaves got crowded and it became apparent they were compressing the audio enough to be noticeably way worse than the POTS was.
Cell carriers seem to have kept performance at that low level ever since.
Plus lots of times it seems like it's no longer full-duplex, after a pause more like voice-activated from either end before it starts transmitting to the other party.
If the audio of a phone call was pre-recorded on a good microphone it could sound awesome even over low bandwidth "voice" connections. Audio for voice calling is optimized almost entirely for latency. This means super short buffers and relatively simple encoding.
Streaming video/audio has a distinct advantage of not having the same latency sensitivity. It's not a two way conversation so if the stream is a second or two behind the wall clock as long as it's in sync you're never going to know unless you're watching a stream of an event you can see live, then you'll see the encode and transfer delay.
Besides latency, the microphone/audio input pipeline on a phone is in one of the shittiest recording environments it could be in. It's right next to the users mouth, sometimes far too close, so it needs automatic gain control to keep from being overdriven. It also needs to filter out the audio coming from the speaker lest it generates feedback. The microphone itself also needs to be very small and is attacked to the body of the phone so it's difficult to isolate from body sounds like the user's hand rubbing over the body.
The fact a cell phone can even transmit reasonable sounding voice is a minor miracle involving many thousands of engineer-hours. The extra processing power and bandwidth available today to handle wideband voice helps a little with quality but it's still very latency sensitive and still suffers vs less latency sensitive codecs or one-way streaming.
> It's crazy to me how much telephony still sucks.
I think about this every time I use make a voice call on a cellphone -- in terms of audio quality, it blows my mind how inferior it is to what we had on POTS lines in the 80s.
The almost hilarious situation in Austria is that people usually have (truly) unlimited or high volume contracts. You can pull terra-bytes if data a month, even with tethering. As a result the main way in which contracts differ are speeds.
The fastest 5G contract these days is 500Mbit. Most people are fine with paying for the much cheaper 100Mbit contracts.
So even if 5G has speed benefits, usually I wont notice.
I am thinking should I flag this. And thinking how low can ieee get? ieee publishing 20+ years ago were not great, but they wont bad. Right now this piece has no engineering insight into it, zero understanding of how MNOs across the planet earth work, no idea of 5G upgrade cycle both backend and front end, and zero mention of Pandemic / COVID delaying upgrading work. So what is the point of this article? Or are they now simply another marketing / PR company to downplay the 5G and hype 6G next?
Are we still at the stage people think Real 5G = mmWave? Which is what I believe 99.99999% of the internet comments were suggesting and at least 90% of HN believes in 2022.
I'm not going to argue with you, but it would be really helpful to me or us if you could be more informative and perhaps less insulting to the crowd. After all, most mobile tech is done in the dark and few are truly versed in all of it.
I for one didn't think 5g == mmWave, but I specifically chose TMobile because their initial 5g rollout plan made way more sense for me, as it wasn't mmWave, where others seemed to be focusing there.
To me this piece can be summed up as "5G isn't performing well, this can be due to many reasons".
Your comment seem to come up with more reasons it isn't doing as well as it could, while basically going into the same direction as the article. Why would you flag it for being basically right, even in a boring way ?
Why would you flag this? That’s not what flagging is for and is one of the asbolute worst features of HN. It amounts to censorship based on user preferences. It’s a real article from IEEE, just because you don’t like it or agree with it doesn’t mean you flag it.
> What does [flagged] mean?
>Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.
If you think that flagging amounts to censorship then I guess you don't believe that there are bad faith actors who exploit vulnerabilities in human cognition? I don't think this ieee article is nowhere near flagging territory but there are plenty genocide and fossil fuel shills around here.
I think that's what the flag button should be for, things encouraging harm to other people or out and out lies or going to malware sites, but the IEEE article is none of that, it's a well-reasoned article with sourced facts.
Sure, but is anyone (who has an actual choice) actually choosing to do this? From what I can tell, carriers seem to run a lot of really stupid ads and keep the marketing money faucet flowing for a long time before they finally give up.
Yes, many people are deciding to use mobile-only connections, suffer through the usual performance degradation when everyone decides to Netflix at once... and also actively "Who needs this?" complain against building out wired infrastructure which would fix this issues en masse.
5G is preliminary sensing infrastructure. Don't take my word for it, go read and watch all the IEEE and 5G/6G industry literature that spells this out in great detail.
"Integrated sensing and communication" is the search term to get you started.
I just figured I'd do some measurements of the different speeds.
Location: in the center of a modern well isolated family home, with HR++ glass. So not ideal for optimal reception, but I didn't care to get up from the kitchen table.
Tested with speedtest.net in the browser with Android Chrome. Network is T-Mobile NL.
5G: 69.52 Mbps down, 37 ms ping
4G: 56.79 Mbps down, 34 ms ping
3G: 4.01 Mbps down, 56 ms ping
I'm not sure if T-Mobile is still keeping their 3G network at optimal performance. All their competitors have phased out 3G. They'll probably follow soon (though only 2G phase out is announced).
Anyway, 4G → 5G is an improvement, but not orders of magnitude. That might be a bit much to expect though.
I also measured my wifi/fiber connection. Got to 162.86 Mbps and 17 ms ping. Still much better than the mobile networks. (And lower than I expected, so probably time to debug a bit.)
> I'm not sure if T-Mobile is still keeping their 3G network at optimal performance. All their competitors have phased out 3G. They'll probably follow soon (though only 2G phase out is announced).
Are you saying in the NL 2G networks will be closed before 3G networks?
In Germany 3G networks are already closed, in Finland closing has been announced. But 2G networks are promised to run still for years.
It looks like T-Mobile is the only one to phase out 2G before 3G. The other two networks (KPN, Vodafone) have already phased out 3G, but will keep 2G until 2025.
T-Mobile announced 2G phase out will finish in June this year, but hasn't announced 3G phase out yet.
I think 5G is more of an enterprise technology than consumer tech. For me latency and "campus networks" (or simply the ability to apply for a license to operate your own 5G network in a fixed location) are the two most interesting things about 5G. Those are clearly valuable if you think about a production line of connected devices in some fixed geographic location (factory etc.). Pure download speeds etc. don't matter that much to me, 4G was already plenty.
The rollout is a bit curious though. In Germany providers are incentivised to connect people no cover area (iirc they have to connect at least x% of the population). Sort of makes sense but also cuts off potentially very interesting use cases (for example rural areas where 5G could be used for agricultural machinery).
The real problem with 5G, in my opinion, was the usual problem with tech -- the hype. All of the exaggerated and unrealistic tales about the possibilities were heard as promises by most people, and those are promises that 5G cannot meet in the real world.
The reality is that 5G was hugely desired by the telecoms because it eases their problem with the amount of load the cell system has to carry. And deploying it is very expensive, so they wanted public money to help. Which means they wanted to get people excited about it, thus the hype machine was put into overdrive.
I'm about half a mile from a 5G tower and have been using a T-Mobile hotspot for about a month because the only telco that has run internet on my side of the street (in a town that literally has fiber 300 feet away) is AT&T, and then they only have DSL. This is in a Dallas suburb. AT&T? Nearly 90 bucks for 50Mbps down, 12 up. T-Mobile? 50 bucks 140 down, 50 up during peak times.
Cancel your T-Mobile and buy a Calyx (also using T-Mobile) and you'll be paying ~$45/mo (after hotspot device cost) and have no data cap or throttling (it's real, grandfathered contract from Clearwire)
This article is a disappointment, not 5G. Cellular speeds have been increasing at an increasing rate over the last few years. Things have been getting much better for consumers. The article cites the lack of mmWave as the reason 5G is getting "slower" but then kills its own argument by explaining how mmWave has almost zero range.
This article has a thorough explanation (1)
In most nowadays 5G implementation is the first one, where you get a slight enhanced LTE, as it’s easier to implement, SA, which provide extra features is still not widely used -although it’s changing, and then you have the least adopted one is the mmwave due to its new bands (unlike the sub-6GHz) that require new radio/towers/etc. on a higher frequencies (also higher noise), and also new UE (or user equipment/device), which so far only very limited devices support that. In Canada, we did some cell surveys utilizing robots/drones to map the areas at different altitudes to find the deadzones and coverage, and you can say in most of the results, NSA can have the coverage as the LTE, mmwave in some cases we had not just to maintain a clear line of sight to get any signal, but also we have to be relatively close. So mmwave adoption might still in its early stages, it’s also why so operators went with C-band instead.
(1) https://dgtlinfra.com/5g-standalone-sa/#:~:text=What%20is%20....