The Promise of 5G | Hacker News Reader

The Promise of 5G

techcrunch.com

45 pointstwsted46 comments

I skimmed through the article and saw hyperbolic statements like, "Now with the leap to 5G networks, we can start to completely reshape entire industries, and rethink how we run our cities and manage critical national infrastructures." I thought to myself, "Ugh, who is writing this crap?" then scrolled up and saw it was "Hossein Moiin is executive vice president and CTO of Nokia Networks."

I never thought I would long for the good old days when Mike Arrington would just write about companies he invested in instead of cutting out the middle man and letting companies write their own articles.

Same with the prosthetics story. Increased bandwidth over mobile networks could enable them to print more arms? This is only solvable with 5G?

He should have run the post through http://www.hemingwayapp.com. "adverb. Remove it."

Edit: It gets a 13.

"17 of 59 sentences are hard to read."

"27 of 59 sentences are very hard to read."

What a load of nonsense. The idea that faster and faster wired and wireless broadband open up huge new opportunities just doesn't make any sense to me. 4G just gives me webpages a bit faster, it's not even especially noticeable most of the time. I can already stream 720p video to my phone which is more or less indistinguishable from 1080p at that size. What other massive fast downloads do you need on a mobile device while data caps are still in the low gigabytes?

You are ignoring the fact that it's not just mobile devices that take advantage of fast mobile data connections. Being able to bring a LTE hotspot on long out-of-home stays is pretty nice, and while you may not want to do big downloads on your phone or watch 1080p videos on a screen with less vertical resolution than that, you may want to do so on your laptop.

If for you 4G is only slightly faster than 3G, then blame your service provider, because it's not supposed to. Where I live (Portugal) I get 2-7 Mbit/s speeds with 3G and 10-40 Mbit/s speeds with 4G. But most importantly, I was getting 100 ms pings with 3G while 4G pings are more like 20 ms. Or perhaps your service provider is limiting LTE usage to phones and forbidding tethering, which is silly too.

LTE is, right now, the only way to even get proper Internet connections on rural areas, where the alternative is DSL with speeds below 1 Mbit/s, and sometimes not even that. I believe it's also much cheaper for the network operators to cover those areas with wireless Internet than by laying copper, let alone fiber.

The main issue, that can't be stressed enough, is indeed the data caps. As things are now, higher speeds only lead to hitting the limits in less time. Worse, some sites now seem to detect faster connections and deliver more/heavier content over these (cough YouTube in auto quality mode cough), completely ignoring that a faster connection may still have caps. But I have no doubt there are uses for having fiber-like experiences over wireless broadband, especially if the latency is reduced (IMO more important than increasing the speed).

Re: the rural angle, and considering I'm near Alentejo and only getting 384Kbps right now, allow me to explain that 3/4G at 2.1GHz won't cut it for wide-area coverage, and that it isn't cost effective to upgrade most transmission lines in rural areas to the point where you can have multiple simultaneous users with high bitrates.

That said, my current situation is not representative - I'm in a known poor spot (it's tricky to get a decent signal due to lack of line-of-sight to a base station, and the nearest is 5 klicks away as the crow flies) and if I go uphill and bask in the sun with my iPad things improve markedly :)

Also, LTE at lower frequencies will fix most of these issues - we already have some of the best mobile broadband connectivity on the planet here in Portugal, and it's only going to get better.

I'm not saying it has no uses, just that it's not going to bring some sort of revolution, especially with such low data caps. If the current networks aren't rolled out more widely then giving hot spots of very very high speed isn't going to lead to new services as there's not wide enough coverage.

I use my mobe for tethering on holiday and it's great but the only problems I have in that case are bad 3G coverage.

Yes of course the bump from 10mbit (which I get with HSDPA, top speeds on HSDPA here in Barcelona are over 15mbit) to something like 40 is useful if you're using it for your desktop/laptop but that's not really what this article is about.

The general assumption that higher and higher data rates will enable new uses just doesn't hold true to me. In the last few years my home connection has gone from 30mbit VDSL to 300mbit fiber and honestly it's only really noticeable in a few edge cases like downloading games on Steam. I see no radical new use cases taking any sort of advantages of these sorts of speeds, just as I haven't for 4g mobile networks.

This reminds me of the famous quote: "Everything that can be Invented has already been Invented".

But I agree with you that if you have a 10 GB monthly limit, higher bandwidth wont change much.

Perhaps the issue is actually with your provider? In practice, HSPA+ (3G) usually allows for 20Mbps in my experience, which fits right inside your 10-40Mbps LTE window. Going from 20Mbps to even 40Mbps really isn't going to be noticeable in many circumstances. In theory, HSPA+ actually allows for download speeds greater than LTE allows, although less so on the upload side.

It could allow devices to download content just in case it is needed. This could be great for business which often rely on large attachments and downloads. Why should I have to use some cloud viewer when my phone has plenty of bandwidth and storage?

Agreed. What do I need 5G for? I never think 'I wish I could use my phone more'. I use it too much as it is. All the IoT stuff in the article is a load of cobblers, we're more than capable of doing stuff like monitoring pipes without linking every device to a 5G network, you just have a lower power radio network linked to a router connected to the wired Internet. Why on earth would you want to flood the mobile networks with IoT traffic, do we really want to compete for the bandwidth with IoT devices? As you say, data caps are an issue too.

You have less contention on the bandwidth bottleneck between the cell phone tower and you device (and all other devices on the cell tower)

Why do you want to go from 802.11g to n? But then you upgrade your incoming connection, add more devices, then you see the difference

I think that once speeds like this become available, it will drive significant developer creativity. We'll very quickly figure out new and interesting ways of utilising all that extra bandwidth, and very quickly end up at a point where we're again pushing the limits of the available technology.

Virtual Reality environments perhaps?

Compare playing Second Life to playing World of Warcraft. Second Life loads all data from the server, WoW has most of the world preinstalled on the client.

Higher speeds mean we can offload high-speed processing to remote computers (cloud etc...) and give you the same services for smaller devices with longer battery lives or improved experiences with the same devices.

This is critical for wearables like AR glasses and the like to become commonplace.

For example we build 3D point clouds in real-time on devices and then process them on the cloud to stitch them together to then reload on the device. With super fast internet we could move our mapping to the cloud and could reduce our hardware requirements to basically a camera, battery and an LTE chip.

What I'm about to say is not about that article, but just a general point.

This is that the printing press "only" made it quicker and cheaper to make books, and the internet "only" made it quicker and easier to move information around... So improvements that can be characterised as only incremental can still be important.

(I'm not trying to weigh in on the case of this 5G stuff however)

Due to line contention / crosstalk, my 4G connection is now faster than my continuously degrading home VDSL2 connection (BT's "super fast broadband" fibre-to-the-cabinet offering).

However, it still doesn't mean a huge amount because data caps here in the UK seem pretty restrictive. It costs a small fortune to get a data package that might start to give you a landline-replacement service: A 20GB package is probably going to be £40 a month or more.

Wow, I had no idea there were caps that low!

Virgin's 152Mb cable is costing me around £40/mo and there are no limits on the downstream. I understand they limit upload speeds using some kind of rolling threshold though, but it's still unlimited.

As bad as that is, that's £25 less and 5GB more than what I've seen available in the US. I've been wanting to switch to wireless internet, but it just doesn't seem practical.

Did you have a look at virginmobile's 10GBP/month for "unlimited" data ? Three is around 17GBP/month I believe.

I regularly find my 4G is faster than friends' fixed broadband. It's often not worth connecting to the WiFi.

The one problem is contention. Mobile networks may give you full signal but they'll have under-provisioned the back-haul and won't connect you. Very annoying when this happens.

I used to have unlimited data on 3G but couldn't find a 4G package which offers this. I'm sure it isn't a technical limitation as it's available in the far east.

Somehow I made it through the whole article. I'd love to hear why the author thinks increasing bandwidth by 10x will cause such massive changes. Does 5g tech improve concurrency/crowded towers, range, latency? Will radios be simple and cheap enough for IoT? This report is so devoid of content I wonder if there is some marketing agenda behind it.

More than the speed of 5G, I'm hoping for its capacity. If it offers 40x the capacity of 4G (within the same amount of spectrum), it could become a good contender to replace home broadband (and add a lot of competition). T-Mobile already offers 7GB for $50 and 40x that would be 280GB, plenty for most home users. Fixed broadband prices could be significantly cheaper than mobile broadband and installed antennas could offer better reliability and and speed than mobile devices.

It could create a much nicer and more competitive market for home broadband. With AT&T owning DirecTV and Dish owning a bunch of spectrum, there are two companies that could want to do installed, fixed home broadband in the 5G era to support a triple-play of wireless, tv, and home-broadband. Sprint is sitting on over 200MHz of spectrum in most areas with a lot of it being high frequency BRS and EBS spectrum (2.5GHz). Installed, fixed, directional antennas would work a lot nicer with that spectrum than mobile devices and it would offer up a new revenue stream for a company that has lost $50B since 2006.

If 5G really has a big boost in capacity, it could make a big impact against home-broadband monopolies. Wired might still offer a better experience for enthusiasts, but given that a lot of people I know want to save $20 a month and drop from 110Mbps to 25Mbps, the competition could have broad appeal for a lot of people.

> T-Mobile already offers 7GB for $50

Does that include tethering? I've noticed a lot of carriers offer a... well, not a large amount of data, but some amount that's on the better side of terrible, but if you tether, the limit is much lower.

Includes tethering, for me at least. I use the $30/month prepaid which has a similar data plan structure. As far as I know, T-Mobile let's you do whatever you want with your phone and data.

> T-Mobile already offers 7GB for $50 and 40x that would be 280GB, plenty for most home users.

Um, lets say conservatively that an hour of 4k video is 8GB (1080p is ~4.7GB/hour on Netflix). 280GB gives you one hour of video/day in a month - which sounds a little low, considering you may have 3-4 people watching different streams. And that doesn't even include video chat, which surely should be something we expect for the next 10 years?

What? Faster internet? Again? How 4G helped? 0. We need power efficient network, not faster one. It would be faster than what you get through fiber. Does that make sense? Shouldn't we focus on making the networks cheap, power efficient and with most possible coverage? This article screams bulshit to me.

Faster transfers means less time and less total power draw from the radio.

I disagree. Faster transfers just means people will find more garbage to transfer. It's the same principle as with traffic - allowing more capacity often leads to no net decrease in traffic.

Why do you think it'll mean less total power draw? Didn't we see that devices consumed more energy when using 4G vs 3G? Why do you suspect 5G will be different?

http://developer.att.com/application-resource-optimizer/docs...

Thanks for the superb article, I'm basing my statements from testing in real world. I have some 3G/4G phones connected to large batteries, transfering 1MB to 100MB now and then, while they do run different kernels the 4G phones consistently draw less power.

YMMV!

4G lets a greater number of people use smart phones by increasing the amount of shared bandwidth available.

I don't need more power efficient, I need exactly faster cellular network internet. I very rarely have issues with phone battery and a lot of times I hate quality of cellular network.

5G? I'd be happy with reliable 3G coverage in the UK.

3G coverage? I'd be even happy with reliable EDGE coverage. Half of my daily commute has no coverage at all. Location: one of the most economically powerful regions in Europe/West of Stuttgart/Böblingen in southern Germany.

The network coverage (with all three major networks) along railroads in Germany is a fucking joke.

We need to hugely increase capacity. 4G Speed is fine, but it wasn't designed for these kind of intensive use we are doing today. We can do 20 - 30Mbps on most 4G network during normal use, when things go bad it stops loading. Dropping to mere 1 - 3 Mbps with high latency.

We need even lower latency, best case 4G is around 20 - 30ms. Most of the time it is 50+ to 90ms. That is much better then then 100s to 300ms in 3G. But 5G should bring even the worst case to 10ms max. Latency is important in Webpage / Apps loading speed.

And then hopefully 5G can do all these while using even less energy then 4G.

One thing I would like is more tower capacity for dense events like sporting events and music festivals. Even with a strong 4g connection I often can't even reliably get a text to go through while tailgating at a football game.

That's usually a result of poor backhaul capacity. A lot of tower sites likely still running on copper (or PtP wireless) instead of fiber, so the capacity just isn't there for locations that only have a lot of connected devices "sometimes"

Many sporting venues, universities, college/corporate campuses have on-site cells or wifi offloading already built. But there are lots of them that don't. In the past, it's because the carriers won't pay for the capacity themselves, but want the location to do so. Which doesn't make sense, because if you owned a venue, how would you pick between ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile & Sprint? You're definitely not going to pay all of them to put in cells.

Wifi offloading makes it somewhat easier for the location to build-out capacity, but it's still not cheap. 100s of thousands of dollars...

One thing nobody seems to mention is NAT. When can we have end-to-end connectivity with phones? More bandwidth is nice but if the connection is still crippled what good is it for?

IPv6 resolves that.

For IoT you don't need higher speeds, you need lower power requirements. I am much more interested in things like LoRa networking. It allows upgrading base stations to receive sensor data directly from the sensor, while the sensor can run years on battery power. It allows retroactive upgrades of buildings with sensors without having to put in new cabling or figure out where to put bluetooth networking gear.

The article at least mentions latency, which would provide measurable gains. I don't think the bandwidth of 4G is holding the network back in any way. Progress is nice of course, but better 3G coverage, affordable global roaming and higher data caps are more important.

5G hardware is still pretty bulky. It requires a motorised trolley. I'm sure that will be miniaturised though.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30224853

VR websites will need this.

Does 5G bring forward secrecy and strong end-to-end encryption for phone calls and texts? If not, why not? The likes of AT&T don't want to upset their spymasters?

the good thing is, that it's trivial to use alternative voice-apps over 4g. no one forces us to use the default one

with 5g it would be even more so

Reply on news.ycombinator.com