The rational exuberance of 5G
bell-labs.com
bell-labs.com
Note how it is just about impossible to get any usage statistics other than 'per person' from the various providers.
See also: 'roaming charges' and 'air time'.
For the same reasons that it took government intervention in Europe to get rid of roaming charges.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel#Long-term_unsustainabil...
And of course, in America there would never be such a thing as carrier collusion, that's totally unthinkable, so what those carriers in Europe were up to would not at all be done on other continents.
Let's turn this around: if the market is so thin why are they still pursuing it?
Wouldn't it be irrational to pursue a market in which no profits can be made?
Especially while pushing forward with enormous marketing budgets and tech upgrades?
Maybe we should set up some kind of donation spot for those poor carriers that supply us with all this technology out of the goodness of their hearts.
I'm assuming their accountants aren't any better than AT&T's and Verizon's, which show substantial profits from wireless.
> Let's turn this around: if the market is so thin why are they still pursuing it?
To get a bigger piece of a large market and hopefully profit in the future, just like 90% of the companies we talk about here on HN. But that's precisely why they have no incentive to collude to maintain the status quo.
This is a common strategy in a growth market, such as mobile. And of course they have every incentive to collude because it would increase substantially those profits that they can then re-invest.
In other words, there is no downside to such collusion, and lack of profits in the present does not count as evidence given that in other markets such collusion has already been widely documented.
In the case of TMUS and S, and any other publicly traded company the imperative is to maximize shareholder value. Sprint especially is on the ropes. Investors worry a lot about a bankruptcy in the next couple of years. It has every incentive to change the status quo, and is cutting rates across the board to bring in subscribers.
It's not irrational if T-Mobile and Sprint believe they can eventually turn a profit, and probably compress the margins of T and VZ due to greater competition.
Sprint hasn't invested in its network in part due to cost-cutting. All of the carriers have to market. They are retail consumer facing.
I am not saying we should feel sorry for them, merely that the likelihood of collusion from Sprint especially is very low.
See, there is no downside to collusion for parties, only upside.
And it even 'maximizes shareholder value'.
Sprint cutting their rates is a bit like pissing in your pants, as the Finnish say, it will only keep you warm for so long.
In the meantime, all carriers not being created equal, there may be some re-shuffling of name-tags and call signs but as long as carriers can get away with charging for thin air (SMS, Air Time) they've always done so, I see absolutely no reason to assume goodwill on their part without some pretty strict oversight.
And of course they have to market, just like everybody else that wishes to sell a product. But just like everybody else that wishes to sell a product, if there is no margin there will be no marketing, and if there is a way to improve the margin then surely it will taken.
Maybe Sprint is the exception, and they are really doing as bad as you say (a bankruptcy in the next couple of years does not sound like a huge threat to me, usually a bankruptcy in the next 3 months is the kind of thing you'd worry about) then maybe Sprint will go under and its assets and subscribers will end up with one of the other parties.
Such is the nature of doing business. But that says absolutely nothing about whether or not there is a profit to be made for all players by placing caps on data plans and by colluding to keep prices for data plans artificially high.
The downside is that collusion preserves market share status quo. For those hoping to gain market share (like Sprint and T-Mobile) collusion gets in the way of that goal.
It is perfectly possible to compete for market share while at the same time colluding on the price of a part of your offering. All the parties competing will come out ahead in that scheme at the expense of the consumers.
You can compete on the kind of handsets you offer, your marketing message and the various demographic selectors. You can compete on coverage of the market, availability of the service, quality and so on.
Your argument to the contrary is based on piling speculation on top of speculation. Not only are we to assume--without evidence--that the carriers are colluding, we must also ignore what we know about T-Mobile's and Sprint's incentives to break the collusion and grab market share because they are, in fact, making tons of money but hiding it through clever accounting.
It's not that collusion isn't a possibility in cellular markets in the abstract. It's that it's highly unlikely in a market where one of the alleged colluders is bleeding money and customers and faces bankruptcy.
In other words: you are establishing that the competition must be efficient in spite of the fact that the prices for data transfer in your neck of the woods happen to be the same as they are in areas where carriers have already been established to collude.
Now I'm really happy that that is the standard that you'd apply to find say a defendant guilty in some court of law, but this is not a court of law and circumstantial evidence is fine by me in the case of multinationals that refuse to open their books to the point where one could establish whether or not their margins are artificially inflated or arrived at in ways that are not kosher.
But, since you seem to be very much of the opinion that carriers are entities that deserve a lot of sympathy for their present day miserable situation (rather than that they offer vast amounts of money for spectrum and then overcharge consumers in order to make this money back) I hope you will decide to strike out for the underdog here and to offer your carrier an even larger premium than they are already extracting from you for the data that you use.
I find it interesting that you begin the whole discussion on a note of 'everybody will charge what they will' with Apple as the example (of clear graft) and end on the present one, the cognitive dissonance is so strong that I really wonder how carriers have managed to pull the wool so thoroughly over your eyes that you can't see what's going on. You have to commend them for managing this, it's a long time since the break-up of Bell in the US and all the ugliness that has come to light in countries all over the world but to see it so successfully papered over that they could essentially get away with it in broad daylight is interesting to me.
If there is one aspect of technology that is rotten to the core when it comes to extracting money for nothing from the populace it is telcos and the industry requires very careful monitoring and the occasional government intervention to stop them from their worst excesses. Any and all appearance to the contrary may safely be interpreted as successful marketing.
Note that since it requires a license to operate the market is far from efficient in the present and that in quite a few countries with so-called free markets when it comes to telecom the various governments still have a large chunk (if not an outright absolute majority) of stock in their former monopolist telcos. And that this is one reason why governments do not feel all that motivated to do something about this problem.
I don't think these types of businesses will ever be inherently extremely profitable, but Verizon was making a nice chunk of change from ~2009-2014 until T-Mobile basically defected from the dominate market pricing contract scheme.
In any case, the fact that we have the internet as the perfect roaming network that all mobile carriers actively exploit yet absurd roaming charges persist is proof of market failure. There need be no more explanation.
https://levels.io/korea-4g/. He used 4 TB of 4G data for $48. Yup. In high density South Korea.
Or maybe you'll want 200 GB plan in low density Sweden? 699 SEK/month (~$82), rather expensive as Nordic countries go, but at least no one can say I'm cherry picking. http://www.tele2.se/handla/mobilt-bredband-4g/.
Please don't buy the propaganda spread by the carriers. It's just full of excuses.
In their material you'll hear about how difficult it is to provide service for some unusual special case, like a stadium somewhere during a huge event and that's why. Stop asking, just buy our overpriced plan.
Cellular deployment has almost no economies of scale. Deploying a new cell tower costs the same whether you already have 10 towers or 100. Meanwhile, just a handful of users can saturate a tower and/or its backhaul, so more customers requires smaller cells and more towers.
Put another way, to have good coverage and 1 customer would be ridiculously expensive. There are always going to be areas with few customers. You add towers in areas with lot's of customers.
It's totally unlike the costs of any service with real economics of scale, such as software.
As density increases infrastructure can more closely map to usage.
Net effect if 50 million people take X towers then 100 million people take less than 2x towers.
If you were trying to run a network, wouldn't you instead have things like differential pricing based on traffic priority or payment plans which allow you to pay more for a greater share of the available capacity? That would directly align the users’ interests with the network operators’ and would provide a strong incentive for things like backup software to make sure they send traffic with a low QoS level and back off when the network indicates congestion. Most people aren't going to care if their phone waits until they leave the stadium to upload their photos but that'd make a huge different for the network operator having to handle 50,000 people in a small area.
Without a strong regulatory hand, the carriers' incentive in the US to to provide the highest return for the spectrum they've acquired. That extracting the highest revenue for the smallest capital investment -- means fewer towers optimized for coverage vs speed. Performance optimization requires more smaller facilities, which is capital intensive and appears wasteful from a Verizon/AT&T POV.
enjoy your libertarian ideologies and try not to get shot
1. It won't really reduce costs. Why? Because 3-5ghz 5G offer similar spectrum efficiency to current methods while on the other hand mmWave(20+ghz), which do offer tons of spectrum, don't penetrate building, and attenuate rapidly in air, so you'll need more base stations.
2. Users have shown they aren't willing to pay more wireless. And for most things consumers do like VR and 360 video etc, wifi is fine and cheaper.
3.There are other good methods for the internet of things, and 5G is too late for that anyway.
So that leaves the realistic use cases as cars(but isn't it too early? ). and maybe VR(although we're very far from appealing VR services which users will pay $60+/month for, and we probably need for wifi confined AR to be a thing first ).
And on top of that the question remains - could we improve 4G enough, without needing to deploy all new hardware?
I agree, and would rather see ubiquitous and cheap 4G before anyone talks about 5G. I think 4G already has the potential to eliminate the vast majority of wired to the home cable Internet service given its rates, the only downside is the extreme spectrum crunch and the lack of viable open bands to use to provide Internet to everyone.
In the UK this is simply not the case. I have unlimited 4g connection, and I had unlimited 3g before that. In fact, the 3g was my _only_ internet for a long time via tethering. It was good enough to play TF2, and could easily download 20gig games overnight via steam etc.
I assume somewhere there is a fair use policy - but if i've never hit it I reckon it's doing a pretty good job of only hitting abusive use.
5g isn't going to solve the problem of US pricing being shit.
Three do "all-you-can-eat" 4G data + 200 minutes = £23/month (50% off first 6 months)
When I was in the UK for a few months in 2014 the deals were worse than the US and the data caps were lower (LTE on EE).
EE also actually went down twice while I was there in London which I've never had Verizon ever do.
(Select "Unlimited data" from the filters on the left-side)
Is this a technical limit of 4G, an infrastructure limitation of not having enough backhaul to the base station, or a business limitation of just wanting to make more money?
These plans aren't as amazing as people think, especially since they still limit tethering (and maybe maybe throttle data).
However, I think your conclusion is correct. If 4G was fine, the market value of cell tower time would be a lot lower.
In the states sure, but the US are not the only country in the world ;)
Even subway trains and stations had uniformly excellent service. A defining experience: exactly once did I note poor reception on my phone. Zero bars, 4G in a subway station. I was figuring I was SOL for a time. Nope! There wasn't even any additional load latency that I could tell -- web browsing was snappy as ever. I've lost track of the times in the US where I'm at one or two bars, LTE and I've just given up waiting for the bits.
This brought about a dawning realization that even the best covered areas in the US are practically rural backwaters compared to Japan's infrastructure, using the same wireless technology generation.
Thus I won't point any fingers at the technology. Instead I'll reserve that judgement for the US carriers. :-/
I have two of the latter and it boosted my happiness working from coffee places. I bought a good portable 4G router with 12 hours of battery and that worked out so well for me that I actually cancelled my wired home internet.
EDIT: you can get unlimited WiMax boxes (capped at 3 GB/3 days), but that doesn't work in a lot of areas (Tokyo subways...). Some MVNOs seem to offer unlimited data but it's speed capped from the outset.
Please don't confuse profit-oriented carriers with what 4G is capable of. Or states which through legislation create high network construction and operating costs. For example by having laws enabling unreasonable profiteering for cell tower site real estate. Or by collecting high fees for radio spectrum. Or by failing to shut down spectrum squatters.
And states where carriers "co-operate" with government (= provide hooks to their network trunks) and are practically untouchable even though they practice rather obvious collusion.
In other words, please keep technology and societal issues separate.
5G or any other technology with a high barrier of entry is not going to change any of that.
4G works just fine where those societal issues don't exist. In states which have real competition between carriers and a low barrier of entry. Regardless of population density.
If those issues didn't exist in the U.S., truly unlimited data-only 4G would be about $15-$30 per month -- in a small Alaskan town or in the heart of New York and anything in between.
I get fantastic 4G speeds on my iPhone, for quite a while it was faster than my home connection. But I could never use it that way due to the carrier pricing structure.
Why do you think they're able to keep that pricing structure?
Monopolies, oligopolies, not enough regulation, and very high switching costs mean phone companies can charge crazy rates with near impunity.
Demand is also off the charts. Approximately nobody does VR. Growth is still in bread and butter things like mobile video. In the U.S. in just the last two years, cellular penetration grew from 105% to 115% (more cellular subscriptions than people) and monthly data usage tripled.
That could suggest more people are have access to a cellphone, or more companies are buying work phones for their employees.
Don't tell Verizon or AT&T, both likely candidates for replacing their terrestrial services with 5G in the US as a way to compete nationally against Comcast.
There's a reason Verizon has been selling off chunks of their system to Frontier.
After all, why put wires in the ground if you can just attach a 5G modem to the side of a person's house?
Will they also offer unlimited data plan for this? :-(
Edited with the cynic filter:
After all, why pay unionized workers to provide all you can eat service through wires in the ground if you can sell metered service by just attaching a 5G modem to the side of a person's house?
But once we add strong directionality, how big the difference is between licensed and unlicensed anyway?
2. Consumers won't be paying more for wireless. You'll still be paying your $200 for an iPhone + $100/mo for internet with a 24 month lock-in. Those ~2k you pay over the course of your contract is what funds these upgrades. The functionality will be bundled with your iPhone $n+1 when the phone-renewal-cycle comes up. You'll have a 4G transceiver + pre-existing wifi tranceiver re-appropriated as Verizon-branded wifi as they negotiate their bluray content to transfer through their femtocells.
3. Internet of Things via mesh might be okay for torrents where latency doesn't matter, but no way for comms.
re: your 4g question (I'm assuming you're referring to LTE-A) - No. 4g is limited by spectrally very heavily re: the amount of content you can fit into each hz. Where Verizon is running into problems (NYC, SF, after sports events when everyones taking drunken selfies, etc) they're at saturation. In large cities, I'd imagine Verizon can't just do the ol' "drop more base stations in" because they'll just be spilling tones into their own, over-saturated chunk they bought from the FCC for a few billion. (In the case of 4G LTE-A, these operate at half-duplex within a 6 mhz band for tx and another 6 mhz band for rx, placed up or down 40mhz).
3. IoT has other non-mesh protocols like Lora which will work well.
1. Since spectrum efficiency is similar to 4G, to offer more bandwidth,you'll need to use mmWaves. But those don't penetrate buildings, and won't be everywhere and people like their cellular communications to be everywhere.
Also I read that base stations will be much more expensive, and it makes sense - the technology is harder to build.
Also with mmWaves there will be a lot of unlicensed spectrum and the way you buy spectrum will may be different - so and that could create a lot of business models that threaten carriers.
2. I didn't get the part about Verizon branded with, could you please explain?
``3'' : "Work well" for what? I was specifically addressing comms, as that's where the problem currently exists. There are too many concurrent protocols/specs for me to keep up with LoRA (I'm only familiar with the 3GPP standards i.e. the NarrowBand IOT analog to LoRA, for obvious reasons), but I did some reading[1]. It has some awesome features like low-power consumption that allows long range, but again, you're not going to be streaming Youtube videos via that protocol. Their site officially says[2] their solution "is a network ideal for Internet of Things (IoT), metering, security, asset tracking, and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications." So while a great solution for, say, plopping down a few thousand soil hydrometers, it's not going to help with the over-saturation of the 4G networks.
``1'': Spectrum efficiency varies as a function of carrier wave length[3 for a brief overview] There's an information theory limit as to how much data you can effectively transport (throughput, not latency) limited by the Shannon-Hartley limit. (Or maybe the Nyquist something-something...forgive my ignorance on the topic, I really should have went to grad school or at least taken more physics classes.) To offer more bandwidth you can do plenty of things without resorting to mmWave, i.e. picking up rights to a carrier wave when Auction 73 occurred, or use OFDM amongst the ISM bands
Which brings me to (``2''- at least, as I understand it). What providers are trying to do is use the standard UWB/OFDM that already has well established, cheap commodity hardware behind it (think: a Cisco Aironet equivalent). The poster at the start of the thread said >> 2. Users have shown they aren't willing to pay more wireless. And for most things consumers do like VR and 360 video etc, wifi is fine and cheaper. I was simply saying that any new technology will be bundled into the next revision of phones. It's not going to cost the consumer any more than usual, because (at least in the US) the 24-month sign+subsidized phone practice is commonplace enough that the next-gen technologies will be bundled in at the same rate.
I'm right there with you on mmWave - if you're looking to replace 4G with that, well, probably not viable at the moment as people still tune transmission lines using machined components (expensive, can't really use powdered metal bulk solutions when you need .1 thou tolerances..) that are designed filter cavities like this[4] in one offs (even more expensive without economies of scale) by generally those with graduate degrees. I haven't heard any ballpark quotes for 5G pricing from the usual suppliers.. who's quoting what, and from where?
[1] https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/lp-wan/current/pdfbVG4...
[2] http://www.semtech.com/wireless-rf/lora.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_capacity
[4] http://www.rfsworld.com/stayconnected/userfiles/stayconnecte...
1. Auction 73 is just 100MHZ, not big enough to matter. Also how much bandwidth could you get from "OFDM amongst the ISM bands" , after discounting bands that are reserved due to politics,or for future use by government/military etc ? why aren't they being auctioned ?
2. Why would carriers bundle an expensive technology that doesn't promise them more money long term(after everybody deploys it, which will happen if someone does) ? they have simple ways to signal each other to do nothing. Also assuming this tech offers similar spectral efficiency, if all it buy is more bandwidth, by deploying more cells, just deploy more 4G cells - and save yourself money/risk/etc.
Can't find the quote for the 5G price, but i think it was in the context of mmWave, just some discussion, nothing formal. But why would 5G(non mmWave) be cheaper ? companies have to justify r&d, more newer patents, start from lower volumes, complexity will probably grow, etc.
Also a side question: is there a way to build around mmWave unlicensed bands to create noise floor similar to using it as a licensed band ? maybe with phase array antennas(assuming no other interfere but the network) ? or maybe a different legal regime that gives neighborhoods control of their spectrum ? because if so, and if we can solve the mmWave tech(big if), it would look like the future of wireless.
Sure they are if the service is good and it makes sense. 4G is the most popular broadband connection at home in Austria at that point I think.
In 1996, AT&T spun off Bell Laboratories, along with most of its equipment manufacturing business, into a new company named Lucent Technologies.
In April 2006, Bell Laboratories' parent company, Lucent Technologies, signed a merger agreement with Alcatel.
On April 15, 2015, Nokia agreed to acquire Alcatel-Lucent, the Bell Labs' parent company, in a share exchange worth $16.6 billion.
"the cloud infrastructure cannot be more than 100km from the end device consuming the application, due to the finite speed of light, which can only traverse ~100km (round trip) in the 1 ms that is available for the networking portion ..."
Since light would traverse ~299km in 1ms, would the max distance of the cloud architecture be ~149.9km - assuming we do not take into account any additional processing and response times?
Edit: The author was using the speed of light in current-day fibre-optics as an estimation (~213km in 1ms, a reduction of about 30% from vacuum). Relevant - http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v7/n4/full/nphoton.201...
Here are two sources, both of which have prop. velocities @ around .6c depending on the dialectric. Again ideal. I haven't architected any long-run infrastructure, but 1/3rd sounds pretty right to me.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0986/4308/files/Cable-Dela... http://www.faculty.ece.vt.edu/swe/lwa/memo/lwa0136.pdf RG58 is your traditional coax copper you'd run with copper and SMA connectors on an above-average scope.
Does light travel through copper?
I can't agree more! Awesome analysis.
So we are not really seeing the full potential of 4G at this point.
Releases 13 and 14 standardized 5G[2] earlier this year. Here's the set of documents that I'm pretty sure shouldn't be public (you typically have to be a member to get access). Bad sysadmins, disable DirectoryIndexes ! The R13 and R14 zips have quite a bit of descriptive content. Here's the marketing mumbojumbo stuff, for completeness[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_(telecommunication)
[2] http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Information/WORK_PLAN/Description_Re...
[3] http://www.4gamericas.org/files/3714/4224/8256/Executive_Sum...
Having witnessed the roll-out of 2G, 3G and 4G over the last 15 years in the UK, with each one being as disappointing, over-promised and patchy as the one before it, I'm hoping to be surprised. But I'm not holding my breath.
I have a phone that has been downgraded to 3G only because my provider's 4G is actually slower.
You can be pretty close in to large cities in scotland and struggle for 2G coverage let alone anything faster..
Akamai's State of the Internet, released yesterday, puts the UK in the lead for mobile data speeds with an average speed of 28Mb/s, followed by Belgium, with 19Mb/s.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/29/12056760/uk-fastest-mobile...
https://www.akamai.com/us/en/our-thinking/state-of-the-inter... (Downloading requires an email, but it wasn't verified.)
"speeds can be altered by mobile networks' use of proxies, meaning that the speeds recorded will be between those proxies and Akamai's servers, rather than between the servers and the actual mobile devices themselves."
For users end mile usually matters the most and this table doesn't count for that, so it doesn't reflect the actual user experience. Sounds more like PR stuff than an actual test.
Exactly. Well implemented 4G provides easily 150 Mbps+ actual sustained speeds. It's amazing what some true competition between carriers can do...
Which provider are you using? I've been on Orange then EE throughout the rollout
[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/elon-musk-admits-satellite-...
SpaceX can do this far cheaper than others because they can launch the satellites for "free" as part of launches that are happening anyway.
Surely you mean 35000 km?
You can VPN home and use remote desktop at near local performance.
You don't need to plan your data usage. Worry whether you have the files with you.
At least that's what it means for me.
However ergonomics is a different matter... Touch screen is pretty bad for desktop usage.
Android devices let you connect a USB or a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. You get even a mouse pointer last I tried. Although not using it like that in everyday life. It's more convenient to just use a small laptop.
With iOS Apple's Bluetooth keyboard works. Other input devices didn't work, or at least I couldn't figure out how.
I have fiber at home. About 50/50 Mbps goodput and 15 ms latency to home VPN using 4G. Remote desktop is pretty fluid. While I can notice the extra latency, it's not a problem in any way. For example Bluetooth mouse latency is worse.
Even full screen WebGL/CSS3/whatever web apps and full screen web video work well.
Some tips: Don't use any TCP based tunneling or VPN solution, like ssh or OpenVPN over TCP. They're bad for interactive use.
Measure, mobile devices have different 4G performance profiles, and that includes latency. You can have up to about 5 ms latency difference between a new flagship model and some low end 4G phone.
Desktop applications other than the browser tend to be less demanding.
Although games are not my thing, playing PS4 games remotely works also very nicely on a Macbook over 4G. Just need to have a PS4 controller and a USB cable. It just works. Very near to local performance. There's some kind of NAT traversal, so you don't necessarily even need to use VPN.
5ms shaved down to 1ms (one-way) with decent fiber could take my ping to Google DNS from 23ms to 15ms, that's going from Boise, ID through Seattle, WA all the way down to CA where the Google DNS server I am hitting is located - a rather considerable savings.
Problem was when former finance minister Hans Eichel decided to reduce the German state debts in 2000... he did so by auctioning off the UMTS frequencies, for in total 50.000.000.000 €. That's 625€ per German citizen that first have to be paid off before the network provider makes a profit on that user. Also, the provider has to pay interest on the debts (ECB interbank rate at the time was 4.5%), and the infrastructure had to be built, maintained and upgraded (electricity costs, networking termination fees, personnel, construction workers, materials, ...); this in turn moves the "profitability point" per customer waaay behind.
In essence, Eichel screwed over us Germans by selling us "reduced state debt" when all we got was a debt-shift from the state to private entities, and we still suffer to this day from the highest data prices in Europe.
Bell labs are you for real?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn
I have noticed that some websites are actively obfuscating the content on their page to prevent it being loaded by content-viewers (like the website or the app).
I've had to email him to fix an issue in the app and he pushed a change to the Play store fairly quickly.