Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase | Hacker News Reader

Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase

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142 pointsvelmu91 comments

Without more details on the test setup, it's hard to evaluate it.

5G can be deployed with much more spectrum than 4G can be. Deployed with 60-80MHz of spectrum, US carriers have shown off LTE north of 700Mbps. The article said that they were using the 3.5GHz band, but they didn't say how much spectrum they were using which makes the comparison incredibly suspect. Do an image search for "T-Mobile gigabit" or "Sprint gigabit" and you'll see plenty of tests in areas where the companies have a lot of spectrum in a small area doing very high speed.

AT&T and Verizon are planning on launching 5G with hundreds of MHz of spectrum in millimeter wave bands. That spectrum won't travel far and will have difficulty going through walls, but will have lots of capacity given how much they have.

By contrast, LTE deployments are usually in the range of 10-80MHz. Given the low 50Mbps speed of their 4G test, it seems like they didn't use much spectrum at all for 4G. If they had a reasonable LTE setup with 80MHz of spectrum in 4xCA, 256QAM, and 4x4 MIMO, they should easily beat 500Mbps and probably get closer to 800Mbps. The low LTE speed makes me conclude that they're just looking to promote Elisa (the wireless operator that worked with the newspaper to do the test) and set it up to just make for a good article.

What I want is a comparison between LTE and 5G NR that uses the same amount of spectrum in the same band. 5G NR is likely to have new applications with millimeter wave and very high order MIMO, but that won't work at the lower frequencies that are used to create broad coverage. In the 500-2,000MHz range with the same amount of spectrum, how much faster is 5G NR?

Now, 5G NR is said to have some great benefits in terms of latency and power use for low-bandwidth devices on top of bandwidth increases, but people aren't showing off real comparisons yet.

Also, just to see how bad a test of LTE this was, average speeds at the super bowl were over 50Mbps for three carriers: http://bgr.com/2018/02/05/t-mobile-vs-verizon-fastest-networ.... I mean, T-Mobile was able to top 120Mbps in a real-world situation. They couldn't beat 50Mbps on an unloaded LTE network? That just sounds like they gave it very little spectrum. Heck, Ookla notes that average nationwide speeds are 31.58Mbps for T-Mobile, 23.83Mbps for Sprint, 24.39Mbps for AT&T, and 28.21Mbps for Verizon. That's an average that includes places with bad coverage and such. 50Mbps is a very low LTE performance number in a lab which just makes it feel suspect.

Now, it could be that 5G NR, like UMTS in its early days, has a lot more room for improvement. UMTS launched at 384kbps which wasn't extremely faster than EDGE and 1xRTT, but did have big latency benefits. A little later, it was pushed further and eventually got as high as 42Mbps (theoretical). Sometimes they kinda exaggerate the early tests because the technology is really better over the long run, but it will take some time to get there.

> What I want is a comparison between LTE and 5G NR that uses the same amount of spectrum in the same band.

But if they did an honest comparison like that, they couldn't claim ridiculous numbers like "14x bandwidth improvements".

I would really like details on latency. Bandwidth is all very well, but it's high latency that is so often the real limiting factor in browsing performance. I live in a rural area, and my wired connection is very slow (~ 12Mbps). 4G competes well for bandwidth, but the latency (and the fact that the latency is highly variable) makes 4G unsuitable for general purpose internet use.

If 5G could be made closer to WiFi for both mean latency and latency stability it would have a potentially huge impact on broadband access in remote regions (assuming it's easier to deploy 5G there than fiber - which I think is true for most regions).

In cities, I routinely get pings of about 40-50ms on LTE. I think it's well past the point of matching fixed broadband in that regard.

Interesting. Here (UK) fixed broadband is much better than that for latency. I ususually see 8-11ms on fixed broadband (DSL-based), yet my ping on 4G is generally more like 40-150ms, with lots of spikes.

Even rural broadband tends to average 30ms pings for idle connections. 4G, like you say, is massively variable.

Isn't the latency mainly determined by congestion / bandwidth saturation on either the radio network or operator's backbone?

IIRC the actual technological latency of a 4G link is just ~2 ms extra; the problem is that you have to share the link with many people, so if the network is overloaded you may get unstable latency. In this regard, anything that increases capacity would automatically help with latency as well.

Yes, but also retransmission that happens at the physical/link layer to mask lossy links from higher layer protocols, such as TCP.

T-Mobile austria did the same a few days ago. They achieved 3ms latency to a drone which they were remote controlling and 2Gbit.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/t-mo-austria/sets/721576693479...

https://newsroom.t-mobile.at/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/1802...

It is indeed an impressive feat, especially compared with racing drone pilots that usually fly with around 0.5 to 1 ms delay between our video transmitters and receivers on the 5.8Ghz band (the cameras however adds a delay of 20-30 ms, but that is unrelated in this comparison).

I'm not disputing 5G is faster, but was congestion taken into account for this test? 4G for me is noticeably slower than when I first got a 4G phone, primarily because the network has become more congested as it became the mainstream.

5G is less about just faster network anyways. The goal as far as I understand is to use something like gre bonding to achieve some support for transparent handoff between base station and home network. So in theory if you are in your own wifi the network should not need to talk to your phone.

How is this different from WiFi Calling?

Hopefully it improves over that technology... I regularly get dropped calls switching from wifi to LTE networks, especially if I spend any amount of time on the edge of my wifi network (like if I take the call inside the house and then walk to my garage).

Would this transparent handoff work for just calls, or for data as well? I'd love to see a solution to the wifi to 4g data handoff issues I run into.

Multipath TCP is a solution to this, Apple has it in iOS. But adoption is really low.

There are also some unsolved challenges with Multipath TCP, at least last time I studied it in 2014/2015.

For example, when multiple good links are available, Multipath TCP will tend to flip flap between them rather than stabilise on one or the other. You can also get massive reordering which will tend to throw off the congestion control algorithm, but I believe that issue has since been resolved. Good chance are there are some other issues that make MPTCP not quite suitable for widespread use right now.

It doesn't look like they considered substantial congestion for either 4G LTE or 5G, which should mean that while the specific bandwidth numbers may not hold up, the speed ratio should be comparable in production.

You can see that they evaluate LTE at 50Mbps, which is around what Verizon phones were getting when they first started going to market but before congestion and backhaul limitations were hit due to the number of LTE devices on the network.

Currently on LTE with AT&T, I can usually hit 10-20Mbps, so applying the 14x ratio, I'd expect to be able to get 100-300Mbps with 5G once congestion takes hold, which is quite sufficient.

I think the biggest difference is going to be raising monthly download caps. 4gig to ~50 gig is huge, but T-mobil has 50 gig caps now. So, I could see most people getting by with 500 gig / month for home internet connections.

Which is going to put a lot of pressure on ISP's to improve.

I'm genuinely hoping that it puts ISPs in a bad position to have no dominance in the market.

I've been under a "provider" who caps out at 10Mbps with, sadly, about 40% uptime with our neighborhood for about 5 years (constant outages. On a first name/you've got my phone number basis with the contracted technician, as is quite a few people in the neighborhood). I joined the board to get out of it. We're due to get out of it at the end of March, but Spectrum has zero interest of coming in and servicing people. CenturyLink said they'd be willing... but want a 5-7 year contract and everyone in the neighborhood is understandably against that idea.

So yes, bring on the time when mobile bandwidth is such that low caps aren't "needed" and the speed is high enough to get rid of ISPs as an option.

What's the difference between an ISP and a cell phone company?

Competition.

I can switch to any cell phone provider I wish at any given time. ISPs that isn't the case for the vast majority of the US.

I was originally with Verizon, but the pricing was a bit steep so I left (grandfathered unlimited data plan, but was paying pretty heavily for 2 said plans).

I switched to Sprint and that was working fine, their unlimited data plan was working and the prices were much cheaper. However, the previously mentioned fiasco with our ISP meant that tethering was now important to me as a fallback when needed and Sprint's plan didn't include tethering and it was a bit steep at the time (as a developer, I have to work on things at night sometimes from home and garbage internet won't suffice there. I empathize heavily with the people in the neighborhood who work from home constantly/online classes, I do).

So I switched to T-Mobile with the Simple Choice plan at the time with basically same features, but 14GB tethering per line and added two more lines for the kids at a reasonable rate. January I switched to the One plan and added International Plus (unlimited tethering) and I predominantly tether now and only connect to my actual router that leverages the garbage ISP when I need to use my internal network (and I check the internet at that point and it is still bad). Plus, tethering is typically 3x faster than said ISP. Needless to say, I absolutely love T-Mobile in our location, it isn't great everywhere though from what I hear, and it works fine for me as an outright replacement (I don't do Netflix or other streaming from computer, so my tethering isn't particularly damaging. Plus, not in an area of high congestion).

So there's a ton of difference here: I've been able to move around as needed to get what works best for me when it comes to the cell phone company side of the equation and I've been hamstrung with the ISP side of things. Plus, I don't even dislike Verizon and Sprint, they work well, but it just didn't work for my needs. With ISPs and the limited competition, they have little incentive from their peers to make me like/accept them, case in point the ISP we're stuck with until end of March.

And related to that, how many towers currently have the bandwidth capacity at their base to support this new throughput at scale? All this may do is shift the bottleneck from between handset & tower, to the tower's own infrastructure.

Mobile vendors won't mind because your phone will say "5G" in the status bar and they can charge more. But in reality your phone to web-site performance (particularly outside of artificial benchmarks) may not improve substantially.

> how many towers currently have the bandwidth capacity at their base to support this new throughput at scale? All this may do is shift the bottleneck

Expanding tower capacity is part of the 5G build-out. There's an upgrade spending binge going currently. The US wireless market has enough competition now, mostly thanks to T-Mobile, to force all of the carriers to properly upgrade. They're not wasting any time, all of them are aggressively pursuing it as a competitive advantage.

AT&T and Verizon have been losing customers to T-Mobile for years now. If they make the mistake of claiming 5G, when it's not, T-Mobile will just use it as an opportunity to hammer them. Competition, it works.

This also gives the large carriers in the US an opportunity to go after taking more broadband business from Comcast.

Most sites have fibre backhaul now. And then point to point wireless can do 10gig+ these days anyway to a tower that does have fibre backhaul.

Even with fibre, it wouldn't take many users on the theoretical capacity of 5g to saturate the uplink.

5g is shared bandwidth from ~20Gbps download 10gbps upload, increasing the number of users over a minimum does not increase peak bandwidth just utilization.

Considering multiple carriors would each have 20gbps and there are ~200,000 cell towers in the US we are talking massive bandwidth in aggregate.

Another factor to add though is that traffic likely won’t increase by 14x at the same time. Apps will mostly finish payload transmission earlier, leaving the connection unused for a longer period of time. So there likely won’t be as many concurrent transfers in a cell as there are now.

I regularly get less than 1 Mbps download on Verizon's LTE, so I have almost no hope for 5G to help this issue.

why? if the article is true then with 5G you will get 14 Mbps, which is significant improvement isn't it ?

If it's a capacity issue, it doesn't matter how fast your phone can connect to the tower, the issue is connecting the tower to the rest of the internet.

Even if it loses 60% of its speed due to congestion, if the price and monthly quotas are comparable to my home cable connection, I'll be saying good-bye to Comcast.. (especially if they have any decent upload speed, I push a lot of docker/vagrant images)

I actually think the home market would be an ideal place for them to start, as its much less 'mobile' so if you get coverage, your not going to have spotty coverage while they fill in the gaps.

T-Mobile just bought Layer3. They're totally gunning for home broadband/video.

https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news-and-blogs/uncarrier-tv-cl...

yeah they're 50Mbps seems awfully low, heck I can get 100Mbps on 4G and I live in a rural village in Scotland.

It hasn't become more congested. The providers throttle on purpose to reduce costs.

What standard is this now? Last time I tried to read up on 5G, it was described as a collection of ideas for a new standard rather than one specific technology. IS this still the case (i.e. different companies work on competing technologies) or does 5G by now mean the same for all companies?

No, all these deployments are considered "pre-standard" 5G.

In that case it would be helpful if news articles described what the company actually did. Maybe they don't understand themselves but any speed claim is useless without knowledge about the underlying technology.

No, the 5G NR standard was finalized in december of 2017.

Do you have any link with more information on that?

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/12/20/16803326/5g...

5G New Radio (5G NR) OFDM-based air interface was completed Dec 20, 2017.

There are still work to do but you will see small scale deployments at the end of 2018 and first phones and consumer devices start to arrive 2019-2020.

http://www.3gpp.org/about-3gpp/about-3gpp has information about the generations of mobile systems. 5G will be the latest generation and isn't 100% formalized.

> The introduction of 5G will be the result of improvements in LTE, LTE-Advanced and LTE Pro, but this will soon be followed by a major technology step, with the prospect of an entirely new air interface. The first drop of 'New Radio' features, in Release 15, will form the first Phase of 5G deployments.

> Full compliance with the ITU’s IMT-2020 requirements is anticipated with the completion of 3GPP Release 16 at the end of 2019 - In Phase 2 of the 3GPP 5G effort.

Faster speed is great, but what about bumping the data caps?

I was able to hit ~70mb/s over 4G several years ago (in ideal conditions). That's enough to burn through most bandwidth caps in a couple of minutes!

Even most "unlimited" plans still throttle you after some point.

That depends on your provider; on my side, data caps have gone up a lot or have been lifted completely during the 4G era.

T-Mobile has 50gb throttle limit that’s only enforced during congestion.

Well, that's an improvement. I liked T-Mobile when I lived where they had coverage.

Meanwhile T-Mobile in Germany has a 4GB cap for 45 EUR/mo

The test was on the operator www.elisa.fi

Most of their dataplans are unlimited (without any throttle).

Yea, my comments mostly apply to the USA. The rest of the world seems much saner when it comes to mobile pricing.

It could be that many of these companies want to keep the caps low so that you need to purchase both home internet and mobile internet. If I had a 100gb cap, I'd ditch my home DSL and simply use my phone as a hotspot all the time.

Here in Canada, Bell & Rogers own both the cellular networks and the home internet networks. They are highly incented to sell you BOTH.

That doesn’t make any sense. Here in the US, Verizon and AT&T don’t offer home Internet in the vast majority of the country, and Sprint and T-Mobile don’t offer it at all. The wireline divisions of AT&T and Verizon also make very little of the companies’ profits (Verizon’s wireline profit margin is typically 2-5%). Goldman Sachs has been trying to get Verizon to sell its wireline division for years. Why would it sandbag it’s wireless service to prop up its wireline division?

You're probably right. I'm just throwing out a hypothesis.

I wonder what kind of technologies are behind 3G, 4G and 5G.

From a consumer perspective, upgrading the number means "the same, simply better and faster". (just like an iphone :)

The truth is probably more complex than that.

From my experience, 4G was much more reliable that 3G has ever been. May be the service providers have improved. But I have the feeling that 4G is a fundamentally different technology from 3G. In that case, is 5G fundamentally different from 4G?

2/3/4/5G refer to "Generation"; for 2G the technology was GPRS, for 3G it refers to UMTS, EDGE, W-CDMA and HSPA technologies, and for 4G it refers to Mobile WiMAX and LTE. These are a bit tougher for marketing than 2/3/4/5G, as I'm sure you can imagine. I'm not sure what the tech behind 5G is (yet), still seems in flux.

3G technologies used CDMA while LTE uses OFDM so it is a different way of encoding. However, wireless carriers in the US have often increased their number of cell sites substantially - possibly doubling. The amount of spectrum that carriers have has increased substantially - again, more than doubling in some cases. Plus, with the rise of data, consumers now have a way of testing the quality of their link (ie. a speed test) so it's easier to verify under-performing phones. That probably has an impact on device manufacturers. LTE's decreased latency can also make it seem more reliable. Slow ping times mean that downloading a web page can become tedious and seem like it's not working as a script blocks and you're waiting on a 400ms round-trip between the 3G network and getting to the server. Even things like the rise of cheap CDNs like CloudFlare mean that more content is located near you.

5G NR is still OFDM based.

At least on the research side there has been work on GFDM (Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing) as a possible modulation technique for 5G. I don't follow the standardization enough to know what are the chances of it making it into a standard.

The "G" terms are all marketing, but generally...

1G was analog.

2G is networks originally designed primarily for calls: technologies include GSM (with GPRS+EDGE added for packet data), CDMA 1x or iDEN

3G is networks evolved for decent data speeds: technologies being UMTS (later upgraded with HSPA) or CDMA EV-DO

4G is embracing a data-only network: the technology being LTE (although some US carriers brand HSPA as "4G" to compete with WiMAX which was branding itself as 4G while having HSPA-like speeds)

5G is still kinda up in the air, but the focus (aside from faster speeds and lower latency) seems to be on more pervasive connections (better roaming between network types) or low power/IoT stuff

All these definitions are contentious. Some people say the initial LTE deployments weren't real 4G, but only LTE-Advanced is, etc.

Nice, soon 500 word articles like this one be able to have 30.2MB of Javascript frameworks and ads instead of just 2.2MB and load in the same amount of time!

Soon, people will be able to max out their monthly data plan in less than 10 seconds. After the first glorious 10 seconds, their bandwidth will be artificially reduced to 256Kbps.

Frankly I'm wondering if 5G will ever take off. One problem with 5G is that it uses higher frequencies, which carry more bandwidth, but don't go through obstacles so well. So you need much more hotspots, which A is creating zoning nightmares and B is an expensive proposition. Really performance is similar to that of wifi. So the question is why not just use wifi? There's a bunch of wifi hardware already installed, we can assume in the future that more will be installed, and that wifi will continue to improve. Really the big problems with building a wifi based cellular network are incentives, software, and ISPs. We need a way to incentivize people to open up their routers so that strangers can use them and software so that the people using these routers aren't getting snooped on by the people who own the routers. Software and incentives aren't that hard to fix and could be an interesting startup opportunity. However, ISPs could quash any company that tries to do this.

[0]https://www.fastcompany.com/40468468/the-debate-over-neighbo...

Because WiFi sucks.

If I'm riding a tram and leave WiFi on, the continuous connection and disconnection of networks (I pay for a WiFi service with a bunch of hotspots) makes my internet useless.

If it wasn't for iOS's restrictions on some types of data usage I would never turn on WiFi on my phone.

> we can assume in the future [...] that wifi will continue to improve

WiFi has gotten faster over the years but none of the fundamental problems have been solved. Heck, WiFi routers still hijack your DNS and HTTP connections just to show a ToS or let you log in! Why is this not an adopted part of the standard?

Wasn't RADIUS supposed to allow this?

There are lots of standards I'm sure, but one problem with WiFi is the implementations are usually complete crap. With 3G/4G stuff, at least the operators have some minimum QA standards that force the manufacturers to up their game, but for WiFi anything goes.

> So the question is why not just use wifi?

5G is designed to use wifi when available. It's more than just new cellular radio interface and antennas. 5G connection can use 5G/LTE/WiFi simultaneously. Gibabit LTE can be used as an anchor for 5G functionality even when 5G networks is not available.

I think many people underestimate the ambition of 5G and assume that 5G is just 4G with vastly bandwidth.

Aren't some ISPs and MVNOs already doing this though? Like Republic Wireless, Project Fi, Comcast's mobile service, etc. They eagerly prefer WiFi hotspots and give you access to a network of them with a cellular network in place as a fallback.

It tears down the connections though.

Our cable provider has such an initiative. You can opt-in to open your internet connection (separate bandwidth of iirc 2Mbit and separate network) for other customers. You can only use it, when you share as well.

It is sometimes nice if a neighbor has it open and your own modem is not working properly. Also neat, I could use it in two countries so far (Poland & Switzerland)

The initial outcry of users was quite high, as of course nobody wanted to lose bandwidth and have other on "their" network.

A big advantage is that 5G is running on licensed spectrum, so not just anybody can send signals in the spectrum, this should give much less interference.

Public WIFI is also really bad from a security perspective.

Another big advantage of 5G over 4G is that it can _also_ run over unlicensed spectrum. This enables more use cases like enhanced mobile broadbands, device-to-device mesh networks, private 5G networks, etc.

I sort of agree.

Vodafone in UK very rarely bothers deploying LTE2600 unless it is a super busy place like a train station. They rely mostly on LTE800, they've started doing LTE2100 as 800 is getting so congested. But they're not even bothering with the high frequency bandwidth they already have; so I really can't see them bothering with even higher and more expensive to deploy spectrum (again, unless it is super crowded places, but LTE2600 with micro/pico cells can handle this really well now).

I also noticed the same in the US when I was roaming, even in lower manhattan there was a load of LTE700 and only sporadic higher spectrum LTE1700/2100.

I think LTE with loads of carrier aggregation will work just fine, I can't see this being much of a step. Apart from maybe better handoff between networks; but it isn't suddenly going to enable a new load of applications/devices like it is being hyped up for.

"4G vs. 5G" What a marketing BS! Let's say it straight: we increased radio frequency by N multiplier to get larger badwidth with RF penetration capabilities tradeoff -- now we should put radio transmitting stations at a distance of 30 meters between each other and behind every corner, cause radiowaves at this frequency cannot pass through even a plywood sheet.

Has everyone settled on one 5G or will the 5G landscape in the US still be split between GSM 5G and CDMA 5G?

Everybody uses the same LTE in the United States.

Qualcomm figured out that they make more money by patenting everything they can think of in 4G/5G and collecting that from everyone instead of selling their own hardware to a handful of operators who adopt their closed standard, so CDMA is dead (their "CDMA 4G" was never adopted by anyone, everything worldwide is LTE/"GSM 4G")

I didn’t know we’d already centralized. Thanks.

LTE is the next generation technology for both 3G (3GPP) and CDMA (3GPP2). Said another way: the merge already happened with LTE. So there's one continuation now, NR (New Radio) within 3GPP.

Since 4G came out i have never had to think about the internet speed of my phone. Only when it has been connected to wifi abroad.

What we need is not speed or bandwidth, it is penetration and range.

*It is probably a regional thing i can image that 4G could be quite slow in the midst of Tokyo.

TBH LTE800/LTE700 covers the range and penetration quite well. A rural macrocell can cover 20-30km. 5G isn't going to solve the underlying physics here.

There's also LTE450 which could do absolutely ridiculous distances (used in Russia and Scandinavia I believe).

I remember when I tried LTE for the first time and was blown away by huge speeds. Thing is none of this matters when plenty of clients use the same system and the provider decides to throttle all of them.

Well, here’s your last-mile broadband competition!

I hope we will see the major four cell carriers plus Comcast bringing broadband choices from one to three-five options for most of the country.

I've never really needed more than 4g and from what I read 5g has severe problems with penetrating solid structures.

We have a tiny screen on our phone how much more bandwidth do we need? You would probably have to hold the screen directly to your eyeball to need 4k videos on your phone.

5G is brand new tech that's not used by anyone. 4G was also supposed to be 50-70 Mbps when it launched. It was at most 12 Mbps, in the beginning, and then it dropped to much less than that as more people got onto the 4G network.

Unless data plans increase alongside this, it just means most people will just reach their caps dramatically quicker. At least for me, speed isn't currently the big limiting factor; the data cap is.

This is just going to end up like the race for the thinnest phone. Nobody really cares past a certain point, but jeez, they'll keep trying.

The operators care, because faster traffic means more customers per megahertz of spectrum.

Obviously the more speed the better for PC and residential internet connections, but for me and probably a lot of other people 4G is more than fast enough for what we need on our phones.

In fact, I have the AT&T "Unlimited Choice" plan on my phone, which caps my bandwidth at 3Mbps and it's been totally fine. I never find myself wishing I had a faster cell phone connection.

Do you think this means streaming high end games like OnLive tried to do will become a reality?

Of course. Nobody's on 5G yet.

I talked to a friend who is a part of R&D 5G team. He is completely terrified. Pointing a high energy stream of photons to peoples phones, creates a risk of signal interference resulting in burning people (yeah, lasers).

I don't know much about mobile tech, but when I heard that from a person who sits in the lab doing it, my feelings about 5G are a little mixed.

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