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Comment by fleetfox | Hacker News Reader

As data point. You can get "real unlimited data" plan for ~10EUR in baltics

Same in Austria (but 20 EUR instead of 10). LTE is a competitor for ADSL and Cable here and LTE providers sell WiFi routers that use LTE instead of ADSL/Cable as uplink.

I recently replaced my home ADSL connection with LTE (for 20 EUR a month: https://www.yesss.at/tarifoptionen/unlimited) and get approx 2x the download bandwidth and 10x the upload bandwidth for the same price as my previous ADSL connection. Even when there's congestion (which doesn't happen a lot) it's still significantly faster than ADSL.

>get approx 2x the download bandwidth

What about latency?

In a LTE network that is not over its capacity the latency is a bit under 20ms these days in my experience. With 5G this should go down to 1 to 2ms.

What accounts for the difference in these figures? Is it understandable for someone without in depth knowledge or not really?!

Latency in LTE is, I think 5 ms. The rest from the delay is normal network delay and not an issue of LTE. So with 5G (with everything else being the same) will reduce the delay by about 4 ms.

Not really a network engineer so cant really help with that. The 20ms is just my experience and the 1 to 2ms is the theorical number given by the people designing 5G. Found this writeup but still not really sure beyond improvements to the slot-based framework and higher frequency as being the reasons

https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/5g-waves/4460346/5G--T...

All these latency numbers vary a lot based on connection quality. As I understand you basically need line of sight for 5G to work at its maximum frequency and will fallback to what is basically 4G when such a connection is not possible. But then again the antennas/stations for 5G should be much smaller and thus easier to deploy closer to the end users.

Latency will go down with 5G if you pay for it. How much is the big question.

There are 3 sides to 5G: - eMBB: massive boradband --- high throughput, mmWaves; - URLLC: ultra reliable and low latency, for industrial applications typically; - mMTC: massive IoT. Cheap and low power.

The network can handle all 3, but as a device or user that doesn't mean you'll get all the benefits at the same time, some choice will be required. The reduced latency always has some cost impact.

Today the LTE air latency is 4-5 ms, the rest is in the core network. 5G has some air interface changes to reduce the air contribution to 1 ms, in the context of URLLC. For basic users, it'll likely be like LTE (already pretty good). There may be some general improvement if they optimize the core latency for all, but TBC.

Especially the upload makes it so much better. Usually nobody is uploading much.

How is latency for you? When watching a stream or downloading latency which playing an online game jumps up to ~1s (1000ms) in the game. Croatian TELE2 provider, indoors at -92 dBm. Usual latency is about 15-20ms doing ookla speedtest but "real life" it's about 40-50ms.

This issue is likely to be bufferbloat [1] and not directly related to LTE. If you can put a properly configured router in front of the modem that may help. I haven't looked into it but it seems recent OpenWRT have the necessary support to mitigate bufferbloat.

[1] https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Introduction...

Depends on the server you want to reach. Same country you can get latency ~20 ms. If you get lucky also lower. But haven't seen anything below 10 ms. Also "-92 dBm" doesn't say much. There are 4 relevant values for LTE: Rssi (probably your -92, the most irrelevant one), Rsrp, Rsrq and Sinr.

France here, for 20€ I got 100GB domestic + 15GB EU roaming, which is very much asymptotic to unlimited for me. Considering moving to 50GB (domestic+EU roaming) for 25€ and stop worrying when I cross a border.

50 or 100GB isn't really a whole lot. I couldn't live with those limits. OUr 2 person household usually generates/consumes 600GB-1TB traffic / month. IPTV, Games, Downloads, Uploads.

Who said you need to funnel everything through your mobile plan? Of course downloading a single Xbox One game would burn through the whole allowance but why on earth would I do that when I'm at home? Maybe completely unlimited plans will come some day, but in the meantime I don't feel limited at all just by being pragmatic and sensible.

Because your landline is too slow.

"Funneling everything through your mobile plan" was the basis of this comment thread (asking about when we can stop worrying about WiFi and just watch Netflix on our phones)

> asking about when we can stop worrying about WiFi and just watch Netflix on our phones

Streaming Netflix is a blip on the radar and effectively consumes not that much, as witnessed while I was on vacation for two weeks and binge-watched on the train (three times 7 hours didn't even cross the 5GB mark).

15GB EU roaming? I thought the EU got rid of that nonsense?

Not entirely, no. From what I understand, a provider is allowed to limit you in roaming to the volume you'd get at a set rate (I believe right now at around 7 €/GB, with set steps reducing it the next years) for the price of your plan.

So if you pay 50 € per month, your provider is allowed to cap you at 50€/(7€/GB) = ~7 GB while roaming.

Also, operators can request (yearly) authorization to apply limited surcharges in case the roaming rules would cause "unreasonable losses", example: https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/ficora/news/2017/fouroper...

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