Great. Now I'll be able to use up my monthly data in 2 minutes instead of 10 minutes.
Edit: I don't mean to poo-poo the advance of tech, but this really highlights the disconnect between what's possible and what consumers actually want/value.
Edit: I don't mean to poo-poo the advance of tech, but this really highlights the disconnect between what's possible and what consumers actually want/value.
A 5G cell will be 0.1-1.0 km in radius and cover dozens to hundreds of users. In a suburban area, that might be an entire large subdivision. The cost of getting fiber to the cell might be just as much as getting it to a fiber distribution hub in the subdivision, but with 5G once you do that you're done. With FTTH, you have to then run it to each house, which will take (in the aggregate) way longer than it took to run fiber to the subdivision. The branch factor kills you--yeah, it's just a couple of hundred feet to each house, but it's a very labor-intensive couple of hundred feet (under yards, into basements) that you have to do for each subscriber.
Also, all bandwidth is shared--it's just a question of where the sharing starts. GPON--what's typically used for FTTH--involves sharing 2.4 gigabit down/1.2 gigabit up between 16-32 users per PON. That comfortably supports gigabit service with reasonable oversubscription. A 5G small cell will have less bandwidth shared between more users, but will be in the same ballpark.
Router is 4 years old Huawei 4g router and I have installed outdoor antenna on the roof for stable connection. I have been with this setup at home for the last 4 years.
I could propably get faster connection with new router but this is fine.
> Priced at $50 for people who already have Verizon wireless and $70 for those who don't, it's promising speeds of "around 300 Mbps" up to 1 Gbps, with no data caps.
Also, data caps grew a lot in the 3G -> 4G transition, and will grow a lot in the 4G -> 5G transition: https://www.pcmag.com/news/357374/verizon-no-4g-level-data-c...
I agree top speed isn’t too much of an problem in itself, but if with contention that speed can drop a hundred fold and still provide a good connection, the leeway is worth having. And presumably there are range and robustness of connection benefits as well.
IMO 4G is pretty solid all around, and for the first time people are going, "5G? Why?"
It depends. As you can read from the replies, 4G in different market has different situations. The main theme of 5G will be bringing more capacity, and lower running cost for carriers ( At least that is what they said, I am not convinced on this matter ) . Top Speed is no longer a major selling point anymore, they want more Data, and 5G will bring anywhere from 5x to 10x capacity improvements. In theory, that should mean US telecoms has incentive to provide much Data for the same price, and EU citizens will enjoy higher speed as their Data package are cheap already.
The good thing abut 5G is, for possibly the first time in history Carrier is well prepared in technology stack than consumer counterparts, may of the carriers are installing and upgrading to 5G equipment now, but they are for now running 4G signals. All of them ( not just Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei ) allow software update to enable 5G signals. Those equipment already provides better LTE performance, making 4G and 5G transition much smoother. Every step from 2G > 3G > 4G were like revolution, 5G was more of a evolution of 4G.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16334690/t-mobile-unlimit...
I want to pay for my bytes, and I want you (carriers) to give me the service I pay for, at an guaranteed rate. A SLA, basically.
Consumers get shafted on these deals. We pay for products with no agreement over what we're actually going to get. It gets tiring :/
Consumers greatly benefit from these deals, because they pay a fraction of what it would cost to get service with an SLA. (Put another way, it costs a fraction as much to build a network with over-subscription than it costs to build a network where each user has guaranteed bandwidth.)
Where I work, we pay Cogent almost $1,000 for sub-gigabit, and that's in a building with several competing providers to choose from. I pay a tenth that for consumer gigabit from Verizon. That's because I'm sharing a 2.4 gigabit PON node with 16-32 other users, and Verizon can assume that nobody will be using the full gigabit more than a small fraction of the time. If Verizon was only allowed to sell guaranteed bandwidth, they could only sell a 75 mbps service. Which would suck for the consumer when they went to go download an iTunes movie or a game on Steam.
It doesn't help that actually pricing out Internet access is more complex than X cents per byte. For most providers data between the hours of 0100 to 0600 would be free because of how little network usage there is, while data from 1700 to 2300 would be most expensive due to that being when everyone is using the network simultaneously. But throughout the years there have been very few time limited unlimited plans.
And even then, its not actually "expensive" to use the Internet in the evening. Its just saturated, and pressures the ISP to either throttle everyone or expand capacity. Expanding capacity is expensive, but just promising "up to X mbps" is easy and I'm surprised at how eager operators are to adopt data caps over simply throttling heavy data users during peak times.
Well, I'm not really surprised, because the former lets you hit people with surprise bills for ludicrous amounts while the later just saturates your useless customer support lines with complaints.
Meanwhile, older ADSL terminals are often backhauled by a couple T1s, so 6Mbps may be split across more than a few customers, resulting in poor service. Centurylink calls it exhaustion when that occurs.