Hacker News Reader

Comment by derekp7 | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us. For the most part, all the tasks I need to do on a phone (pocket computer / communicator) can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website's loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds).

The only thing I can think of is 5G will allow for more overall network bandwidth, so the data caps on "unlimited" plans wouldn't be needed. But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can't do with current 4G/LTE?

View on HN

With data caps I don't see much use for it. I still think it's hilarious that carriers advertise download speeds that would blow through most people's monthly data allowance in at most a couple of minutes.

It would blow through your allowance if you downloaded something at that speed, constantly. Maybe other people understand it differently but I’ve always understood those ads as like ads for a top speed on a car. You’ll never go that fast normally, but you can if you need to.

People will continue downloading < 1 MB per request, it will just be much faster

Except if you hit the top speed of your car you can continue driving around at the normal speed the whole rest of the time. You don't have to drive around at half the speed you want for a month.

That's just it, though. If 99% of your mobile internet usage consists of <1MB requests it doesn't matter if you're on 3G,4G,or 5G.

4G at least in general has lower latency than 3G, but I don't know if that's the protocol or just deployment.

You'd still get kicked for high ping even if you sat right under the 4G tower.

In our rural area with poor 4g (Verizon) signal, the latency is still usually better than our CenturyLink adsl. Something like 40ms vs 60ms.

Speak for yourself. With my grandfathered unlimited data play from Verizon, I basically stream YouTube all day long.

It won't be long before companies are making extra-high bandwidth auto-playing ads to eat your allowance, not to mention the improved location tracking due to smaller cells.

I think this is a great point. With fast internet, my fear is that websites will load more and more crapola, eating our bandwidth, so basically we will indeed be buying 3 minutes of internet per month.

You can be sure that content creators will expand their media density to fill the available capacity.

>But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can't do with current 4G/LTE?

5G has the potential to provide throughput and latency that is comparable to a fixed broadband connection. In reasonably competitive markets (i.e. not the US), that's A Big Deal. Latency is a particularly acute issue in many applications; 4G generally adds about 50ms in the best case scenario, but 5G can easily provide sub-millisecond latency. Imagine a near-future where it simply doesn't matter whether you're on WiFi or cellular, because they both provide the same experience.

You say that it provides sub-millisecond latency.

-- Keep in mind that I know nothing of nothing.--

--- Is the sub-millisecond from repeater to repeater or from origin to final destination that's [n] repeaters away? Won't each repeater introduce its own latency?

What causes the 4G's >50ms response time?

One thing is that 4G is generally centrally broken out to the internet.

So let's say you're in Scotland, the packet would enter the mobile operator's network, then go to London, where they've bridged the network to the internet.

So there's an extra there and back again.

But why should that change with 5G? Couldn't operators already now route traffic to the internet in more locations?

5G isn't just the radio network. It's a rearchitecture of the core network as well.

For example you can have a 5G core over LTE.

But the article is only about the radio network. 5G over LTE wouldn't bring the problems discussed in the article.

The same applies with roaming too, so in that case there is even more latency.

5G non stand alone can provide this due to the new core network. But we are still at the mercy of the speed of light. A round trip of 1 millisecond translates to about 150 km (95 miles) of distance between you and your resource. And that is without any signal processing at the receiving end and in the air to fiber interface.

But the sub millisecond latency is only for local communication, isn't it? Which is most likely not available for most applications that phones use.

From my current location, it's a 13ms round-trip to the nearest Google server via a good fixed broadband connection; over 4G, that would be ~63ms because of the latency overhead of the cellular connection. That's a substantial difference for a lot of real-time applications.

I do not deny that 4G has worse latency, but 5G will not provide sub millisecond round trip latency for regular internet based applications. Sub millisecond latencies are due to local communication which can replace DSRC/802.11p in car2car communication and similar applications.

Your 4G results also seem quite bad, my personal test right now was more around 18ms broadband vs 31ms LTE. Google scholar results (https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=LTE+l...) I looked into seemed to suggest LTE is capable of ~20ms latency results, while (http://wirelessone.news/10-r/1007-lte-latency-today-9-ms-dow...) suggests that LTE-A (3gpp release 13) is capable of 14ms latency.

4G offers enough speed to replace my home internet connection, however aggregate bandwidth at the cell towers prevented this.

I assume with 5G we're just about at the point where you could ditch the home internet connection and go 100% cellular.

The average home connection in Canada is something around 15-20Mbps, IIRC. Your average 4G is already faster than that. I get similar speeds on average on my phone compared to my home internet.

The two reasons I still have dedicated home internet at this point are data caps and latency (gaming). Otherwise, my phone usually gets comparable - or better! - speeds than my home connection.

My home connection has a data cap now (fuck you comcast) so the first 5g provider to sell a real unlimited plan will get my money.

T-Mobile is piloting just that: https://www.t-mobile.com/news/home-internet-pilot

And I hate Comcast. The $50/mo to unlock true unlimited internet was absurd.

I actually cancelled my Comcast last month and went to Century Link. The overall speed is slower, the lack of data cap and being 1/3 of the price has been worth it.

It feels good to no longer be giving them any money, especially after their billing would routinely "forget" discounts that were supposed to be on my account. I got offered free Starz for 3 months and $30 off my bill for the coming year, which just happened to only be there for a month... So after calling them to have the issue fixed once, and then seeing it happen again the very next month, I finally cut ties.

T-mobile de-prioritizes this product though: "During congestion, Home Internet customers may notice speeds lower than other customers due to data prioritization"

At least where I live, T-mobile towers are at least occasionally congested. Its not too uncommon for data to be slow or even non-functional with good signal levels (on my smartphone, don't know about this home product).

You are so fortunate to have options for your ISP! Where I live (in a good sized city), my options consists solely of Comcast.

Yeah, it really is a blessing. I'm sorry to hear they've got a stranglehold on you. Their customer service is really terrible, and they can get away with it because they know you're stuck.

I am in Minneapolis and Century Link has managed to become the primary secondary option to Comcast. Some neighborhoods are lucky and have US Internet's Fiber as a third option.

On top of that, Century Link has been pushing hard to expand their fiber. I am relegated to only 40MB connection on the copper connection in my neighborhood right now, but the technician that came out to do the install said that (unofficially) they're hoping to have Century Link's fiber be an option in the next year.

$45/mo for 40MB. Will be $65/mo for fiber. Still a fraction of Comcast's insane rates.

Pretty much all home connections have too up here, unfortunately. I have to pay a CAD$15/month extra to have unlimited transfer, otherwise it's capped at 400GB IIRC, and overage charges are outrageously expensive.

Mine is 1tb/month, but $50/month to get unlimited. The sooner internet gets treated like a utility the better.

And I believe it's $10/50GB you go over the 1tb/month.

Microsoft's One Drive was doing a constant upload/download one week, refreshing itself constantly, costing me $200. Ugh.

You realize that existing utilities don't provide unlimited usage for a flat fee, right?

I honestly don't understand the fear of usage based billing. It's the only sane way to charge for this kind of thing. The marginal price for a "unit" of data is just too high. The real "cost" of delivering a terabyte of Netflix or Youtube content is so small compared to the price ISPs are able to charge.

Well, if the cost is that low, I would think that would be an argument for just making it a flat rate.

Historically, I think the fear among people like those here was more or less two-fold.

1.) The original top 1% downloaders were mostly those downloading lots of "Linux distributions" (and of course many other types of media) over torrents. I'm sure quite a few of those 1% ers were on sites like this and preferred to effectively be subsidized by the 99%.

2.) Whether or not it was just a rationalization for #1, many made the argument that bandwidth caps would constrain innovative services because if you turn a meter on, people are going to use bandwidth-intensive services a lot less and the Internet will be less generally useful as a result.

The dynamics today are probably a lot different. I imagine the profile of a big home bandwidth consumer now is a family that watches a lot of Netflix and YouTube.

And then, a couple of years down the road, your ISP will silently begin to throttle your connection once you reach 1TB per month. :(

But the 4G towers have less bandwidth than the coax network. So if everyone used 4G for home internet speeds would be worse.

With 5G and recent increase in cell tower coverage. We are almost there.

The 5.8 GHz band has 500 MHz total of bandwidth. Many cell phone companies already have more than that much bandwidth already, they just have to deploy more small cells.

The only result of 5G would be the end of public wifi which typically has 5 - 10 mbps speeds.

> The only result of 5G would be the end of public wifi which typically has 5 - 10 mbps speeds.

Not if they charge anything close to what they charge now.

It's not cell phone service, but I get my home internet via 5G from Starry (https://starry.com). Speeds are between 200-300MbS (symmetric upload/download) for $50/mo. It's really been fantastic in the six months or so that I've had it. They've got their own towers and repeaters on buildings here in Boston. Couldn't be happier with them and with being able to ditch Comcast.

What is the latency like? Could I play CS:GO or another game where latency and jitter matters?

They claim, and I've heard from a friend who games, that the latency is lower than it was from Comcast. I don't know what it is and I'm not home at the moment to test it. I haven't played in a long time so can't speak from experience.

Out of curiosity, do they give you a publically accessible IP? Or is the connection NAT-ed?

Yes they do give you a public IP but don't have static IPs.

Wow, I’m paying $130 for 100/5. Damn cable companies.

However, due to limited range, they'll have to put up 5G stations every couple houses, and they'll have to get wired internet to the station... I wonder if you'll be able to buy your own station, or if you'll have to use the crappy utility-provided power-wasting box? To get adequate service to the station, they'll need some kind of high bandwidth link pretty much right to your street, perhaps coax or fiber...

> so the data caps on "unlimited" plans wouldn't be needed

They're not even needed now. It's all about money.

Right, I doubt it really costs Verizon $15 to provide me an extra gigabyte..

It’s somewhat needed. 15 dollars a gb is just to raise revenue.

But a truly unlimited 4G hotspot service would crawl to stop during busy periods.

Some sort of rationing is needed.

Seems like this is a pain-point that was self-inflicted by the companies themselves; selling service to many people without the infrastructure to back it up.

That said, I'm not suggesting companies deploy 1:1 infrastructure in lock-step with sales. Power/Water companies plan for peak demand periods. What prevents ISPs from being able to do the same?

It seems to work just fine here in Finland, it is a very common alternative to wired home connections (seems to be about 50-50 split: https://www.ficom.fi/ict-ala/tilastot/kotitalouksien-laajaka...).

No data caps, so you can use terabytes of data without throttling if you want to.

Most people don't come close to hitting their cap unless they accidentally update their 200mb apps on the data connection.

> can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website's loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds).

I think you forgot how slow 3G was/is. It's around 512KBps. You can stream music on that, but streaming video is a straight nope (480p on youtube wouldn't even be happy with 3G) and even just browsing the web will be a frustratingly slow experience.

4G LTE definitely has the bandwidth to do all those things are reasonable quality/throughput particularly for the resolution & form factor of the device in question, though.

"3G" also encompasses HSPA which supports real-world speeds in the 10s of megabits.

The original 3G UMTS (384kbps) was indeed dreadfully slow by today's standards.

HSPA+ will hit real-world speeds in the 10s of megabits, but HSPA won't. Both are technically in the "3G" spec, though, you're right about that. But they were marketed/branded as 4G almost immediately.

> But they were marketed/branded as 4G almost immediately

That was just a US thing though, right? Where I lived it was branded "Turbo 3G".

Isn't LTE already being branded as 5G in the US as well?

Have a decent connection where there’s a large gathering of people.

Very much so. Sure, the headline speeds of 5G are nice (and indeed currently with the right 4G deployments and equipment, you can certainly get some phenomenal speeds today), but like all major network upgrades the primary benefit for typical users is aggregate capacity. That seemingly pointless headline speed doesn't quite happen when you've got 100s or 1000s of people in an area, what it does result in though is a usable speed for all of those people instead of an unusable one.

You don't need 5G to get that, you can get usable speeds to over 100k people in a roughly 200m x 100m area with wifi and 4G, as OSU has done (1,2).

1 https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2013/08/27/ohio-st...

2 https://www.dispatch.com/news/20180405/ohio-state-to-spend-n...

With the same backbone infrastructure? Wouldn't you need more cell towers for this? From my experience, areas that constantly have large crowds often work well with 4G, just the occasional bursts don't work.

802.11ax ("WiFI 6") supports this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Technical_improv...

As near as I can tell, the only benefit that consumers will see from 5G is that it will resolve a real problem with the cell system right now: capacity.

In very congested areas, the total supportable capacity is already being completely utilized. This is why people in very congested areas experience call drops or problems with network availability. 5G would go far to resolve this.

However, that's the only consumer-level benefit that seems realistic to me, and it would only be noticed by the people in dense areas. All the other stuff, such as increased speeds, etc., appears to be nonsense.

Nothing, really. The bottleneck for cell data throughout (and latency) is backhaul. Improving backhaul isn’t sexy like changing the “4” to a “5”. Improving backhaul is a very expensive (and slow). And counter to one’a business goals - telecoms in the US want just the right amount of congestion to justify network upgrade subsidies, even if that means they do not adhere to ITU-T requirements.

The best “feature” of 5G is that it’s a great opportunity institute rate-hikes.

>> The best “feature” of 5G is that it’s a great opportunity institute >> rate-hikes.

I can see it now. "$100 additional per month" But you can cancel your cable/DSL now!

The most common suggestions I see are mobile applications that benefit from the lower latency afforded by 5G - stuff like VR/AR, gaming, self-driving cars.

Aside from that the real reason money is being poured into 5G appears to be to replace the last mile / home internet.

> the real reason money is being poured into 5G appears to be to replace the last mile / home internet.

In order to be a realistic alternative for internet service, the cost would have to come WAY down. Using the cell system for your primary internet feed right now is prohibitively expensive.

I have a hard time believing that the cell companies will actually lower their pricing for 5G. It seems more likely that they'll do the exact opposite.

I'm in Japan which has a similarly uncompetitive mobile space to the US, and they've been offering unlimited 4G home internet here for a couple years now.

Their solution is to IMEI lock the plans to these mains-power wifi routers the size of an old AirPort Extreme, and QoS them to have lower priority than their pay-per-GB mobile customers. That way it can't be abused for people to use it to replace the (still-expensive) mobile plans, and the lower network priority means that they're just taking up unused network capacity anyway.

You should listen to Shahriar Shahramian on The Amp Hour Podcast: https://theamphour.com/430-shahriar-discusses-5g/

There's a ton of interesting things, like 5G is for a lot more than cellphones. I've always heard that 5G will have phased array and I wondered how that would work -- he talks about possibility that the array is on the roof of a car and your devices will connect back to that. Lots of issues, like size of antenna and power consumption, to get those blazing fast speeds.

I'm thinking it's probably an ingenious marketing move intended to force the people to install equipment from a certain country despite concerns, in order to keep up appearances that investments are being made in the technology.

From a consumer perspective, LTE's great in its current form, I've never seen any actual person complain about network speeds in a region where LTE is properly deployed, I don't know of any application that struggles on this infrastructure.

You're making the assumption that 5G and future advanced wireless systems are exclusive to phones. In the future this will not be the case at all.

Human(individual) customers won't reap the huge benefit IMO. This is a big step up for commercial sites though, where cellular modems serve as fail-over for fiber/commodity service. These customers typically have unlimited data plans, and are more than happy to pay any outrageous data fees that keeps their network operating.

Demand for bandwidth has historically expanded to match the bandwidth available. Folks will find some use for it.

Multiple 8K 90Hz VR streams for the whole family to play Roblox 2025, all running off a personal hotspot.

I want to see DOOM running on just the network stack, but with raytracing because.

Ajit Pai seems to think it's about: Rural Connectivity. Fiber Infrastructure. National Competitiveness: https://youtu.be/jKbAdEVOaDY?t=406 (Ajit starts around the 8 minute mark)

Do his words actually carry any information? My understanding is that he is one of the least credible, least respected humans on the face of the planet.

Ajit Pai has exactly zero credibility.

He's one of those people the internet is right to hate

I think I've read something about significant improvements to latency. Don't know if true or not.

Latency-sensitive applications over 4G/LTE, like SSH or games feel sort of sluggish.

One use case could be high resolution, low latency video streaming for remote control of autonomous vehicles, e.g. trucks.

Driving a semi-truck remotely? What could possibly go wrong!

You seem to be ignoring speed of light and time to react.

5G attempts to market a compelling reason to upgrade a phone and stave off the slowing phone replacement cycle?

> I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us.

WISP internet service to the home.

WISP is very useful in rural areas. It's less compelling as an alternative to wired services in the dense urban environments where we'll see 5G deployments. You're going to have to run all that fiber, anyway.

That all depends on how rural it is. Rural enough that a tower can cover enough houses to make it worth it or so rural enough you have almost as many towers as houses?

I spent a decade on various WISPs, even had one of their towers on my house (free connection + cash = very yes). It was a city with a mix of single family homes on small lots and townhomes/condos. Cable doesn't exist there, so WISP was the way to go. It was pretty good until Netfix got popular. It was bad in the evenings when everyone would sit down and turn on a show.

Now I'm in a very rural place, lots of hills, thick trees. Luckily there is a telephone/internet co-op who put in fiber. I think they realized with the distances they have to cover that WISP and copper were out. I've never seen fiber to such remote locations.

We only have one cell tower that covers us now, so I won't hold my breath for 5G.

My only choice for internet in a reasonably urbanized area is Comcast. No one has run fiber to my apartment building. If someone wants to run fiber and set up nearby 5G cells, and can provide internet service that is competitive with Comcast, I don't see why I wouldn't switch.

Again, looking for the advantage -- in this case, I can see WISP being useful for areas that are underserved by the local cable monopoly, and in other areas it provides a third competitor (cable/dsl/wisp).

I wonder how 5G home internet will compare to the up and coming LEO satellite constellations (StarLink for example).

You still need to lay fiber for 5G base stations

And if you're going to bring the fiber most of the way, you might as well terminate it at the premises.

That depends heavily on the location.

In many suburban developments, the power/communication lines are all buried underground. It would probably be much easier to install a couple of microcells around the neighborhood than to dig up everyone's lawn.

I was lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where Verizon initially installed FiOS. It was a massive undertaking. They had to trench every street in my development. I was young at the time, but I remember thinking how massive the effort was considering not every house would even sign up for it.

I’ll confirm, as a crew is dragging/trenching fiber as we speak (I’m looking out the back window watching after ordering them pizza) at a family member’s home in a suburban community, to be terminated on the side of each home (fiber to the premises).

They ran aerial fiber to the neighborhood, and then ran the fiber under each street, with the final run being placed in the backyard easement between house rows (with a Ditch Witch doing the heavy lifting).

Family member is going from AT&T DSL for $40/month with 3Mb down/1Mb up to $50/month for 200Mb down/75Mb up (with a two year price guarantee and no data caps). It’s quite the deal.

That's a little weird. I lived in an area that had fiber installed, it's pretty nonintrusive. The fiber is laid under the side walk and the last bit from the side walk to the house is blasted in. You have a small hole dug by the house and another one by the side walk, no trenches needed.

At no point does a fiber installation require digging up an entire road or even your lawn.

In my old neighborhood, I saw Comcast fishing cables through the street drainage sewers. Not sure if there was a separate conduit that was accessed via those grates, or if it actually just laid along the the bottom of the sewer pipe lines.

This isn't necessarily the case. Bringing that cable an extra ~300m and providing the ONT hardware for each house is quite expensive for the small number of customers that might benefit in a rural area. Terminating at fast wireless and providing radios is much more cost effective from the telco's perspective.

From the telco's perspective, yes. From an end user who is getting fiber from a coop or muni fiber provider, it's about $300-$500, which might be considered reasonable if your ongoing operating costs (and therefore, costs to the end user) are lower.

Disclaimer: I have contributed to a muni fiber project, and am familiar with trenching/arial mounting and premises termination costs.

The problem is that the new spectrum is not appropriate for that purpose for the exact same reason it interferes with weather forecasting equipment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com