Why is the ‘race to 5G’ a race? | Hacker News Reader

Why is the ‘race to 5G’ a race?

theverge.com

194 pointstakanori154 comments

One data point: FOMA [1] in Japan was the world's first commercial 3G service to launch. Was it the "winner" of that "war"? No, it was basically an incompatible fork of UMTS [2] that in the end was used by nobody except NTT Docomo, who had to retool a few years later at considerable expense to be compatible with the global standard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Mobile_Multimedia_A...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS

and similarly in the US Wimax was Sprint's disastrous entry into 4G

https://www.rcrwireless.com/20160401/opinion/worst-week-bold...

Which has left Sprint crippled to this day, to the extent they need to merge with T-Mobile to fund a 5G network. The rest of the industry has well learned not to jump too soon.

This answer and the answers below ignored one simple point: 5G is a global collaboration (3GPP), not a regional experiment, which includes operators around the world and vendor around the world (not true, few from American..). You can basically call 3GPP the dictatorial organization, simply it is the only organization truely working on the cellular technique.

More importantly, it is getting stronger, and the ecosystem getting more diversified as more OTT and devices vendors like Google, Tencent, Alibaba, Apple, all joining in.

Face it, US is being left behind.

FOMA was an UMTS implementation also shepherded by 3GPP. This didn't stop it from being incompatible.

Put another way, the W3C is supposed to set global standards for web browsing, and we all know how compatible browsers are...

Afaik, browsers have pretty solid compatability these days. I mean, they’re all chromium skins, but nonetheless

True. But note that in 3G and 4G period, there are a number of systems that are not compatible to each other, like UMTS vs CDMA, LTE vs WiMAX, while 5G is the global one.

5G-NR standard only gives a 15-20% gain in data thoroughput over the same bandwidth as compared to 4G LTE. The vast majority of the increase in thoroughput has to come from the millimeter wave bands. Think about streetlights to get an idea of coverage and propagation. Now think about running internet fiber to every streetlight. It's quite a task. It'll only be done (and has only been done so far in the USA) in areas that require high bits/khz/km^2 like entertainment stadiums.

Additionally, almost no two countries actually have overlapping 5G bands. It's a mess of competing standards. So it'll be different frontend modules for controlling the antenna arrays required on the handsets (high power usage and space requirements) due to the integration required. Handsets are going to have to get bigger. Unlikably big and specific to region.

And beyond that the 5G setups being implemented now aren't stand alone. They're both LTE and Non-Standalone (NSA) 5G. The 5G just provides extra bandwidth and isn't used as a control for the handsets. It more than doubles the complexity of setups because of the trouble RF designers have to take with harmonics and intermodulation. All the competing national freq band standards mean different filtering solutions.

The future will not be evenly distributed.

>5G-NR standard only gives a 15-20%

15-25% is _fucking_ _huge_. Even a few percent increase would be worth it for telcos.

15%-20% might be huge for Verizon’s CFO and shareholders, but it’s inconsequential for consumers who are currently being sold some terabit-IoT-self-driving-car-VR-surgery yarn in an effort to get governments to give handouts of property and spectrum to anyone waving the magical 5g sauce.

It's also inconsequential for everyone who has a data cap on their phone plan. Running out of data 20% sooner isn't a win for people who can't afford a luxury plan.

This is absolutely a 100% silly way to look at it. The same amount of data is used even if you had slow or fast internet.

And who do you think is pushing for 5G?

The companies who will benefit from this 15-20%.

It's 20% not 25% (more accurately, 19%). These are real numbers not something I made up. And the increase in bandwidth from 3G to 4G was ~4x, 400%, so the increase from 4G LTE modulation to 5G NR is pretty marginal in comparison.

I quoted, I didn't come up with the numbers.

>Additionally, almost no two countries actually have overlapping 5G bands

What does that mean? The 5G NR in the future will be reformed from the current LTE, and aren't we all set for mmWave AND 3.x Ghz Spectrum for 5G? I think that is what the majority of EU, South Korea, Taiwan and China are doing. I am pretty sure that is what US and Canada are doing as well.

Even the sub-6GHz spectrum allocations in various countries don't overlap that much. But yeah, the 3-6 GHz spectrum is going to be the biggest game changer since it will actually propagate okay and doesn't have the phase noise problems of very high frequencies. https://www.microwavejournal.com/articles/31757-global-5g-ru...

>Now think about running internet fiber to every streetlight.

Streetlights are usually within sight of each other. Can't we just add light sensors that point at the neighboring lights and modulate the brightness by a fraction if we want to do messaging?

Streetlights are usually white, which means there’s a phosphor, which drastically limits the modulation frequency. Also, the lights themselves (at least where I live) are owned by the city or PG&E. Good luck getting them to cooperate that deeply with carriers. Also, the lights are off in the daytime.

That being said, in the absence of fog and heavy rain, optical communication between light poles isn’t that crazy.

Was thinking mostly of messaging for the lights themselves, telling lights to tun on or off, checking that they are on or off and also that they aren't misbehaving, that sort of thing, so relatively slow modulation would probably be fine.

I’m pretty sure OP was referencing streetlights for how dense you need your base stations for millimeter wave communication networks.

Will phones have multiple antennas for 5G?

Yes, for millimeter wave. They require line of sight and are easily blocked by hand position in addition to multiple antennas being required for achieving the data thoroughput improvements of MIMO. The entire phone will have to be covered in antenna.

I remember the old fractal antennas for handling different frequencies. Maybe those will still be used.

Two points:

1. The article's point is that the "The Race to 5G is BS" and not "5G is BS". Please adjust.

2. I can try to offer an answer to the author. History has shown that a novel piece of technology often leads to innovation. Dial-up led to BBNs and the Web, broadband led to audio and video content delivery, and so on. Winning the "race to 5G" means the US will be the first to innovate in systems that take advantage of faster wireless broadband networks. That's important. IMO.

You are technically correct. Updated the title.

>Winning the "race to 5G" means the US will be the first to innovate in systems that take advantage of faster wireless broadband networks. That's important.

Why is being "first to innovate" important? What happens if we aren't first?

The first to innovate tends to make the most money off of the innovation.

Being first is often not a sustainable competitive advantage and we have a good case study in looking at the recent past with 3G and 4G. Apple makes all the profit in smartphones and all the incumbents like Nokia, RIM, Ericsson are gone.

That's why you need to keep innovating if you want to keep making money. Turns out that doing a thing once isn't sufficient to profit off it for eternity.

Tell that to disney. IP protections are designed specifically so that a day of innovation may last a lifetime.

But Apple has rarely been the first to innovate. They were not first in the personal computer, the laptop, the MP3 player, the smartphone, or the smartwatch. Most of the true innovators there are dead.

No, the first to innovate tend to be in research roles and rarely make the most money from their work.

Sometimes being second means to avoid the mistakes and downfalls of the first. So I would argue it is not the bad position either.

'The best way to learn something is when somebody else figures it out and tells you, "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."'

That doesn't really convince me that coming in second matters for anything. What does it matter if we're a year or two behind?

I think the two are linked though. Imagine someone saying “why are we racing to the moon? Why are we racing to quantum computers?” If the benefit is clear, nobody asks about the race.

> "Imagine someone saying “why are we racing to the moon? Why are we racing to quantum computers?”

I can imagine that easily, the benefit of both of those is far from clear to many people.

>Winning the "race to 5G" means the US will be the first to innovate in systems that take advantage of faster wireless broadband networks. That's important. IMO.

I'm not really sure if being the first is important or even beneficial. If that were true the United Kingdom would still be the world's superpower and myspace would still reign supreme. Being first is mostly an unthankful job because you're the one who does the most work while everyone else can copy.

Everyone else also gets the benefit of watching, seeing what went wrong and doing it better.

> I'm not really sure if being the first is important or even beneficial. If that were true the United Kingdom would still be the world's superpower

Or, you know, Persia, or Akkad. There have been many firsts.

Industrial Revolution I imagine.

England may have been the first to start powering machines with large-scale coal mining, but was it the first to start making iron tools? :D

> If that were true the United Kingdom would still be the world's superpower

I don't know if that's a good example. The UK benefitted enormously from its empire. I don't think anyone's proposing that the winner of the 5G race will be the leader forever, just that they'll be in a position of advantage.

The article already countered #2 by pointing out that countries who "lost the race" ended up with faster, cheaper and more widespread access to 4g. And despite these countries having much better networks than the US, most companies did not just drop everything and move.

In a world where so many people are on decent quality wifi at home, work, and sometimes even on their commute, I don't see a big potential for sudden innovation in consumer apps.

There is the theoretical "internet of things" usage, but such a product might have to wait for a global rollout regardless.

What is 5g going to enable? All it does is allow cell towers to work better for stadiums and make billing for small plans smoother.

“The race for 5g” is just a way for the cell phone companies to push through a bunch of concessions by using jingoism before everyone gets 5g phones and realizes there isn’t much of a difference.

Ehhh, my opinion is that 5G is bullshit for consumer internet. Actual 4G (as opposed to whatever your carrier has in your area) is supposed to be capable of up to gigabit speeds, but that's obviously not happening many places, if anywhere due to a variety reasons. However, even so, 4G with good implementation and penetration would be fast enough to stream or download anything reasonable on mobile devices for quite a few years yet.

5G, however, is not bullshit for IoT. If you've ever tried to build an IoT device that uses 4G, you know it generally sucks. 5G will, if they actually build to the flashy spec, fix a lot of issues around latency, cost, and power to send/receive "thing" data.

> but that's obviously not happening many places

Is it happening in ANY places at all? As the carriers add more and more users to their 4G network, and they are not in place to raise the price for their plans, the 4G is just getting worse and worse.

"5G, however, is not bullshit for IoT"

I humbly disagree because IoT itself is BS.

We've been talking about it for a decade, and I don't have any use for it, nor do most folks. The ideas are nice, but practicalities are not there.

There's a lack of standards, no consistent 'home hub', not enough use cases for expensive gear, security problems galore.

The 'beachhead' for IOT has thus been Google/Alexa, which are really Cloud services and don't integrate very well locally.

Theoretically, I can see my fridge telling me what to order, my microwave knowing how long to cook etc. etc. but I'm wary that any of it will come to fruition for a long time. But I'm not that concerned because I don't care.

I think IoT needs a 'killer app' that everyone 'needs' which paves the way for everything else.

Nobody was building anything for the data networks when BlackBerry came along with an addictive product. It was not until BlackBerry was printing money that Apple and Google took notice and thus justified massive investment in their mobile offers.

I agree. I think it may be a dollar value thing. I recently doubled my income and still can’t see the value in expensive Hue bulbs. Their price for wirelessly dial-able colored light far exceeds my willingness to pay and deal with hub generations. I might budge if they were half their cost, or if I doubled my income again. But probably not because of the technicalities.

Seriously, what benefits from perfect information? Human stuff...healthcare, weather, investment choices, etc. the information I would like on my “things” are things like when things will fail or what I need to do to keep them. I don’t need nor want a fridge suggesting merchandise for me. The other use is wireless control-that’s also got limited appeal.

i got hue bulbs (adjustable white) for: - lights turn off at night/when i leave - lights turn on when i get home - i can ask google or siri to turn them on or off as i am doing other thing

as for the colour ones? I have on on my deck, its blue. sometimes i change it to another color if i'm asked but otherwise i can't find any use for the color ones.

Where I see IoT going is the same place as apps already have. Sending off random telemetry data.

You may or may not want a fridge that tells you what to order. But advertisers want a fridge that spies on you so they can tell you what to order. Or the power company wants you to have a fridge that uses power when they tell it to.

What is coming is "You Are The Product, Act 2".

ps. If you upset the fridge company they will terminate your account and your fridge will fail-open-and-warm.

I sometimes wonder if it’s time to make a company that makes high quality dumb devices and hammers on competitors in marketing, calling out their specific privacy abuses, and the long term potential implications. Really play up the 1984 angle, private conversations being subpoenaed from Amazon, that sort of thing.

Or a smart appliance company that works with local hardware and keeps all data on premises.

> Or a smart appliance company that works with local hardware and keeps all data on premises.

That assumes there is a use case for data-collecting appliances that brings enough value to people that such a thing would actually be preferable over an equivalent appliance that doesn't collect that data at all.

I don't think that there is such a use case for common appliances, though.

I think you're assuming that IoT = consumer home devices, which is a small subset of the market. Most home devices are mostly useless, but outside the home they're a big deal. The kind of IoT I've worked with has been for industrial/manufacturing and WAN-based data gathering - things like distributed sensors across a manufacturing floor, wetlands monitors across a few dozen square miles of watershed, road and vehicle low-bandwidth communications, etc. Practical applications for those kind of IoT devices vastly outnumber practical applications in the home.

Yes that's fine but the problems remain.

The carriers will utterly not present a viable solution to IoT. Neither will industry.

There will be 'application specific' things that use current networks to achieve IoT, but as far as the carriers are concerned, it'll be like 'low bandwidth mobile phones' or something along those lines.

I have no faith in carriers ability to innovate, and industry is not good at presenting 'grand magical architectures'.

Something like this could happen: auto companies get together with carriers, and ask for some kind of special device/rate/services. They get special gear made for cars. And then other industries start to use that architecture. Reason being, only Ford/GM etc. are big enough to have real impetus with carriers, and Ford/GM will have specific requirements + the 'long term horizon' enough to guarantee revenue stream. Then other industries hop on board and we have IoT that's used for a lot of stuff, but that was originally designed for cars. Something like that.

The carriers are their own worst enemy. Remember when they charged 10 cents per 'WAP' page with a little bit of text and a few links?

Mostly just because there isn't much urgency to improve in the west. There is plenty of IoT in China. I wouldn't say 5G will be amazing in this regard though.

I don't disagree with you. The carriers in my experience only care about making as much money as they can off data and even their "IoT" package offerings tend to be a joke in terms of actual cost if you want to do more than SMS between devices once in a while.

On the vehicle side, I've sat in negotiations between the big carriers and big automotive manufacturers several times now and I can assure you the autos are not able to exert nearly as much pressure as you would think. Data prices have actually been one of the big causes of crappy head unit experience and lack of OTA updates for the mass market.

Iot is not about you or me. It is not about phones or alexas. It's about "smart cities" and surveillance states - why do you think the chinese are so good at it? It is not long until we will be unable to escape 24/7 surveillance. England is a predictor of where we will be 10 years from now. And it won't change, no matter how much we scream. Classic tyranny of the majority. Or apathy of the majority. Every one is understandably upset about private data mining, but public is way, way worse.

Yeah, I think IoT is mostly bullshit that doesn't add much/any particular value. But you know what I do need? Windows in my house that either close automatically when it rains, or when I tell them all to via an app or something. Then I can open all 20 of back up when I want. or maybe open them 5%, or 20%, or all the way, or drop half way, and open the bottom halfway. Know why this will never happen? It's expensive to manufacture & install, the profit margins are way low, and it needs to be secure, meaning it should never call home to google. The opportunity cost of doing that is too high vs. just making some useless gimmick that sends user data back to Big Ad Tech so they can farm it in their high profit margin ad business... That, and maybe I'm an old fashioned edge case that just likes fresh air when the weather is nice. And I live where I could use this for most of the summer, as it's not usually too hot, and it rains all the fucking time.

I’d love to buy something like this. I’d also love window shades that opened shortly before my phone’s current alarm. These are both projects I have planned for whenever we end up owning a house, but I’d love to be able to buy something off the shelf if it had an open api, and preferably didn’t require an internet connection.

There are a couple window shade options out there, but they didn’t appear to be very open when I looked briefly. Maybe there’s some older-style zigbee stuff that I missed.

this already exists

IoT isn't about making 'things' for consumers like you and me, it's about embedding sensors in public infrastructure and creating networks of machines and sensors that interoperate. You'll never 'see' IoT or buy IoT devices, it'll just be embedded into whatever product you buy and it won't be opt-out. That's why we need public protocols for IoT sensors, because otherwise all of that data will be in the hands of giant corps and then we'll truly live in a dystopian surveillance state. This is the end game of surveillance capitalism; as detailed by Shoshana Zuboff in her new book.

> it'll just be embedded into whatever product you buy and it won't be opt-out.

It will be for me, because I'll disable it. With sidecutters, if necessary.

IoT's killer app is V2V road safety, collision avoidance. All cars with OBD-II could be upgraded.

  If you've ever tried to build an IoT device that uses 4G, you know it generally sucks.

Haven't yet, but may soon in near future. Care to elaborate in a sentence?

I'll try. 2G/edge was a solid platform due to low modem cost and cheap data available on multiple carriers, but the spec is mostly phased out at this point. 3G and 4G modems have both been expensive in hardware cost, expensive in bandwidth cost, and massive power hogs if your device needs to run on batteries. It usually ends up being a better bet to try to get LoRa or XBee working for device-to-device (despite their limitations) and having only a single "expensive" box for cellular internet connection, but this gets tricky if you need communications across fairly large geographies (ex. distributed outdoor sensors).

Thanks for the info!

Yes, I would've always used a "hub" to connect devices to the outside world, it's the sensible thing to do.

I checked out the availability of hardware on eBay Germany, and it seems GSM/GPRS modules start at €3.00, averaging at about €12.00, whereas 4G modules start at €30.00, and average around €70.00, that's quite a hike!

I'm guessing the Arduino MKR NB 1500 is something like a "reference device", and runs for ~€66.00 before tax on their own website. It has the uBlox SARA-R410M 02B chip on it.

A cheaper alternative seems to be the SIM7600CE and its variants, selling from Chinese traders around €30.00 to €70.00.

Does anyone have any experience with any of the chips I mentioned?

> Actual 4G (as opposed to whatever your carrier has in your area) is supposed to be capable of up to gigabit speeds

Isn't what's being sold as 5G now just finally fulfilling the promises that were made for 4G? So we'll have to wait for them to sell 6G to get what is being promised for 5G.

Pretty much. However some folks in more rural areas were only on a fancier 3G, being told it was 4G, and now ATT telling them they’re on 5Ge.

2 more things"

- in what ungodly scenario would a consumer need 1gbps speed on their desktop, let alone on their phone. I consider myself a power internet user (I own an ISP), and even I can't think of many scenarios where I would need more than 50 Mbps of internet speed for a sustained period of time.

- On mobile devices, higher speed will almost surely result in higher power usage. When consumers are asking for longer battery life on their phone - does 5g theoretical speed really gives that, much advantage over a 4g phone? I can't think of any situation where it does.

In conclusion, 5g advantage is nothing more than to stimulate tech industry component sells to consumers and business, ie, 5g modems, phones, antennas, license fees for goverments, exporting tech stack to other countries. All these scenarios adds up to a huge financial market. The first country/company to be in this market will benefit from it. Thats whats its all about. I am not worried about snooping - the telcos and ISPs are already inside government's pocket for decades now under eecutive order (I am not only talking about USA here).

>- in what ungodly scenario would a consumer need 1gbps speed on their desktop, let alone on their phone. I consider myself a power internet user (I own an ISP), and even I can't think of many scenarios where I would need more than 50 Mbps of internet speed for a sustained period of time.

On demand streaming of game worlds would be a possible application imo. So instead of downloading the entire game you don't install the world locally but download it as you need it. This could give access to terabyte-sized worlds if done properly. Honestly these would be new markets rather than existing ones.

> On mobile devices, higher speed will almost surely result in higher power usage. When consumers are asking for longer battery life on their phone - does 5g theoretical speed really gives that, much advantage over a 4g phone? I can't think of any situation where it does

There are situations where "race to finish" helps with battery life. E.g. when I've taken a bunch of photos my phone starts backing them up to the cloud. If that takes 2 minutes instead of 10 and it can go back to a low-power state quicker, that's a big saving. The question is how bad is the standby power draw of 5G?

5G boxes will be on "every street" meaning that real-time triangulation of devices and thus citzens will have exact precision. Whoever wins the race to 5G will be the one who writes the protocol and thus it will be tailored for their backdoors in the code. The US wants their backdoors in the code, not China's.

FYI, even according to the protocol it is back doored. Search for lawful intercept.

It's a front door, not a back door. Lawful intercept of telephone calls has been a stated requirement for every previous generation of cellular technology going back many years. This was never a secret.

It's still a back door. It's just a legally required one.

Only in countries like the US that need millimetre wave for 5G

> Whoever wins the race to 5G will be the one who writes the protocol

A common standard is already decided, the race is just to deployment.

Does the US manufacture any 5G network equipment anyway? I thought it was all Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei

Not sure, but what about Cisco?

The US is completely out from network air interface competition. It's only Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei and ZTE.

Qualcomm and others manufacture components.

5g just means you can blow your entire data plan in 5 minutes if it even works. 4g is fast enough where they could actually just lie and sell you 4g service by labeling it 5g you likely wouldn't notice because YouTube already runs great on 4g.

This is the big one imo. 4g is so fast compared to data caps that it might as well be unlimited speed because downloading anything big enough to make the speed matter would use your entire months data allowance in minutes.

Until data caps are significantly higher I don't see 5g as anything other than a marketing name from people who want to sell new phones.

That’s like arguing that improvements in mobile CPUs don’t matter because if you continuously pegged your CPU, you’d quickly run out of battery. Most consumer usage is bursty. In the era of single web pages that take up 5-10MB, going from 30 Mbps to 300 Mbps offers a marked improvement in user experience.

Also, the the overall available bandwidth of the system is one of the key factors behind the data cap, so we can expect the cap to increase in general when 5G rolls out. That means this line of"current data cap makes 5G useless" thinking is short-sighted.

So you think wireless companies will spend billions of dollars upgrading their infrastructure to 5G only to later increase your monthly caps so that you will be able to pay less monthly? Keep dreaming. The reality is that they will use 5G to increase your monthly payments somehow.

> increase your monthly caps so that you will be able to pay less monthly

You're not going to pay less monthly because you're going to want to stay on the higher caps when the experience is better. YouTube will no longer be capped to 480p so you will use more video streaming bandwidth, etc.

The wireless companies are also looking to eat the wireline companies' lunch. They want you to cancel Comcast for 5G. For that they'll have to have higher caps.

For that, they'll have to get rid of caps. At least for me; I dont have one. And none of this "first 25gb is fast" nonsense. Wifi is where I dont have to worry about how much data I use, so I can download my 30gb vm image. By doing so, I only have to buy a gig of data a month and only use 200mb of that. 5g has the capability to handle it, or if it doesn't, maybe it's not the future after all. At least not for home internet.

For power users like us it will never be a replacement. But I know plenty of people who already use 4G as their home internet. The complain about congestion during the evening and hitting their cap at the end of the month, and some switch to fiber. Going from a 30 GB to a 300 GB cap, they would be serves perfectly.

I didn't say anything about paying less or wireless companies not wanting to recoup their cost. So you're not refuting anything I said.

But now that you brought up the topic of price, the most likely scenario is that we'll end up paying about the same with more bandwidth / less latency, and we'll collectively use more bandwidth wirelessly. That's how 2G->3G->4G all worked out, and that's how it worked out for broadband home internet as well (DSL to Cable to Fiber or others). The cost has remained largely similar. You seem to think the price has somehow always gone up after each generation. The data doesn't support that view:

http://www.in2013dollars.com/Wireless-telephone-services/pri... http://www.in2013dollars.com/Internet-services-and-electroni...

Of course at each generational switch, there might be slight premium for the new one temporarily, especially during the early phase of the rollout (what else is new?) but in the end they all came down, as the majority of the infrastructure switches over. Contrary to what you seem to think, companies can't charge arbitrary price - the demand drops if you increase the price too much, and the existing infrastructure (of potentially other companies) put a ceiling on how much you can charge even with the new infrastructure. Sure, while the new infrastructure provides better functionality, they will be able to charge more compared to the existing. That will determine how fast the companies can rollout the new infrastructure, not the other way around like you imply.

> In the era of single web pages that take up 5-10MB, going from 30 Mbps to 300 Mbps offers a marked improvement in user experience.

I know the consumer can't change that. But the one at fault here is the bloated 10MB web app. It is incredibly wasteful to build an entirely new network infrastucture + new chips in order to let web devs include useless 2MB javascript frameworks.

The size of websites is based on the speed of the average users internet. If we were still on 3G no website would bundle 10MB of js. As soon as the average user gets 300Mbps mobile internet half of the internet will bundle 50MB of JS and another 50MB of wasm to power 400 tracking scrips that can use the new cpu power on phones.

Single-threaded download still stinks. Maybe the new HTTP stuff will make it better, maybe not. Google drive is one of the few sites that maxes out a fast internet connection single-threaded; until others adopt those tweaks, why bother? I believe they have a better TCP control algorithm plus some other stuff?

That may be true for the US, but here I am in France with an unlimited 4G data cap for $16/month.

There may be a hidden limit, but it's at least greater than 200GB/month.

5G means that providers can sell higher data caps.

The real end game of the race to 5G is increased unavoidable surveilance on the general population.

5G won't provide better speeds as much as increased bandwith. Instead of IoT devices requiring a connection to your WiFi network (and thus your consent) to phone home, they will send your data over 5G, with sim cards paid for by selling your data to advertisers.

Ubiquitous internet access has a lot of exciting potential but inevitably it will make the mass surveillance problem even worse

internet over cell networks is already ubiquitous, 5g is just faster. due to short wavelength it probably won't even be consistently accessible for a long time unless you live and work in a densely populated area.

5g can support orders of magnitude more devices in a network cell. Have you ever been to a crowded outdoor area and had full data signal but no ability to complete any requests? It’s because the local network cell is oversubscribed so no new connections can be made. 5g has both smaller cells and a greater ability to support more devices in a single cell, thus making IoT 5g devices more acceptable. 4g LTE wouldn’t be able to support people having 10x the number of devices they currently have on cell networks.

Are you promoting smaller cells as a feature?

Yes? That's the design intent of 5G: geographically smaller, denser cells. However I don't think these are intended to be deployed unconditionally everywhere, just in areas of high population density or foot traffic. Not on hilltop towers kilometers away.

Think of wireless generally, like an ethernet hub. When one thing is talking, everything else needs to shut up. Or: by making the ranges shorter, you're not shouting over the people at table on the other side of the room.

I don't understand the value proposition of this from a marketing point of view. > sim cards paid for by selling your data to advertisers

Are advertisers seriously going to pay for the subscription of the SIM card of "the shiny new"™ IoT fridge or is this a hope of the telcos? Because if anybody expects me to pay for the connection of the abovementioned fridge, I'm out and I'm missing something.

The recent articles about US telcos selling location data suggest that they are in on the deal. Thus, telcos might as well make deals with IoT fridge companies to give them the data plans for free for trading in the data.

i wonder how my home based iot device will send over 5G when those frequencies are basically not even capable of going through the first obstacle they encounter. that being said, i don't have any iot device at home just due to this risk :D

I'm expecting higher costs for the consumer, increased data plan costs, new phones, less coverage. All sounds positive to fund these new networks nobody is asking for.

Did higher data plan costs happen in the transitions from 2G to 3G and 3G to 4G?

5g is a massive capex on the part of telcos due to density requirements orders of magnitude greater than 2,3,4g. Unit on every block kind of density is significantly cost increase; no way around higher prices.

Oh ho ho. Next you're going to be questioning the "race to AI". It's like you want to be forced to read articles about raccoons with distemper, instead of buzzwordy tech FUD pieces, on slow news days. Is this what you want? Is it possible, dare I say it, that you might even want want us to lose the race to racing? Why are you rocking the boat?

5G is not that much for consumers but for industries [1]. There is a number of industry use cases that are just impossible for anything other than 5G. For example, self driving cars, virtual /augmented reality, support for huge numbers of IoT devices (ie. smart city).

Also, 5G is not just higher speed / reduced latency. The core network is way more flexible than 4G. This can allow it to provide guaranteed service to specific users, like first responders. That way first responders will be able to use the way cheaper and feature rich commercial networks instead of dedicated networks as it is the case now.

The first countries to have 5G infrastructure will be able to have faster developments on these sectors.

[1] The only major difference for consumers, given how they currently use their mobile devices, is that now everyone at a live concert will be able to stream it to instagram. I do not know if it a good thing though.

1. What does 5g have with self driving cars? And specifically what does lack of 5g do to make them any more or less possible?

2. NO wireless service provides GUARANTEED anything. To anyone. That's not how physics works

1. It is not my field, but in general, self driving cars should be connected to a central entity that manages them. For more information search for "C-V2X".

2. They guarantee an SLA.

> self driving cars should be connected to a central entity that manages them

Why?

Absolutely agree with your second point. If only marketing had gotten the memo ...

Regarding your question, self driving cars have to interact with their environment. Receiving a message that indicates there is a vehicule of x,y coordinates may be better than trying to figure it out on your own using sensors. Getting the message in a timely fashion is essential, otherwise it is practically useless. 5G could be the communication channel for the message to transit, given that 5G aims to achieve lower latencies that 4G.

> Receiving a message that indicates there is a vehicule of x,y coordinates may be better than trying to figure it out on your own using sensors.

True, but that only requires the ability to communicate directly with cars near you. That's 100% doable with even 20th century technology. Something like 5G is not necessary for this at all.

> self driving cars

If a self-driving car requires network communications at all, then that's a self-driving car that's too dangerous to use.

The one issue at stake that I can think of is the manufacture of the underlying hardware infrastructure. The risk associated with relying on hardware manufactured in China for critical infrastructure seems to be of some concern for the US government. It's probably unlikely in any case, but importing Chinese-manufactured 5G modems for phone handsets would potentially pose an issue, so would using Chinese-made hardware for telecom infrastructure.

I don't think this has any bearing on what telecom companies offer consumers, or those other aspects of the '5G race'. Nonetheless, falling behind Asia in developing this technology might have other consequences.

The proper answer to losing the technological race for hardware development is to accelerate your own.

But instead the US government are doing their best to hobble China.

Has anyone found any decent reporting on how the rollout of 5G in USA is progressing? South Korea has been rolling out 5G and I found a decent article that highlighted numbers and issues.[1] But for USA all I see is marketing propaganda from the Telcos.

[1] https://www.fitchsolutions.com/corporates/telecoms-media-tec...

One of the large Australia carriers is promoting 5g as a "paid add-on".

There is some marketing material saying it'd cost an extra $15 per-month on top of your normal plan's price. With "first 12 months free" to try it out. This is a 20-30% premium for average prices.

I can see the uptake of 5g in that case being less than 5%.

4g is already fast enough for most things, so very few will actually need faster.

I'm not sure if they are completely clueless thinking people will pay extra, or they are trying to discourage large uptake.

Pricing like this is not designed so that people actually pay for it.

Instead it creates 'value' which is given away with some other product. For example: Free 5G for all business customers, all customers on an $80 plan or above, etc.

It also helps smooth demand - I don't think Telstra have invested a lot in 5G.

This title does not match what is in the article at all. It's about the race to first, not the technology in general.

The author has a point to suggest that 5G is overhyped.

Increasing data vastly will be nice, but it won't change anything fundamentally. I suspect usage will go up, caps will go up - but I don't suspect any new lines of business to come out of this.

A 'quicker 5G rollout' will not make any economy more competitive, or given them an advantage.

5G will require different tower configs and will be a pain for carriers.

I'm buying a new device right now and for the first time I'm looking to downgrade. I hardly use my data, and I could care less about all these stupid apps bothering me. I want a cheaper, simpler option.

5G will probably make 'dongles for your laptop' more in consumer range for prices, in which we may see people shift away from cable, that will be nice. And using that or pumping Netflix from my mobile to the screen might be nice.

Sorry, 'I don't suspect any new lines of business to come out of this.' is akin to '640K of memory should be enough for anybody' (falsely attributed to Gates)

There's a lot of speculation of what new lines of business and evolving lines of business spring from 5G capabilities.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-16/south-kor...

Other areas just off top of my head: Mobile gaming including Mobile VR, Autonomous Vehicles where lower latency promised by 5G is critical, and replacement of wired data services with wireless.

Mobile gaming and autonomous vehicles are already developing industries and will develop irrespective of the availability of 5G.

We're already not close to utilizing the full bandwidth power of LTE for example.

My Oculus Quest might well be soon saturating my 4G with h.265 or h.264 encoded VR streams; teleporting me and others all over.

> Mobile gaming including Mobile VR

This will be a tiny market for the foreseeable future, 5G or not.

> Autonomous Vehicles where lower latency promised by 5G is critical

Far from critical, autonomous vehicles that require network connectivity at all are a terrible idea.

> replacement of wired data services with wireless.

Why is this a big deal?

> in which we may see people shift away from cable, that will be nice

I'm not so sure that matters much. Being able to switch from Comcast to one of the cell providers for my internet is more like a lateral move than an improvement.

It’s really no different than winning the supercomputer race; there is no finish line and no end.

I’d rather have the USA take its time and develop mmWave 5G hardware than the lower frequency stuff Huawei is developing, as mmWave is far more interesting, technically.

But which US companies would be working on developing that tech?

Anokiwave and Qualcomm, off the top of my head. TI has a mmWave in CMOS process, so I can see them getting in on it.

I'd never heard of that first one. Is it supposed to be an anagram of Nokia, are they related?!

No relation that I know of; it’s a US company making IC for sub array beamforming.

Not even a full finished roll out in LTE in rural areas. Telecoms don’t want to lower prices for us, so 5G is going to sell at a premium to consumers. This race about "who control 5G controls the world" is ridiculous.

Rural areas will benefit from Low-band FDD 5G.

The ironic part is that mobile 5G is basically pointless. Fixed 5G could provide competition to cable companies if it actually works, but mobile 5G’s range is so short that anywhere with mobile 5G will be getting several hundred mbps on 4G from the same site and fiber improvements necessary for 5G that 5G itself is pointless. The upside is that the areas that get a dense small-cell buildout for 5G will have way better 4G service as a result that virtually everyone can use as soon as the cells go up and the fiber is lit up for them.

Home markets are important for new technologies and services that build on the top of the new infrastructure. US companies and startups are not going be first to innovate 5G technologies and services if their home market is behind.

The US tech sector is already out from the main 4G/LTE/5G air infrastructure business except for components and mobile phones. There is only Eriksson, Nokia, Huawei and ZTE, Samsung is #5 with very tiny market share.

> US companies and startups are not going be first to innovate 5G technologies and services if their home market is behind.

That answer is really just begging the question. Why is that so important as to require such a huge push as a "race" implies?

This is similar to new car sales being an early indicator of a recession. Government answer in the wake of a coming recession? Subsidize cars.

Winning 5g race is an indication of technological leadership. But you cannot help win it forcefully. You should just watch it respectfully and draw forward looking conclusions.

Of course some people can use it instrumentally to get benefits or desired decisions.

Anyway - congrats to the winner.

https://theamphour.com/430-shahriar-discusses-5g/

I am a bit confused, according to the preceding link, 5G can’t be at all used like 4G, in particular it can’t be used from a base station to a mobile phone. Can someone explain a bit more?

Being able to burn through Verizon's 22GB "secret" data cap on my "unlimited" plan in ten minutes instead of 70 minutes at normal 4G speeds is not an upgrade in any way. Meanwhile I still can't send a text message or check my email when visiting my parents' house out in the boonies. 5G is a scam.

Isn’t parts of the US network still on CDMA? The reason Europe has had lower prices is because we have been better at infra-carrier standards and co-opetition / lowering transaction costs. Perhaps before that the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) is a great example for others to lead by.

It's not really a race. It's more like a scam.

The telecoms and equipment manufacturers want to make it seem like a race in an effort to make people demand 5G, to increase the amount of subsidies as much as possible.

I’ve read L5 autonomous cars are contingent on 5G and others say it’s not a factor. What’s the consensus here?

Sounds like there isn’t a consensus according to your own statement.

Waymo is running on public roads right now without 5G.

IMO: if 5G is required for an “autonomous” car it can’t qualify as L5. That’s a remote controlled car not an autonomous car...

It would be crazy to build a car that won't work unless you have a 5G connection.

5G, if it is really the umbrella term for ubiquitous unlimited gigabit internet access anywhere, any corner on earth, then it might be useful to self-driving vehicle, since they can download the high precision maps quickly anywhere they go.

But that is it. First of all, 5G couldn't possible live up its claim, consider the number of stations that are required and how densely they need to be placed next to each other, it only makes economical sense to deploy them to populous cities.

But most importantly, L5 driving needs to tackle its 'brain' problem, that is a highly intelligent core device to schedule the vehicle's actions regardless of weather/light/road condition/erroneous situation where accidents occurs, to name just a few, and makes sure the driver and passengers alike, are safe. I didn't see how this could happen any time soon, not to even mention the legal challenges it might be facing.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/mwc-barcelona-201...

Sadly I see only one killer feature in all 5G phones: foldable screens.

What on earth does one have to do with the other

I've seen "millimeter wave" in tsa and heard it takes a picture of you without clothes, though they now supposedly obscure it. Creepy as all get-out. Anyway, could a hijacked 5g unit do this? Seems like a serious concern.

ultrasound would be easier and cheaper...

> could a hijacked 5g unit do this?

No, for two reasons. First, the mmwave scanners require more power than 5G cell sites will provide. Second, the transmission of the radio signals is only half of the equation for this sort of thing. The other half is the sophisticated receiving systems that are required, and that 5G cell sites won't have.

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