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Comment by klondike_ | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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.

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