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Comment by youeseh | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone else think there was a race?

How about just 4G? Can we get consistent nationwide 4G? I'd be pretty happy with that.

In my tiny EU country, 4G already covers 99% of the population and unlimited data plans for homes are available from 19 EUR / month. Yet, nobody is talking about 5G or the urgent need for it.

> In my tiny EU country, 4G already covers 99% of the population and unlimited data plans for homes are available from 19 EUR / month.

Mine as well - in peak hours you're lucky to get close to 1MB/s in two bigger cities I've lived in. Also latency spikes even when the bandwidth is OK. Don't know how much 5G will help with all of this but 4G is not a good option as a primary internet connection if you work online and any upgrades would be very welcome.

That sounds like the backhaul is congested, which 5G won't do anything about at all. The good news is, it's likely much easier to upgrade the backhaul than it is to change up all the radio hardware - it's simply a decision your mobile provider/ISP has taken to not do it.

> Mine as well - in peak hours you're lucky to get close to 1MB/s in two bigger cities I've lived in. Also latency spikes even when the bandwidth is OK.

It's the same in my country.

> Don't know how much 5G will help with all of this but 4G is not a good option as a primary internet connection if you work online and any upgrades would be very welcome.

The thing is, very few people work from home, and even those who do rarely require more than 1 MB/s for the most common office tasks.

It's true, though, that 4G connection is not the best option for 8-5 software engineering. But it still makes it possible to work from anywhere in the countryside during the entire summer.

In my average EU country 4G has also great coverage, but for USA that is still a challenge: there are many low density rural areas that are too expensive to cover, so nobody does it. That is why getting 4G coverage there would be more relevant than going for 5G in a few cities.

In my G7 EU country, I regularly go out of not just 4G, but 3G coverage. E for Edge is quite common to see, which with current apps and sites effectively means no data. OK, I'm relatively rural, but doesn't require me going far out into the wilds, or even out of town.

It wasn't much better when I was last in a major city. Regular, though admittedly brief, dropouts of coverage.

No doubt in both cases the mobile company's map says great coverage. I'd settle for pervasive 3G or 4G long before caring about 5.

In a lot of the US you don't get an "E for Edge" you get a "No Service." I was just in Mansfield Ohio and my freind's T-mobile phone was more or less useless and had to be tethered to mine the whole trip, mine (which uses one of the two larger carriers with better rural coverage, mostly because of where I grew up) worked enough that we could occasionally get text messages out, we often had to find a cafe if we needed a new route or map tiles though.

Germany?

In my large East Asia country-China,4G already covers 99% of the population（1.3 billion） and unlimited data plans for homes are available from 129 rmb / month（nearly 17 EUR） for China Unicomm user.Yet, everybody is talking about 5G or the urgent need for it :-)

For the companies, academics, and countries putting time and money into developing the technologies for 5G, yes, it is a race.

I wish it were more of an archery match. How close can we get to what's right through calm carefulness and skill? Races are full of compromises and waste.

When AT&T had a monopoly, they had cell phone technology available in the 40s. It was not pushed because the thinking was that only rich people would ever need it.

Careful plodding thinking and planning ruled the day, and it took 40 years.

https://reason.com/2017/06/11/we-could-have-had-cellphones-f...

According to your article it was due to a lack of licenses, similar to the fact that there are no community run cell networks (like WiFi networks) due to a lack of licenses.

Unfortunately, we've put a giant distributed paperclip optimizer in charge of resource allocation and it really likes races.

There is a technological race. 5G will provide infrastructure where new businesses and can companies emerge.

There are tons of places in the US that are blanketed with LTE. I don't see "new businesses" emerging. Taking credit cards? Electronically managing inventory, payroll, and scheduling? You don't need much more than dial-up to do 99% of those things. In fact many large Brick and Mortar chains are still on AS/400 and do fine.

without 4G, there is no Uber/Lyft, Instagram, whatsapp, cashless etc mobile revolution. So, don't stay in your cave.

Uber/Lyft, whatsapp, cashless payment apps all work reasonably on 2G and fine on 3G. Real time video calling works great for me over 4G/LTE, in the US, China, Argentina, everywhere I’ve tried it.

I’m all for faster/better mobile Internet, but I keep seeing these claims that there’s going to be entirely new business models because of 5G and I just don’t get it. Better coverage for 4G/LTE seems like it would do a lot more good for businesses.

They can’t trick you into upgrading your phone with 5g dreams that way. 5g is what a new version of Windows used to be for computer manufacturers.

None of the things you mention require 4G. Heck, we were doing social media and messaging before 3G even existed...

Uber and Lyft exploit drivers and are only around because they can finance their losses through venture capital. Which they only get because the promise autonomous cars that will never come and because the taxi industry was broken due to lack of working regulation.

All instagram does is enable influencer and bullying.

Whatsapp is just another way for facebook to hover up all data about you and intrude on private conversation to rent out your eyeballs to advertisers.

Cashless is not a desirable state. And is much more driven by credit card companies that hope you overspent once you don't handle physical money and that hope to make a side profit by profiling the hell out of you.

So if that was the only thing that 4G provided I would be happy without it in my cave.

all concepts you mention aren’t conceptual problems. the world is better with the concepts of technology-assisted taxi hailing, and not having to carry cash (i think you’re basically alone on this one; this is the biggest and best technology change in my life in years)

regardless of your opinions of the specific problems with the current platforms, they’re not problems with the concepts... and those concepts are enabled or improved by high bandwidth mobile internet

and regardless, you’re kinda missing the point: 5g will absolutely enable new businesses (and more importantly new concepts), because it’s happened with every single bandwidth upgrade we have ever been through! you can’t conceptualise them now, because nobody has yet! if you could, you’d have started uber before uber, google before google, etc

5G solves different problems.

Panasonic(at a trade show) says they can do 'next gen GPS' with 5g. Basically better location. This could be the solution for the winter problem in self driving cars.

If (as the article claims) you have to put an access point every 700 feet, I guess location isn’t very hard to determine!

Anybody can use a differential GPS currently, you put the GSM base stations in survey mode and you make them broadcast their L2 phase.

I know there are networks doing that in some parts of the world, you have to pay to decrypt the signal they broadcast.

GNSS locations can be accurate to within a few centimeters using the right equipment as long as you have a clear view of the sky. 5G isn't going to do better, and even if it could that wouldn't be sufficient for autonomous vehicles to operate in snow.

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