Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying
wsj.com
wsj.com
I can only assume it's a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)
It always starts with "what are some things that might be enabled if bandwidth improved and latency decreased" and then just jumps immediately to some Internet of Things utopia.
Edit: weird it's a 3 short episode advertisement thing, a "live-read" ad in an interview format. These Pop science people are a great marketing/hype vector. I'm curious how much AT&T paid for this.
The ATT guy said 5g will solve bike deaths by having your bike talk to the stop light and other cars, but with machine learning!
It seems to have the same disconnect from the real world implementations that the AI sales hucksters are pushing, like those IBM Watson ads that were very obviously (to every programmer) being over sold to big businesses.
Reminds me of all the garbage that went around in the transition from AMPS to digital. I had a co-worker tell me her phone was better than mine because mine was only Edge, but hers was PCS!
The AT&T guy should have put an "e" in front of it to tap the nostalgia for 90's marketing nonsense.
eMachines, eBike, etailor, etc...
People will love 5G because it's one more G than 4G. And then AT&T can call it's version 6Ge.
Fortunately most people know not to take it too seriously or don't care either way. People typically only buy a phone when their last one dies so the sales pitch is usually between two very similar models in a store/website, with a possible up-sale for 5G (until 5G is standard). A small price bump because someone believed the sales guy's technobabble is not that big of a deal really, which is probably why there's no lawsuits unlike drug mislabeling.
Which is different than people buying a whole new phone just because they heard about 5G, which is a small minority of early-adopters who are always getting burned by tech churn.
Half or more product differentiations they think up for cell phones is mostly useless or quickly adopted everywhere. 95-99% of the UX will be the same thanks to the Android or iOS and highly competitive hardware specs.
For the large number of people, probably a majority, who in most months don't hit their caps their two main annoyances with wireless performance are poor signal and things taking too long.
Eventually, the carriers will increase bandwidth caps.
What happened instead is that it enabled Youtube, Skype, Facetime, and that did change the world.
I have a gigabit pipe that works just fine on a speed test, but most real-world usage doesn’t go that fast because of bottlenecks elsewhere.
A fancy new 5G tower also has underutilized connectivity to it.
London Density 14,670/sq mi (5,666/km2) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London)
Denver Density 4,519.94/sq mi (1,745.15/km2) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver)
London has a population density 3.25x that of Denver.
Why exaggerate when the facts are on your side? Or more specifically, why make an explicit numeric claim without confirming that it's correct?
I personally dislike the phrase and try to avoid it. But if one is going to use it, I think it should be used correctly.
(I agree with jdietrich that the definition of "city" matters)
I don't think it's particularly useful to attempt to pin down a fixed definition of the boundaries of either city, particularly one as amorphous as London. Suffice it to say that London is densely populated, Inner London is even more densely populated and rush hour on the tube is genuinely insane; Londoners regularly encounter densities that simply don't occur in most US cities outside of a football stadium and have a subsequent need for far higher throughput than 4G can deliver.
Claims from "what I've heard" /are/ informed claims; your anecdotal information doesn't automatically beat other people's anecdotal information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTUs_2hq6Y
But I will add your data point to my opinion of 5G.
There are two phases in the 5G NR standard. The first phase relies on some elements of the LTE control plane to coordinate data services. These data services use new numerologies for their OFDM modulation, vastly more flexible resource block, allocation, improved error control coding, lower maximum latency, better channel allocation, and standardized MIMO support - all of which will improve reliability and throughput, especially in crowded channel conditions.
Phase 2 formally introduces millimeter wave signaling - this is what does primarily propagates through line of sight (LOS) channels. Clever beam forming and beamsteering can alleviate this to an extent but these cells are intended for dense urban environments or interiors of large buildings. These will supplement the lower frequency bands when available but 5G NR devices will still use the lowband when mmWave is unavailable. Phase 2 also switches over to an entirely 5G NR backed control plane (Standalone, or 5G NR SA) which has its own reliability and throughput improvements though these will all happen in the lowband since mmWave isn't suited for these tasks.
Interestingly, it might not be the experiment but rather the experimenters themselves. When this study came out, I mentioned it to my girlfriend at the time (a veterinarian), and she pointed to research [1] that suggests a correlation between the presence of male researchers and stress in mice. It's plausible that if male researchers were present, the increased stress response could contribute to greater susceptibility to certain cancers (it was only the male mice in the 5G study that were affected).
I have no idea how the study was done or the genders of the researchers who participated, but it's worth considering that other variables may be at play. Perhaps it should be replicated under an all-female research environment if it wasn't originally.
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/male-researchers-stress-out-rode...
How will telecomm's justify that ? what do you see as the big use cases ?
Why would that be "despite"? That would have to be being confident in its failure despite having information that it would be a success. Surely they're confident in its failure because the information they have says it will be bad?
And then your comment becomes "I'm laughing because you're confident in your beliefs" which is content-free smugness, or "I'm laughing at you because you don't know what I know" which is more or less the same, if not worse.
Thanks for all the info. Why don't we just skip phase 2 and continue using wifi?
Counterpoint: streaming audio and video were singularly enabled by faster internet. That is restructuring multibillion-dollar industries. The iPhone, one could argue, and through it real-time social media, are products of mobile internet.
There are legitimate new capabilities that will likely erupt from cheaper, faster mobile internet. If the playground is in Shenzhen versus Silicon Valley, that’s where resources should be allocated to explore that potential.
I’m not arguing for 5G. (I don’t know enough about it.) But “it’s just faster internet” is a facile counterargument.
just give me the lower prices we were promised by the carrier oligopoly in exchange for all those governmental concessions (not holding my breath).
AR on the other hand has potential.
AR stands for Augmented reality, the overlay of information and artificial constructs over the real world in such a way as as one can both perceive the artificial constructs and interact with the real world simultaneously.
Nobody will view this by holding their phone up and looking at the world through their phone screen. Real products in development use glasses. Science fiction depicts contacts, currently impossible, or some sort of implant, even less realistic.
Remember we wrote about going to the moon prior to being able to actually go there.
It's a fun novelty, but it should not be conflated with VR. If you move your head forwards or backwards (as opposed to rotating your head), the environment does not adjust itself to match your new position, because it's just a prerecorded video. Without this ability, you can't trick your brain into believing it's in a real place.
I only brought up 360° video because the GP mentioned "livestreaming videos to VR headsets [at] 2x8k@120hz", and there's no other type of video you can stream to a VR headset†. Real VR, with positional tracking, needs a 3D modeled environment, like a video game. We may be on the cusp of being able to stream traditional video games, but VR needs much lower latency than that—around 30ms for absolutely everything in the chain.
I don't think AR is any different in this regard. If the processing is being done on-device the assets are small and you don't need 5G. If the processing is being done remotely, you've got that same latency problem.
How does 5G benefit AR?
---
† Well, okay, there have been some weird experiments, but they preclude standard resolution measurements. They also require an order of magnitude more data—5G won't cut it.
We’re only just starting to be able to do this with traditional video games (Stadia), where significantly higher latency is acceptible, and even that’s largely unproven.
If I’m wrong, well, I still think we should proove this tech over traditional cable + ethernet connections first, which already exist today.
But in that case , downloading the data locally seems like a real option.
I think you underestimate image sizes for modern AR/VR applications. For example, good quality light-field can take few gigabytes for one image. Also there is a big UX difference between downloading full image ahead and downloading parts on-demand (similar to modern video streaming - today we never download full video ahead).
What are the legitimate new capabilities you're thinking of, which many people desire, but can't have primarily because of (mobile) internet speeds?
If I could pick up a 5g signal I could opt for that instead. It's like suddenly having an option for installing a dish instead of whatever the cable company serves you.
As far as speed, I'm not holding my breath. In a previous apartment I did actually have fiber but it wasn't the game changer I thought it would be. Downloads and streaming are capped at a point. The only way to actually use all of this horsepower I had was with bittorrent, and boy it downloaded stuff so fast that the write speed on my drive became a significant bottleneck. I even demoed Googles project stream and while that worked OK, I still got a lot of hickups and low quality stream moments that showed how far away the delivery technlogy was (AC:O was playable but there was way too much latency for a multiplayer game to stream with this technology), even if I had the very best internet on the market.
Who doesn't want more options for home broadband?
I'll believe it when it happens.
DSL was going to break the chains of the dialup overlords.
Cable was going to break the chains of the DSL overlords.
Fiber was going to break the chains of the cable overlords.
Fixed wireless was going to break the chains of the fiber overlords.
My prediction: 5G data providers will pull the same tricks as what we have now. Pricing will be about the same as it is for legacy methods/speeds. You can only get the highest speeds and pay the highest prices even if you don't need all that bandwidth, unless you're part of a government poverty program. In which case, you'll get DSL speeds for cable prices. Signing up will be easy. Getting out of the contract will be hard. There will be mandatory fees for things you don't need or want.
It's the same group of companies. Why would we expect any different just because the delivery method has changed?
The market might not function as competitively as it should in the US, but it still functions - new, cheaper tech eventually results in lower prices for consumers.
I was going through some old papers a couple of weeks ago and found some bills. My cable ISP bill from 2002 that I found was $103/month after taxes and fees. Seventeen years later, I pay $106/month.
Back then, the only other choice I had for internet was dialup. Today my other choices include DSL, fiber, and fixed wireless. So, I have more competition now; but I don't have a lower bill.
5G may add IoT which can have value for everybody if done well (or not if it ends up as a sensation of being monitored 24/7 even without privacy issue)
I can see how all of these things might benefit from 5G's higher bandwidth and lower latency, but they should also be more than possible right now. So if there's some untapped audience for a communal online karaoke app, I really don't think 4G networks are what's holding them back.
This type of thing is where I get pretty frustrated with 5G talk. It's a lot easier to come up with ideas than it is to build them, so if we can't even come up with concrete ideas, I don't think 5G networks are going to make the difference.
All of the proposals I see either don't make any sense under scrutiny (live streamed AR), or could easily be accomplished in another way (smart light bulbs).
Faster mobile data is great. I'm just not expecting it to transform society.
It would be way less convenient, though. So I don't. I don't know which device I'll end up watching on, and don't want to deal with syncing and all that shit.
Which is way more expensive than streaming services. Prohibitively so for wide swaths of the general population who don't have tech industry salaries. The cost of one TV show from iTunes can approach the price of several months of Netflix.
With copyright reform, that needn't be the case.
(Note that for many consumers, Netflix is already considered too expensive. Several people sharing the cost of one account is pretty common from what I've seen.)
Fact is that streaming is just convenient. Like really convenient. I wish there was more stuff that I could download and listen to offline, but it's naive to suggest that streaming has no advantages. We stream while data connected because we download things in an ordered manner (vs how normal downloading is done). That's nice that I don't have to wait for a full movie or song to be completely downloaded to listen to it.
Maybe you don't subscribe to channels and the system could never anticipate your whims and desires... but I wager it would work great for most users.
I also think the current copyright system is insane, but streaming genuinely is more convenient than buying physical media. If anything, DRM makes media available through streaming _less_ convenient.
IF you have children, you're probably familiar with the concept of streaming Frozen for the 50th time. If you're using netflix or spotify or similar, you're probably also familiar with the concept of something that was previously available just vanishing because of circumstances outside of your control.
Streaming is mostly a DRM/copyright enforcement tool. The only time streaming is actually adding value is live streaming.
4G is perfectly fine for that, but if I Street watching a 40 minute video before I go on the tube, I can’t finish once underground
If it was line speed, a 40 minute episode would download with current 4g while I was waiting for the next train. On WiFi it would be down before I walked out of range.
Stuff being available exclusively through streaming is certainly a way to enforce DRM, but that doesn't mean people wouldn't still largely be streaming even if stuff was available for download without DRM too.
Streaming takes that choice away from the user in the first place. With nothing gained in exchange.
That's like saying "people don't need to listen to the radio for the same pop songs, they can just play a CD with them"
When technology gets a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful, a lot less power consuming, the magic of the market creates completely new categories of use that unlock new demand at consumers.
Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.
5G is a step on the way.
For stationary objects like TVs and lights we already have wifi, and a range of simpler low-power options used by IoT basestations. What does 5G bring to the table here?
I say this while also recognizing that most IoT stuff today is overhyped BS.
A refrigerator will still keep things cold. A stove will still heat things up. An AC will still AC. Other than home automation systems that go belly up when their servers go offline, most things do the same thing they did 50 years ago.
5g isn't revolutionary.
At every step, you could always say "it is just faster". Only in retrospect can you ever see how world changing "faster" was.
At least if enough people are willing to care about, advocate and pay for this feature.
How are you getting power to the light?
For the record. I don't think that there will be a physical sim card in your bathroom light but I think that all these wireless communication standards (infrared remote controls, wifi, bluetooth, 4g mobile data ...) will converge into one and the use of that will be so cheap that it will be used everywhere.
Not that you'd ever use them for a light bulb.
https://www.automation.com/products/enocean-announces-wirele...
But it won't be cheap for the consumer. At best, our data plans will stay the same price. But more likely they'll rise and, well, I just don't think people give a crap enough about having a sim card in their TV to pay the extra. Maybe if you make SF money, but most people don't.
I think, too, people are starting to get teched out. Just a little for now, but it's happening.
I would still need a wifi-router as my laptop and my tv does not support 4G. But my guess is eventually those devices will support xG mobile data and my wifi-router will be a thing of the past.
I went the Sprint 50GB (really 100GB) @ $60 per month.
...for entirely political reasons. Here in the UK, you can get unlimited 4G data (with 5G in some areas) for $25 a month. If you pay through the nose for shitty service, take it up with Ajit Pai.
You can say "we don't need to frantically rush to deploy 5G" without also saying "nobody will ever benefit from 5G".
Increasingly, consumers don’t even own a personal computer. (Unless we’re being pedantic and calling our phones PCs.)
Asking what a PC will do with faster mobile internet will be misleading.
But sometimes, some do. That margin is what describes new opportunity.
Somebody like you or I might frequently max our our cellular connections, but I wager most users never do. And how would they? Streaming 4k YouTube videos onto a screen smaller than a postcard? It just won't make a difference for them.
This is the 640kb argument.
Being able to download a move at the gate? Potentially game changing. Being able to stream video from a drone or car on the road to centralised servers? Potentially game changing.
People with capital are willing to bet this technology has legs. Your not being able to figure out why is not a good reason to block the investment.
G5 will also reduce latency a lot, which is another vector that will open new possibilities.
Even as a techie, at some point I want to draw the line.
Sure. But that just means that the products exploiting this technology won't be developed in your neighbourhood but instead in Korea or China.
No. Itll help people watch someone on youtube play Fortnite.
Prove me wrong. That's the point to a discussion. You share points of view. But if I follow your path of discourse, I could just say you're a sheep that'll believe whatever silicon valley tells you.
However, I mostly argue that the taxpayer cost doesn't justify the gains. It's expensive and most counties and cities have to foot the bill or heavily subsidize it. If the telecom company wants to foot the bill. Good on them. No arguement here. If the city has to, go fuck yourselves. Its diminishing returns to a ridiculous level.
Really we have no idea of the the doors it could happen. In the 90s many people thought the internet was a gimmick or a fad. Today the most successful companies are built on it. It's very likely the same will be true for 5G enabled technologies and companies.
5G is not a revolutionary tech when we already have wifi and 4G.
This is the same argument badmouthing the Internet because of social media which ignores that the presocial media Internet is still there and just as vibrant.
And most are served perfectly by Bluetooth Low Energy, using a smartphone as local compute, storage and network uplink. The few cases where that's not ideal are so few that they may as well use a regular 4G uplink without much downside (it's not like they need the bandwidth or will create a high device density)
I think you’re conflating a few things though.
1) 5G spec improvements which do exist and are measurable today 2) your perceived value of those improvements 3) the FCC mandates in the US, which is currently being challenged
You might not want the improvements. Others may. The real issue, IMHO, is the FCC mandates. Although the challenge has a risk for technology too. If the courts agree that there is a possible health risk to RF I have no idea what kind of pandora’s box that opens.
5G offers:-
- bigger numbers and promise of a brighter future for consumers that are impressed by that kind of thing and are happy to trade their privacy for perceived benefits / status.
- And probably some more tangible benefits for those who would attempt to track or advertise as much as possible to monetize the masses.
- And as you clearly understand, nothing particularly beneficial to the rest of us, but we'll join in when eventually forced to through one upgrade or another as usual.
5G with traditional towers is completely different and not an issue.
This is what the US did with 4G and is one of the main reasons for the US's web dominance in the past decade.
20 years ago computers had 32 MB of RAM. So no, they won't run a modern website.
We've been at a plateau of roughly 1-2GB RAM for most of the past decade, masked by the fact that devices have been shrinking (phones replacing desktops) rather than resource allocations growing. Which is a fairly frequently-encountered trend in technology.
We create some design, it proves useful, and for a time, focus is on increasing size, power and performance. Then a shift occurs and the focus is on smaller, more distributed systems.
James Watt's steam engines typically produced 5-10 horsepower output, and he built 500 of these by 1800. Following expiration of his patents, and the adoption of high-pressure steam engines, a period of increasingly large and more powerful systems began ... until the realisation that mobile power was a thing, and electric generation, leading to steamships and locomotives.
With electrical power distribution, whole factories were transformed from shaft-and-belt distribution from a 10-20 hp prime mover to electrical power distribution to individual motors, some of which rivaled or exceeded earlier entire steam engines, but many of which operated with fractional horsepower, delivering motive force precisely where needed.
Locomotives grew more powerful and faster, until internal combustion engines allowed 10 horsepower cars to reach speeds of as much as 30 miles an hour on city streets or country roads, without rails or being bound to fixed routes.
Console radios became portable became handheld became a smudge of silicone you probably don't realise still exists within your phone (virtually all are FM receivers).
Warehouse-sized computers shrank to refrigerators, cabinets, towers, pizzaboxes, luggables, portables, laptops, notebooks, tablets, and phones. There's little reason for even a desktop computer to be much more than the size of a paperback beach read these days, other than port size.
The IoT (the "S" stands for "Safety") is the equivalent of putting compute power where it's needed (or not, as the case may be), but it's so cheap to do, and cheaper than equivalent non-compute-based means, that it's become increasingly difficult to buy silicone-free basic appliances and components.
Many of these small systems don't have huge resource allocations, but they're sufficient to the task. They're not end-user interactive devices ... except where they are, with the Twitter-enabled refrigerator (that's a Web browser running on the display).
Web designers have been buidling on the assumption of ample resources, or have used "requires recently-acquired hardware" as a market-segmentation technique (the poor won't buy your dosh but can't afford the kit required to run your website, so feature-block them out and pre-slim your conversion funnel -- I don't condone this at all, but it apparently works).
But there's no inherent need in transmitting a few kb worth of actual text and a few ten-thousand-word pictures to do so. 20-year-old kit should handle that fine, really.
You don't need a SIM card or 5G for that. Technologies like 802.15.4, or even simpler, are more than enough.
Hopefully we don't get there before proper regulation of tech companies is put in place.
When you can have a smartbulb and a smartphone app, if you already have a smartphone and wifi access point?
When you can buy a wireless doorbell system for $12 which is a free-floating button and triggers a mains powered doorbell remotely? https://www.amazon.com/wireless-doorbell/s?k=wireless+doorbe...
All of that is cheaper than buying, and paying a qualified electrician to run, 10m of cable to a light switch and then plaster/box/paint over it.
I wonder over the long run which is better - hard wiring or using batteries?
It already is. I've got wireless light buttons in some rooms because it's too expensive to put new wires in the walls.
It doesn't require a lot of bandwidth, though.
Not doing this for 5G will basically just hand hundreds of billions of dollars in jobs and growth to China.
The economic value of high resolution mobile streaming seems rather low, at best. Most likely negative, because most content is just time-wasting, and because content that actually matters tends to not depend so much on resolution beyond SD or basic HD (720p).
Other potential applications, as mentioned elsewhere, tend to run into 5G not being fast enough either (once you figure average speeds and not max theoretical speeds), or latency being too high, or the bottleneck being on the remote side.
4G, despite being ubiquitous, costs a lot for service and is power-hungry, not good qualities for most IoT-type applications. 5G might be better than 4G for mobile side energy use, but unless it's close to 802.11ax levels and mobile providers offer cheap bandwidth-limited service plans, I don't see why anyone would use it for IoT applications. That leaves mobile device applications, and people are already too glued to their mobile devices. I'm sure new businesses will capitalize on increased bandwidth from 5G, but I'm doubtful that it will benefit society.
5G antennas near the ground can be easily vandalized.
They really cannot, at least with quality levels that make people actually want to watch them.
> The economic value of high resolution mobile streaming seems rather low, at best.
Many multi-billion dollar companies and streaming services would disagree. As would many investors.
> Most likely negative, because most content is just time-wasting, and because content that actually matters tends to not depend so much on resolution beyond SD or basic HD (720p)
This is entirely your opinion about what content you prefer. Once again, there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars that says otherwise.
> 5G might be better than 4G for mobile side energy use, but unless it's close to 802.11ax levels and mobile providers offer cheap bandwidth-limited service plans, I don't see why anyone would use it for IoT applications.
This is not the problem 5G solves. It solves latency, availability and throughput.
> I'm sure new businesses will capitalize on increased bandwidth from 5G, but I'm doubtful that it will benefit society.
You are doubtful that the creation of numerous companies, highly paid jobs and adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the US economy won't benefit society?
We can already guess at some use cases. AR, VR, or other types of environment simulation. Data processing for vehicles: cars, trucks, drones. And I'm sure that people will figure out more things they can do. But the notion of "there isn't anything else" so why do we need more, is like saying 640K is all you'll ever need (I know he didn't actually say that, but the myth stands)
I'd posit that happens not because your connection is too slow per se, but because your Wifi/LTE coverage is spotty, and speeds on the margins of coverage can be very slow.
So the real problem is coverage, not speed.
But my point is that there's the consideration that it takes half a second to download 500Mb (roughly a 720p video). So if you have 0.5s uninterrupted that's pretty convenient. I'm also pretty positive that coverage will increase from current conditions (I don't see a reason why it wouldn't). So the speed helps with the spottines. Basically what I'm saying is you don't need as long of a connection to download the same amount. If your spottiness is the same then you get more on 5G. Alternatively since it is 10x the speed, that would be equivalent to 10x spottines (which were not considering a fallback to 4/3G).
However, like in Florida, telecom lobbied the fuck out of the state to cap the lease rate to $150 a box and a lot less out of pocket for the telecom. I'm a capitalist and a Republican. But that shit right there, can kiss my hairy butthole.
I guess what also angers me is the unicorn dreams and wishes people think 5g is. It's a business. Telecom gives zero shits about innovation or making the world a better place. They want their pound of flesh and will take the blood too. 4g payouts have slowed for them. That's why they want to suck more blood using 5g.
It's usually a huge hassle to get stuff working on a phone, especially if it requires hardware support. It's not the greatest platform for innovations.
Personally, I’d much appreciate full-coverage, limitless, unthrottled, can-be-tethered, cross-border, always available (unlike in Central London) 4G. If mobile network operators can’t even achieve that, maybe they’re not up to the job of setting up 5G.
It won't reshape society, but it could reshape geopolitics.
The US has had a unique position to monitor the internet thus far. With 5G that could shift (if large swathes of the world use Chinese hardware).
As in all things, every order brings new changes distinguishable from the previous order.
Is it because it will replace wired internet as well? Or the ubiquitous nodes allow detailed location tracking? It will be managed by a skynet inspired AI? Or the fact China has taken the lead in implementing it?
Whatever the case it's a bit weird and I wonder what we don't know.
They said it about 4G as well, and sure, a lot became possible with mobile devices because of it. But all in all, it's just faster internet.
At the same time wireless dramatically reduces the cost per household served. The fan-out problem for wired internet is brutal. It can cost almost as much to bring fiber from a subdivision into each house as it does to bring it to the subdivision in the first place. (It’s way easier to just string fiber along some utility poles to the edge of a subdivision than to then trench it through a couple of hundred yards.)
You may be shocked to hear that Verizon or Spectrum won’t provide cheap or timely service to competitors looking to rent pole space.
It may, on rare occasions, disrupt an existing monopoly. But only on the way to installing a new one.
Something that does confuse me though, is the way 5G is being touted as the solution to better home internet in the US. It only going to fast in cities, which are the perfect place for fibre or even wireless ISP using normal WiFi running point-to-point between buildings.
US poor home internet seems to be driven by lack of competition, 5G is one way of increasing competition. But surely trying to legislate local-loop unbundling (which is what happens in most of the world) would be a cheaper quicker way to drive competition?
Coming from the privileged position of living in a place with a cheap unlimited 1Gpbs home internet connection, it’s hard to see what 5G brings to the table, except perhaps a better mobile connection in train stations and concert arenas.
But so far the problem seems to be simple density related. Laying/installing new cabling does not worth it in many places, because of the overhead costs. (The fixed costs.)
> All I’m asking is that the next time you hear a wireless industry person talk about the “race” to 5G, stop and ask them why it’s a race. Ask who the competitors are, and what happens if we come in second place. See if you buy the answer. I suspect you won’t hear anything convincing.
Faster internet is of course great in and of itself, but I'm not convinced it's deserving of public subsidies or regulatory exemptions, particularly in large cities that already have access to fast broadband. Furthermore, I'm quite concerned about NASA's warning that 5G will weaken our ability to forecast the weather, including life-or-death phenomena like hurricanes.
nobody at the T-Mobile store knows anything
Its a fun thought exercise, but just smile and nod.
The whole point of going into a brick and mortar store is just to see how the improv troupe will lie to you this time.
NASA issued no such warning.
5G would interfere with one satellite-based moisture measure around populated areas. NOAA’s commentary was around how that one measure would need to be statistically tweaked or supplemented. (The headlines resulted from NOAA’s head warning the Congress that if the latter didn’t give him funding for these tweaks, our forecasts would become dramatically worse.)
Hurricanes, moreover, build over oceans. AT&T can’t keep a call in my Manhattan apartment; it’s going to be a while before 5G signals are making it to the middle of the Atlantic.
> With this reduced forecast skill, the European model would not have predicted 2012′s Superstorm Sandy hitting the Northeast coast several days in advance, Jacobs said. Instead, the model would have steered the storm out to sea. Lead time to prepare for the storm would have been cut short.
Was The Washington Post mistaken?
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/05/23/head-noaa-...
No, they’re reporting on a valid dialectic. The topic of the story is the discussion, not the science. (The Post is a political paper. That their May story produced zero further reporting from reputable sources is a hint.)
In lieu of listening to the hearing [1], the American Institute of Physicists (AIP) provides a good summary [2].
TL; DR The Science Committee is debating emission limits. Nobody suggests scrapping 5G.
[1] https://science.house.gov/hearings/the-future-of-forecasting...
[2] https://www.aip.org/fyi/2019/noaa-warns-5g-spectrum-interfer...
Neither am I! I am suggesting (and advocating) that we slow down so that these concerns can be taken seriously. Quoting from The Verge again:
> How did the wireless industry respond to [meteorological concerns]? By writing a blog post accusing meteorologists from across three government agencies of “risking our 5G leadership.” The implication, of course, is that worrying about detecting major weather events could make us lose the race.
That’s kind of a silly and easily-answered question by itself, especially for tech.
If you asked anyone with a minimal business background they’d have an easy answer for that: it’s a strategy leveraging first-mover advantage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage
In tech, there are tons of historical instances of imperfect implementations gaining high market share because of first-mover advantage. It’s a really effective tech strategy. Switching costs, vendor lock-in, and technical debt are huge driving forces for this.
Companies that manufacture critical infrastructure within one's own legal/political jurisdiction(s) can be held accountable -- whereas those actions wouldn't be as possible for those outside of that jurisdiction.
Or to put it more bluntly -- cyber warfare has been going strong for at least a couple of decades now and has only escalated in recent years.
My beef with 5G is the arguments for these disruptive rollouts are almost entirely bullshit. The United States is not in a race to drop a telephone pole with a short range antenna in front of my home.
In the name of national security, Verizon and AT&T essentially get to do whatever they want, with no third party input. The FCC mandates lower rates for pole rent and allows new poles to be placed anywhere. In my case, Verizon put a pole in my neighbors lawn about 12 feet from an existing pole.
Why does Verizon get a government subsidized ability to roll out infrastructure? Why doesn’t Spectrum or Comcast get it for their fiber and coax plant?
Last week I got upgraded from 4G to 5G for home broadband here in London, UK. It just became commercially available in my area (on Three)
As I said in another comment, my average speeds went up from 5-10Mbps to 150-250Mbps and peak ones from 20-25Mbps to 350-400Mbps.
It absolutely is the game changer it's advertised to be in terms of enabling new real-world use cases.
Remember how video streaming was theoretically possible on 3G but totally shit in practice until 4G came along ? 5G is a similar kind of step up. You can expect an order magnitude more bandwidth on mobile than with 4G, and that matters.
In other words : the hype is real.
A small scale roll-out is absolutely not indicative of real-world performance.
In Glasgow, I'm getting around 5Mbps on Three over 4G. In Japan and South Korea I regularly got far in excess of 100Mbps over 4G.
It's more about backhaul bandwidth and capacity planning than radio technology. 4G is more capable than you'd think, and any speed real-world increase we see with 5G is almost certainly down to better network design.
Edit: autocorrect typo - "tech logo" to "technology"
I won't go into great detail, why Three failed to acquire 4G spectrum and how it was subsequently awarded significantly valuable frequency from EE in the process. However, there is a lot more to how Three (Broadband) came to acquire frequency in the 3.4─3.8GHz spectrum. There was no auction neither were there any wars. It was via the acquisition of UK Broadband & Relish, which was already a part of PCCW. It was originally awarded the spectrum, contingent upon certain stipulations ie. building, maintaining and continued investment in telecoms infrastructure.
The current 5G product might bear the moniker, but it is still using the infrastructure put in place by UKBG Relish in parts of Central & Greater London. The speeds are also dependent upon relevant upgrades to the masts, operator equipment, backhaul etc., more importantly the UE has to be up-to-date to take advantage of any speed boosts. It will still not count as real 5G for sometime yet, as there are standards which are still being ratified and other players have yet to join the game.
It would be naive to assume that Vodafone, the biggest operator by spectrum holdings, followed by BT/EE, will just defer their incumbent position, without bidding next year!
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/08/three-uk-aim-f...
https://www.capacitymedia.com/articles/3659839/Three-UK-agre...
An increase in upload speed would be a game changer.
That download speed can stream 4k w/o issue. The upload speed could use some improvements, I can imagine better scenarios if I could stream high res video off to a cloud AI processing system!
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 and parts of the largest cities.
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.
This is just a microcosm if a larger problem: municipal governments hold back progress. Right now, my Maryland county is lobbying to get veto power over a much-needed expansion of bridge capacity between the western and eastern shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Folks are also lobbying hard to shut down already-built light rail stations in the county. Municipalities make it impossible to densify urban areas, demolish obsolete buildings, build transit, build fiber, etc. Remember when San Francisco used to stop fiber deployment because some people thought the fiber cabinets were ugly? 5G is just the latest in a long list of things where a minority of loud voices holds up progress for everyone.
Technologists are jealous of why places like Japan have such great infrastructure. They do because they don’t give local interests veto power over infrastructure. They don’t let environmental and historical preservation laws turn every attempt at infrastructure development into years to decades of litigation. Tokyo is criss-crossed with spiderwebs of fiber on utility poles. They don’t hold that up because some NIMBYs complained about the view. That’s how you make progress.
You do you, and I'll do me.
If you take that to mean "a waste disposal plant gets built right next to your house" then you have a point.
If you take that to mean "we're replacing this single family home with a small apartment building" then you're really going too far.
As a Marin county resident..you and I have a different view of progress.
We're not maximally rational actors. People follow the group, authority figures, the status quo, and fear what they don't understand. A Facebook post is read much more than a 30 page peer reviewed statistical study.
Ionizing radiation cause DNA damage and cancer, the damage level can be both computed and measured.
Non-ionizing radiation only causes temperature increase - lightbulb and microwave alike. The only difference is how deep the heat penetrates, and how many watts are pumped into the subject. The WiFi router is damaging in the same way as a very small lightbulb, and much less so than sitting in the sun.
They generally chose not to believe me and stick with the "the government is going to give us all cancer because... ...money?" narrative, but I did change the occasional mind.
And yeah, all the people who freaked out about radio towers and electrical transmission lines are now freaking out about 5G. The best bit is how an article that stated "5G could interfere with weather radar" was converted by their hive-mind panic into "5G will change the weather!!!"
I wish I was making that up.
WiFi is a lot like a microwave, just with some important differences. WiFi is just modulated and about 1/1000th the power.
There are real reasons why SAR regulations exist.
I blame the misunderstanding squarely on journalists who picked up early stories about SAR limit studies and did an awful job of explaining them.
You aren't at fault, neither is the person telling you that both lions and house cats are both cats. Over time, these early misunderstandings iron themselves out, and everyone sees a lion for a lion and a domestic cat for a domestic cat. Ignore the early public recoil from any new concept, it's not worth fretting over.
People who say "WiFi is like a microwave" aren't trying to educate other people about the EM spectrum. They're trying to fearmonger by saying "WiFi is cooking you like a microwave".
Saying 4G->5G for most modems is just a software upgrade for most modems is not quite accurate. The RF hardware itself is generally not a full SDR. There are predefined RF paths tuned for the bands in 4G/5G. So it’s a little more than a software upgrade. Theoretically this is possible but I think companies like Qualcomm are too worried about pushing their new hardware instead of software. I do think it should move in this direction and it would benefit companies like Qualcomm to do this by selling software updates.
If the high frequency set was left out of 5Gs first round no one would have objected to the upgrade.
I find the "We need 5G so we can have real time translation and autonomous cars" one of the dumbest arguments that can be made and it's pandering to an uneducated public. Why do we need more speed and connectivity for those things when we have better and better ML processors on Teslas and Google moving some voice recognition algos directly to devices? It's a bullshit argument.
There's a subset that will object to anything involving radio because it's electro-magnetic RADIATION and RADIATION causes cancer!
Mm waves may not be harmful to humans but there are some studies that show retinal damage in mice at certain frequencies. Until at least some studies on humans have been done we should not all jump into this like nothing can go wrong and it's guaranteed safe because communication is cut automatically on interference.
Source: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/am-fm-radio-holds-strong-f...
https://nypost.com/2017/11/08/americans-check-their-phones-8...
Example: checking 100 phone notifications about spam email is probably less important to society than a radio alert about a tornado warning.
I'd expect people mostly listen to radio because they are bored while driving, which has about as much "importance".
Dead phones and offline towers are not unheard of in disaster situations.
For example: https://twitter.com/CarmenScurato/status/910957644256546817
I doubt it's either of those things. We can't begin to make quantitative comparisons with those bare facts. I just thought we could make a very simple qualitative deduction--that terrestrial radio is far more popular than many people believe.
This is what it comes down to for me. We have housing crises, debt crises, infrastructure funding crises, and opiate crises all across the country. There are real and significant returns to investment on fixing those. Let's start there.
The one use case I've run into might be robot cars, probably lower latency/higher bandwidth. I don't know enough about where the intelligence actually lives or how much in the way of inter-car communications is actually required though.
Is 5G actually innovative? Are we talking order of magnitude improvements over 4G?
Cause right now all I hear is that 5G achieves faster speeds and added throughput by simply putting more towers and access points around. That doesn't sound like innovative engineering. At that point, just wire fiber everywhere and create a giant Wifi mesh network with an access point at every house. Like that would give faster internet, but not very innovative.
Normally a good innovative tech would cost less, take up less resources, and achieve higher speeds and throughput. I'm not sure 5G is that from what I heard.
EDIT: Even if you downvote, I am asking a question that I'm interested in hearing answers for, so please still try and answer my questions. Thank you.
It's at least as big a jump as 3G to 4G was.
The hype is real.
5G theoretically is similar to when cable modems moved from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3. Docsis 2 ran over a single channel (a single frequency range) and if that channel filled up it could switch to another channel. Docsis 3.0 allowed modems to bond to multiple channels at once, significantly reducing the ability for the line to fill up, and giving people much greater speeds. This is when average speeds in the cable modem internet world went from 12mbps to 100mbps.
In a similar vain, 5G can span the entire frequency range (up to 96ghz I believe), so the closer someone is to a pole the higher their frequency range can span, reducing bandwidth on lower frequencies and providing higher speeds. Those who are far from the pole might be running 5g at the 4g frequency range, but because that will be only a few people far enough away, the bandwidth should be faster and more responsive, even on the 4g range.
People on this thread are saying things like, "The more people that adopt 5g the slower it will go." but as counter intuitive as it is, the more people who are on 5g the faster everyone's speeds will be.
All cell companies have to do is upgrade their existing 4G towers to 5G and over time everyone gets better internet, even if no more poles are laid out. Though, without more poles, the improvements could be mild.
Of course I think maybe what we are seeing is the activist arm of what I've heard called "conspiritainment." It's a way for people to LARP as activists at no real inconvenience to themselves. They get to feel self righteous at no real cost.
It also feels a bit like the domestic version of what I've heard Africans call "white savior tourism" where people from the West go to Africa to fill their Instagram with how they are saving the world.
Picking a real issue usually means confronting and speaking truth to power. That often has real life consequences. Attacking windmills (even literally! that is a thing too!) does not.
Edit: I once heard an investigative journalist and PI make this joke: "How can you tell if a conspiracy theorist is right?" "Check for their name in a missing persons database."
I did not vote on it, but this is obvious pablem. An analysis of "why" is an interesting question, but aiming for platitudes repeated throughout every age in every society, is the epitome of discussion "noise".
I think call conflating 'white saviour tourism's with this phenomena is missing the point.
We live in an age where basic trust in authority has eroded. The erosion is perfectly rational. We've seen large corporations manipulate the media in crazy Orwellian language. We've become accustomed to PR stooges going on media outlets and blurbing new speak and falsey truths .
This in tune with weaponizing of almost all form of discours, meaning we are almost always at a debate where our goal is to annihilate the other person ability to convince, rather than find common grounds. Have left us totally detached from truth. Not in a sense of total objective truth, but in the sense of common ground for discourse even though we don't agree on everything.
Anti vaxxers , anti 5g, flat earthers, regardless of the validity of their claim, are a symptom of this. 1. We can't blame them for not trusting authority, when authority is found lying again and again. 2. They formed a social construct where common ground , i.e. truth, finally exists.
I believe this is an epistemological crisis. Not just virtue signaling, or a weird form of entertainment
5G Wireless: A Dangerous 'Experiment on Humanity' [1]
Could 5G put more kids at risk for cancer? [2]
How To Survive Dangers of 5G [3]
Cancer risk? 5G wireless speeds could be dangerous [4]
‘Totally insane’: Telecomm Industry ignores 5G dangers [5]
According to the New York Times, citing a declassified U.S. intelligence report from early 2017, RT videos on YouTube average 1 million viewers per day, and that is the highest among news outlets. They also say that lots of blogs and websites are picking up RTs claims and repeating them, without mentioning where they came from.
Here's a Times story on this: "Your 5G Phone Won’t Hurt You. But Russia Wants You to Think Otherwise" [6]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...
Anyone up for starting the church of 5G and sending out priests to install cell towers?
Similar to 4G, the first to 5G will create companies and startups taking advantage of the new infrastructure. As countries onboard onto 5G, these well placed companies will out compete any native companies. This is what happened with 4G in the US, and why US tech has dominated the space in the past decade.
Russia's goal is to weaken the West in any way it can.
MKBHD goes over this is a video. It is awesome if you stand right underneath a 5g site, 1-2 gbps. If you head down the road a hundred feet/30 meters the signal drops to much closer to 4g speeds.
Eventually they canned it.
Usually when I want internet that fast I want it at home or work. As such, I am a bit more excited for Wifi 6.
Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices, and bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc.
There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places.
You can imagine stadia running on mobile on the extreme. Everything cloud streamed.
Faster internet means when it matters you wont have to wait downloading a large binary, even though you dont need to be utilizing it 100% of the billing cycle.
A mobile surgery center can be operated by a world renowned md, at the comfort of yheir home
>Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices.
If these new things rely on 5g, how well will they work as soon as they move out of range of 5g internet?
>Bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc.
>There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places.
But wait. Doesn't 5g have more limited range than previous wireless generations? It seems existing LTE towers would be a better solution if you just wanted to cover the earth in high speed internet.
That's... true for all network-based technologies. Electricity is great, but if you don't have a grid connection, battery or means of generating it... you can't use it.
>But wait. Doesn't 5g have more limited range than previous wireless generations? It seems existing LTE towers would be a better solution if you just wanted to cover the earth in high speed internet.
5g includes a high-frequency version which is extremely high-throughput but short range and murdered by walls. There is a lower-throughput version at a much lower frequency which has solid range comparable with low-frequency 4g.
5g wont be an exception.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/5g-needed-to-ease-4g-lte-conge...
If 5g is reasonable to run on existing spectrum (I think this is generally true, but I don't know if mobile devices are configured for it), and it allows for more concurrent use (this is the promise, yes?), and if there are sufficient deployed devices to make it useful, refarming the spectrum to 5g would be useful for improving user experience in the situation described. Most carriers already went through this with 3g and LTE.
You could invest in more 4g infrastructure in theory, that usually means adding more towers to shrink the cell size in congested areas; it's often the case that tower density is limited by municipal agencies rather than carrier budgets.
The farce of 5G is that it’s a pure marketing ploy. It’s not driven by technical need.
And I’m not sure the congestion issue is made up. The saturation levels for 4G are quite achievable.
Right now we only have cable in most of the country, when 5g is out we will have three more last-mike providers: ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
I'm not sure who exactly they're going to end up completing with.
Not to mention many people already use AT&T and Verizon for their home internet...
People with things like nest cameras routinely go over 1tb data cap on comcast fiber. These people started moving to att. Over time, i do expect competition to work its way, on data cap matters at least.
Of course not everyone uses 500GB a month. But still, I think the data cap story has to change if 5G is really to compete with other last mile options.
Also, Today, wireless providers segment the crap out of their market, upcharging for basically anything, including "tethering." With Comcast, for all of their many faults, I can at least use my own modem, connect my NAS and have it accept connections from the open Internet, and of course connect a boatload of computers and network devices with no problems. Wireless providers, to gain parity, would have to suddenly cede control and offer plans that essentially offer no restrictions with dedicated IP addresses. It isn't clear to me that this will be priced any differently from existing last-mile providers. It's not like good wireless plans are cheap today in the U.S. as it is.
5G may in fact improve wireless speeds, but the hype has been that it will be game-changing and industry-shifting and I just don't see it. I'm sure the market will get segmented up such that many people will basically pay the same amount or possibly even more than they did for effectively the same outcome.
That’s already better than Comcast for me - faster and cheaper. Soon as they come to my town I’m switching.
But the main point is that competition will drive down prices even more.
I don’t think you appreciate what 5g is - it’s not just an improvement over 4g in speed (LTE is already fast enough), it’s a dramatic improvement in the throughput per square mile. The caps in place today are preventing small number of people from hogging the bandwidth in the area, which is no longer a problem.
https://www.verizonwireless.com/support/5g-home-faqs/
https://www.verizonwireless.com/5g/home/?cmp=KNC-C-HQ-PRO-R-...
>"A state-of-the-art router"
This is not going to be a sticking point for most people, but I hope they don't try very hard to lock you into some horrible modem-router combo. I don't even trust a Comcast modem, but here we are, with probably no standard 5G home modems... I know I can always just hook another router/AP on top, but it's obviously going to add complexity, especially depending on how head-ass the router portion of the device is, and personally as someone moving towards 10 GbE at home... it just feels like it would be unnecessarily complicated.
>300mps, and $50-$70/mo.
I think it's going to depend a lot on where you live. It would be $70/mo for me because I don't use Verizon phone plans. This does in fact beat my current Comcast plan: 250 Mbps at $96.95/mo. But despite how much I don't really like Comcast, I have to say: my uptime has been impressive, and the reliability of the performance has been good. I would not want to trade this for worse ping/jitter/reliability at a lower cost.
>But the main point is that competition will drive down prices even more.
This would be nice. It would be beneficial to people who don't even care about 5G.
The thing is, I think that it will only practically benefit people in regions where 5G exists. I remember hearing a lot about how fiber would drive down cable prices too, and it may have, but despite promises I pretty much know nobody who actually has fiber home internet.
Since 5G is wireless, perhaps it will have better odds than fiber. Still, it has a lot of challenges to go through. Even 4G is still not available consistently everywhere.
I'm less skeptical now, but I think I'll just wait and see. I'm still more or less ambivalent about the rollouts hitting roadblocks for now, until it's obvious that it really will be transformative. I'm sure mega corporations like Verizon that stand to gain a lot from this don't need our support to push this to market if its actually that big of a deal.
So then take that and remember that there is zero fundamental difference between LAN and WAN except latency based on distance and even that isn't that restrictive on Earth, particularly within a country. It's about 93 miles per millisecond RTT under ideal vacuum/air/photonic-bandgap fiber, or 70% of that in standard optical fiber, so 1/90 of a second say could easily be enough for a round trip to anything within a good 300-500 miles. And at a minimum, any application done on a LAN right now could apply directly. For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections. A lot of things that many people currently centralize could be decentralized again if it was ubiquitous that the population just WireGuard into their LAN from anywhere within a hundreds of miles or more and have an experience essentially the same as being on the LAN itself.
I mean yeah, we can imagine all sorts of future AR/VR applications or enhanced privacy via onion routing and the like (essentially being able to burn some spare bandwidth on it for the same experience as present) and the like too. But is it even necessary to imagine that far? We use LANs right now, and that for most people there is a dramatic split in their LAN/WAN experience isn't down to physics (most people aren't going more then 500-1000 miles away with great regularity).
A repeated dream. In reality thin clients suck even on a LAN. Remoting from a Windows PC to a Mac Mini sitting right next to it had unacceptable latency.
Which is rather confusing given that modern machines can encode video at over 60fps....
Same OS to same OS is better, but not great. Every few years someone comes along and tries to deploy thin clients, and it never takes off en masse, good enough for a few limited scenarios though.
It's the tech you're using. It's most likely streaming jpeg images.
Try, for example, Steam Sharing, but share something like notepad. You can minimize it and it will work as remote desktop. You'll find yourself on another computer with virtually no latency, as if it is native.
What will 5G bring us? Who knows. But if the past is any indication, it will benefit American companies if we invest in it. If not, all of that growth will go to China instead.
It seems to be the Oscar Wilde practically satirical "Anything which is of practical use is ugly and anything which isn't is beautiful".
I’m fairly certain that the carriers could fit the antennas and wiring into a more clean looking packages to put on poles.
Having driven around Dallas and seen a few of these things in residential areas, I can say that yes they are ugly. Unlike a regular cell site, it doesn’t appear that there is any kind of permitting process around these deployments as they just pop up suddenly.
I’m all for progress, but there are ways to make utility infrastructure less noticeable to the urban landscape. Unfortunately with the approach I’m seeing with 5G deployments, the telecom companies will take the cheap way out.
Game theoretically, it would seem that a tempting strategy would be to spend money on influencing the debate in other countries to make them mistrustful of new technology, to slow their economy and relative growth. If the influence campaign isn't completely successful, then you get the additional benefit of having the populace divided amongst itself, and not trusting its own institutions, which further weakens their ability to work together and project power internationally.
Surprisingly, this strategy also works against old technology too. Imagine if you wanted to cause health crises in other countries by convincing enough of the population to be afraid of vaccines that herd immunity is lost. I know this sounds like its own conspiracy theory, but it would explain a lot about some of the weird fringe views that seem to be popular on the internet right now.
There's nothing new on this front.
I get it that 5G doesn't exactly match the hype, that the cost of rollout is high, alternatives like improving 4G coverage and back-haul from towers are available, there are hints of problems with saturating the air in such high-powered/high-spectrum radiation etc. But how a group of supposedly tech savvy, future thinking, entrepreneurial types seem single-mindedly focused on the negative aspects of a technology seems to not match the normal crowd on hacker news.
5G isn't revolutionary but it is the exact kind of incremental improvement I expect to see in tech. It has some benefits (higher speeds, lower latency) and some drawbacks (proximity to towers, interference from large objects, cost to rollout). The discussion here seems to be entirely limited to maximizing the drawbacks and to limiting the benefits.
In my experience with tech, increasing speed and decreasing latency has always netted noticeable benefits. From CPUs, GPUs, memory access and network access - even small improvements in speed/latency have enabled major improvements in features. In addition, rolling out 5G is going to force the rollout of infrastructure enabling 5G, e.g. the fibre lines needed to supply all of those new base stations. For those reasons I am excited about 5G.
And the "5G overhyped, too expensive, not worth it" meme is what I am talking about as being suspicious. It's curious, the last time I commented on this very issue the responses were all that same meme. One can say "I hear the meme but have an alternative opinion" and the response is always "yes, but meme". When several voices are parroting a meme and somehow that saturates almost all of the top comments ... I get suspicious.
No? I'm just going to burn through my data faster, and pay more to the carrier? Why am I interested then?
Isn't more access and more affordable prices the goal of the FCC as well? Why do many other countries have so much better and reasonably priced data?
1. Is a millimeter-wave transmitter in a phone safe? The power output is moderately high, and these wavelengths are absorbed near the surface of your skin or your cornea. Cellphones are held near faces all the time. So I’d be much more concerned about using a 5G phone than about living near a 5G tower.
2. The 5G wavelengths May interfere with weather radar. I think that good weather forecasts are generally more important than cat videos.
But the more obvious point is that millimeter-wave 5G can only work with beamforming, and a beam that is going through your head where it is fully, entirely, fucking completely absorbed not a millimeter in, well, that's not going to yield a lot of throughput.
And they'd cause a... slight heating effect. That's about it. So yeah, if you held your voice transmitting phone directly to your face for several decades, you might create enough tissue damage to up the cancer risk.
But then the radio engineers I used to work with climbed radio towers with microwave emitters putting out far far far more energy than a cellphone, and their only rule was "don't stick your head or crotch in front of a microwave transmitter as you're climbing up".