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Agreed. If 5G delivers as promoted, there is no reason to 'stream' any static content...it simply caches to your flash memory in milliseconds (song) or seconds (movie, Netflix already has mobile downloading). I can see a case for streaming in VR/AR or active content (live/multiplayer,etc), but streaming static content isn't efficient.

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That doesn’t happen now though - the video doesn’t download comptlelty as fast as possible, it downloads 30 seconds or so ahead of the play position.

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

That is the promise of faster networks. Static content would no longer need 'streaming', as in caching these bit chunks...you would simply get the entire segment, and the device would deliver it to you at the appropriate 'speed'.

I don’t need a faster network for that - YouTube doesn’t download at line speed, it downloads in real time.

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.

As chipsets improve it also means the same download should require less power from the device’s battery, if you believe the race the idle argument, which has always held in the past.

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