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Comment by gzu | Hacker News Reader

LTE seems plenty fast enough for typical phone usage. Not sure how much 5G will improve mobile experience in the near future without massive advances in VR.

Is all this telecom positioning to setup a replacement for landline internet service?

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Yes. Many consumers will like it because there's no need for a modem or router.

Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile/Sprint are all working on vertically integrating to provide phone service, 5G, and streaming content options.

Comcast is now in the cell phone business, and owns NBC and Universal. T-Mobile (soon to be merged with Sprint) bought Layer3 and is now in the TV business.

AT&T owns Warner Brothers and HBO. Verizon will likely follow suit.

No coax cables. No modems. Just streaming content over 5G, via oligopolistic walled gardens.

It still doesn't make sense to me. My 4G is fast, faster than home internet often. The reason I don't use it at home is it the cost of data, not speed. Unless 5g lowers the data cost, I don't see any benefit.

It also doesn't make sense from a security perspective, as it eliminates having an external firewall.

From what I have read about T-Mobile's home internet pilot, the pricing might be similar to a cable modem and the service will be geo-restricted to a subscriber location. This makes sense, as they can do more efficient capacity planning when they know that the bulk-consumers will be at fixed locations.

It will be interesting to see what kind of price-bundling options they might offer, if any, to combine this fixed wireless subscription with a mobile phone subscription.

I'm not sure I understand the idea. How is my laptop or desktop going to get internet access this way? Am I going to have to buy a PCI card or USB antenna for each computer? Right now I get 100 Mbps down with no data cap via a cable provider. Trading for a system with antennas on every device , lower speeds, and probably metered sounds like one hell of a downgrade.

4G router, works exactly the same as what you have now.

Well, right, that's what I would have assumed. But parent said the reason consumers like the idea of wireless is that you don't need a modem or router, that's what I found confusing about it.

There's already a lot of 4G enabled notebooks and tablets, and basically all phones. I could easily see that eating 80% of the market. 60% or more of web traffic is already on mobile devices, so the only question is whether 5G will become a standard feature for new notebooks.

Sure, you could buy a 4G/5G router, but for average consumers that may be a thing of the past. At least, that seems to be the direction that every major player in every relevant industry is gearing up for.

5G can handle more devices being connected. All those smart things that want to phone home. It's likely 5G will let many more devices be connected and phoning home without using our personal internet connections.

I wonder what it would look like for my TV to be connected and sending my viewing habits back to the manufacturer without a method for me to turn it off. 5G makes this idea much easier.

Phone companies can get contracts with all these device manufacturers and make money that way.

So in the future hacker TVs will be covered with tin foil on the back?

I need a firewall for my house to let 5G signals thru.

I wonder what it would look like for my TV to be connected and sending my viewing habits back to the manufacturer without a method for me to turn it off.

If you have cable, satellite, or streaming this already happens. The only way to watch TV without being watched is to use an antenna or local storage.

> The only way to watch TV without being watched is to use an antenna or local storage.

Pi-hole[1] might still help at the moment, until the TVs start coming with their own SIM cards.

In any case, I wouldn't use a TV as anything more than an extra large monitor for Raspberry Pi running something like Kodi[2].

[1] https://pi-hole.net/

[2] https://kodi.tv/

It depends on who is watching. For example, if I am watching Netflix I expect them to know what I watched. But, would I expect my TV (the visual device) to know what I watched and report back to the TV manufacturer? I can choose to not connect my TV to the Internet or use something like Pie Hole to stop that device from reporting. If the TV used the cell network how would I stop the TV from reporting?

Maybe then someone smart would come up with a device that would route all 5G traffic through and broadcast to other devices, masking the source and even proxied through a remote server /s

Those are devices I simply will not purchase, for obvious reasons.

It's likely 5G will let many more devices be connected and phoning home without using our personal internet connections.

There's no way this can be cheaper, especially in the US where carriers are currently charging $10-20 per device per month. I can imagine a dystopian future where device vendors think "x% of people can't figure out how to connect to their own WiFi, so let's ship a 5G radio with Verizon eSIM instead and make up the extra cost with more privacy-invading ads" but I'm going to ragequit the Internet if that happens.

Maybe they could optimize by turning off (and not paying for) cellular when WiFi is available.

Seems disgustingly plausible, tbh.

If you look up the pricing of M2M SIM cards, the monthly per-SIM cost is more on the order of $1/mo. Of course the bandwidth prices are straight out of 2005, but these are only meant for phoning home with a couple bytes of data now and then.

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