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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

I heard the real reason we need 5G is to sell more new phones. Thinner and bigger and better cameras isn’t enough anymore. However, mobile phones running 5G radios will deplete their battery far more rapidly than LTE, right? And that is assuming the 5G phone user is in a major metropolitan area where there is sufficient coverage to begin with.

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5G is designed to be more energy efficient than 4G/LTE and it will be. The design goal was at least three days for smartphones and up to 15 years for IoT devices.

5G NG encoding requires more computational power but the but the transmission is more energy efficient. For operators the ability to put base stations into sleep mode is a big deal.

Newer standards like LTE are incredibly more bandwidth efficient. This means that any phone that's still using the old standards uses up the bandwith that multiple newer phones could use. As free bandwith is extremely rare, at least in urban areas, network operators are pushing towards new standards. This phenomenon is real. E.g. in Germany the provider Deutsche Telekom has put a clause into their TOS that allows them to turn off 3G from 2020 onward (idk about their US daughter company T-Mobile USA). Yes, this means you as a citizen have to buy a new phone that supports 5G/LTE. But it's driven mainly by customer demands for bandwidth, not by evil phone makers that conspire with network operators.

You bring up some valid points. I traveled to China recently. Phones like iPhone 5 practically don't work there, because the specifications supported by these phones are phased out to such a degree that you're hard pressed to find coverage even in urban areas. I.e. 4G and 5G made the older specs obsolete, so you're obligated to buy a newer device.

Though, I guess it's possible that these bands were never supported in China. If anyone cares to chime in.

The Chinese telcos developed their own 3G standard called TD-CDMA.

Note that 3G refers to a family or classification of network technologies, and the same is true for the other G’s. As an example CDMA2000 and UMTS are both competing 3G standards.

Yes, for the first couple of years 5G will be a marketing thing (5 is more than 4, so it _must_ be better).

It helps manufacturers sell more devices and telcos to convince people to upgrade their plan.

My opinion is that we don't really need 5G for portable devices (phones, tablets, etc). I'd like to argue that there are no services that would benefit from the higher bandwidth and lower latency that 5G offers over 4G. 5G does have benefits for stuff like IOT, but not for mobile devices imo.

The current pricing schemes of telcos also don't make sense with the bandwidth capabilities of 5G. I have a 'premium' plan with 10GB of data per month, with 4G I can (in theory) already deplete that 10GB in 80 seconds. With 5G I could theoretically deplete that in less than 10 seconds.

> I heard the real reason we need 5G is to sell more new phones.

Yes, and to force change of technical platform. It is harder to persuade carriers to do 4G properly, than to give them a brand new deal. For example we would likely never see VoLTE interoperability.

Another factor is that Chinese companies really want it, because they have most of IP on it, and they don't want to "walk on the minefield" laid by patent trolls when they venture to Western markets.

> However, mobile phones running 5G radios will deplete their battery far more rapidly than LTE, right?

Yes, DSPs inside 5G basebands have more flops and SRAM than the main CPU. Imagine an eighties era supercomputer in your pocket.

> For example we would likely never see VoLTE interoperability.

In the US at least we will have to get there eventually. The major US carriers are all killing 2G and 3G in the early 2020s[1] and due to FCC 911 requirements (you basically have to be able to call 911 if you can connect a phone to a network), not to mention basic voice roaming support, that means all VoLTE phones will have to (eventually) support VoLTE on any network.

[1] https://www.multitech.com/documents/publications/marketing-g...

My theory is that it will be heavily sold to business to connect surveillance and other data hungry devices. It could be perfect for large landowners like a business park or industrial site.

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