5G Was a Mistake (Punctuationless Shout) | Hacker News Reader

5G Was a Mistake (Punctuationless Shout)

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35 pointsthereyougo18 comments

In /r/crypto there's a monthly wish list thread where people can wish for articles (or other stuff) from the community. If there was such a thing for HN I would wish for this: A technical article with perspectives from people actual in-the-know about 5G, describing how/if 5G is actually going to enable things like this in a way not possible with 4G.

I can't understand why IoT would benefit from 5G, it can't be the lower latency can it? Is the energy consumption lower?

To me, 5G just feels like an enormous hype train.

I'm arguably in IoT, though I really dislike the term. The argument for 5G in IoT is that there will be more total bandwidth available. If even if every toaster, toilet, fridge, and smoke detector used category M1 LTE, I'm skeptical we'd have a bandwidth problem. That's more of an issue with mobile video streaming than anything else.

There may be no wish list for articles in the future, but you can wish for something to have been posted in the past and try to find it.

From what I've read on HN, the advantage of 5G is mostly that it enables higher device density (i.e. IoT) with smaller cell sizes. E.g. this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19596320

Any specific parts would you like to know more about?

In general, "how/if 5G is actually going to enable things like this in a way not possible with 4G" can be done. But, from a software engineering perspective, this has more to do with how the playing field is changing for mobile network operators than to the consumer.

congrats. you‘re feeling doesn‘t fool you.

I doubt 5G will ever be deployed to the density where it replaces wired Internet. It's just too expensive, and there are too few reasons to pay for it.

The use case where everything on your WiFi goes through a VPN seems like bad design to me. Each endpoint should care about it's transport-layer security; why trust the WiFi router?

I also don't think "consumers" are going to want to pay for the add-on on their Verizon bill for a 5G connected refrigerator. The greed of the telcos should kill the IoT dystopia before it becomes much of a problem.

The manufacturer will just get a contract so the refrigerator can connect to data networks worldwide for a fixed period, similar to how navigation devices get their traffic updates.

The manufacturer has the bargaining power to overcome the telcos limits and they have a strong incentive because it’s planned obsolescence that has no workaround.

This could be renamed "5G misunderstandings rant".

Standalone 5G NR-U using unlicensed spectrum is critical to 5G. It can shortcut cellular operators like Verizon and AT&T. In business jargon this is called "new verticals". (You can get unlicensed spectrum in LTE in some areas and some cities but it's still sketchy).

NR-U enables local private application specific 5G networks. You also get open mobile broadband 5G services from new service providers such as existing cable operators, internet service providers or neutral host service providers. Traditional internet service provider can use 5G NR-U to replace copper. Internet traffic can go into fiber directly from your personal microcell in you apartment/house. Or it can replacement for the copper in old apartment buildings.

I can't see how 99% of this is specifically applicable to 5G. It's just faster mobile internet. Anything you can do with it you can do with 4G, just possibly not quite as fast. So why the worry that 5G is going to cause issues?

Well I work for a telco and I really don't see anyone excited for 5G. If anything it looks like a bad idea to everyone.

Exactly, it's not that different from 4G and is going to perform pretty much the same, but it will require new phones and will provide an excuse to increase prices for mobile internet plans.

If you are a business, and a buildout to get fiber is in the thousands, and a 5G contract is the same monthly rate as a wire, maybe you want the flexibility to switch carriers more often without additional fiber buildouts.

A better use case is SD-WAN. You already have fiber to your building, and you want a supplementary connection in the event the fiber line gets severed, to ensure business continuity and no outages. At the right price its a no brainier to replace SD-WAN 4G modems with 5G modems.

5G is coming for dsl/cable/fiber, not to get everyone to replace their phone.

this. i‘d call it a ponzi scheme and would love to see telco ceos and politicians in prison.

Correct me if I'm wrong: what annoys me about 5G is that, if I understood it correctly, it cannot share the radio channel with 4G. That is, all telcos will have to buy new bandwidth (or repurpose old allocations like 3G) to be able to offer 5G, and the split between 4G and 5G bandwidth in a given area is fixed. Which means LTE wasn't that much of a "long term" evolution: if I bought a 4G phone, now I have to buy a 5G phone, or deal with a continuously shrinking allocation for 4G.

Contrast that with WiFi, where the very first 802.11 standard for a given frequency range can still share the radio channel with the newest 802.11 standard for that frequency range, and the same WiFi AP can service both 802.11a and 801.11ax clients at the same time in a single radio channel.

This is already happening in Spain, and it's a headache because we already planned mobile coverage around the current bandwidth, and I really can't see how are we going to do without installing more BTs.

There are plans to replace copper with wireless connections in very dispersed areas. In most of this areas we already have posts, so I don't really understand what's the logic behind it, because at the end of the day you're replacing capex with opex. I may be wrong, but laying fiber, if you don't dig it, isn't that expensive, specially if you already own the infrastructure and it's easy to re-purpose.

As always, we won't be able to avoid shades and typical wireless problems, so IMO people will call helpdesk more frequently, and the tooling for diagnosing problems is nowhere close to fiber/dsl.

I read an article that claiming the push for 5G comes from SoC and device vendors, not telcos etc. The followup article was interesting.

https://www.rhizomatica.org/talkin-bout-my-5th-generation/ https://www.rhizomatica.org/5g-wont-reduce-the-digital-divid...

Because it will be expensive, and IMO is way ahead of the consumer needs. And I'm talking about a country (Spain) that already has symmetric 1gbps commercially available, and the common connection is in the bracket of 100-600mbps.

Replacing copper with fiber in remote areas is cheapish if you repurpose copper posts instead of digging, and the opex of fiber is even lower than copper.

For those areas that are disconnected and don't even have DSL a few more BTs and 4G are waaay cheaper than putting 5G everywhere.

And I'm not even mentioning the clusterfuck that is being changing all the bands and retool many stuff.

5G has really no upsides now, at least from my pov.

Actually I think that China will get all of it, since they seems to be the only one to master the technology. They will not let you use all the energy you want, they will just plan the usage and let you use the energy you can use based on your citizen score. Everything will be monitored thanks to 5G, and they will save the human kind.

Edit: I forgot sarcasm was not really appreciated on HN

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