From dial-up to 5G: logging on to the internet | Hacker News Reader

From dial-up to 5G: logging on to the internet

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28 pointsc89X23 comments

In the UK unlimited data Sims (1000GB fup) for £20 a month are starting to be used for home broadband. 30-100mbs speeds are typical on 4g. The landline network is just starting to hollow out. It's unsettling.

What do you mean when you say you find it unsettling?

Change I guess. If enough people give up their landlines the economics of it will alter and the rest of us will be forced to follow whether our choice or not. Perhaps 5g won't have enough bandwidth for everyone at once. Still perhaps it will be better, certainly different.

I have already read about it in other 5g presentations, and I still don’t get why should 5g bring more “virtual presence”. Wouldn’t a fiber optic connection be always faster since it has one less medium to pass? Also, reliability, if I’d need a surgical operation, or to make an important business conference, I would prefer it to be made on a fixed line connection, than over the air. Why do they always insist on this thing about 5g?

> According to a recent consumer report (pdf) commissioned by networking hardware company Ericsson, the average smartphone owner in the US currently uses around 8GB of data each month.

Whaaaat? I figured that must include Wifi so I looked at the PDF, and no—apparently that's the actual mobile data usage. It's a self-reported survey, but still. Up here in Canada I have a 10GB plan which is more than anyone else I know, and is way, way more than I generally use. The only time I've ever come close is when I've been on vacation and done a bunch of tethering.

I'm not surprised that some people use 8GB per month, but I find it very hard to believe that's anywhere close to a national average, unless usage in the US is dramatically different than in Canada. (I know our cell plans are more expensive so it's probably somewhat different, but that much?)

Everybody I know in the US - mostly non tech people - uses a lot of mobile data now, largely consisting of stray video streaming. 8gb of monthly usage seems very low compared to what I'm seeing normal people use now.

At a Thanksgiving thing on Sunday a family member was streaming an NFL game on his phone. He has an unlimited data plan with AT&T, but regardless you can imagine the data usage for that HD stream over an hour. That's typical usage now in my observation.

Huh, interesting. I'd never even heard of an "unlimited" mobile data plan. Just did some research and it appears a few of our carriers just released nominally unlimited plans for the first time this year. However, they still have a data cap (10-50GB usually, depending on the plan), after which it's capped at 512kbps. So not really unlimited. These plans also start at $75/month (or like 55 USD).

I don't envy your politics, but I envy your mobile data plans.

Yeah naturally it's not unlimited, there's no such thing, it's always a marketing gimmick with fine print when a service provider uses that. You're going to hit a limit one way or another.

T-Mobile as an example, has a four line plan at $35 per line avg, with "unlimited" data, with this note:

"During congestion, the small fraction of customers using >50GB/mo. may notice reduced speeds."

I've never used T-Mobile, so I don't know what kind of wall you realistically hit with them at that point.

What I've seen in the US over the last few years is that people seem to have shifted heavily away from the old expensive cable & DirecTV plans and moved some of that expenditure over to streaming services (cheaper) and more expensive higher limit mobile data plans. Which makes sense given what consumers are most often using these days.

Of course nothing is truly unlimited. Still, I took a look at some of the US plans (AT&T etc.) and they're definitely better than what we get. The lowest ones start to throttle at 50GB, vs 10 for ours, and even the ones that don't throttle until 100 are cheaper than the 10GB ones here. To me it's a lot more reasonable to call something that may be throttled over 50 or 100GB "unlimited" vs something that will always be throttled (and to 512kbps!) at 10GB.

At least for me personally, usage varies wildly depending on what’s happening in the real world. On my family plan, my wife and I each use ~8-10 per month, but external factors cause much higher usage. For example, the car is on the account and acts as a WiFi hotspot for all non-cellular devices. We took a 13hr road trip in August and plan usage that month was 42gb.

My data usage is ~30-35gb a month and I don’t stream video or audio usually on my phone.

What do you do that eats up that much data? Tethering?

A large chunk of it is syncing of data. Yes, I could choose to only use wifi for that, but I like having the near instant backup to multiple places, even if it chews up more usage.

I'm in the US. I usually use 1GB per month, and my wife uses even less.

I typically don't consume social media on the go, I don't stream music in my car, and definitely don't watch movies or YouTube while out and about. I pretty much connect to WiFi wherever I go, and my broadband comment had access points all over which my phone automatically connects to.

I didn't participate in the survey myself, and there's a good chance the participants aren't the average (the survey asked how much more data they think they'd use over 5g).

I pay about $20 per month for my plan.

Is LTE in US really just 25Mbps?

I think they mean MB/s

Sadly no, they mean Mbps.

I don't think so, due to the fact that in the linked article:

https://www.lifewire.com/how-fast-is-4g-wireless-service-577...

Explicitly states "The 4G speeds are expressed in megabits per second (Mbps)."

In any case, LTE does way more than those speeds, and if you include LTE-Advanced and LTE-Advanced Pro under "LTE" (you shouldn't), then it goes up to 1.3 Gbps in real life tests (done by Croatian Telecom).

Though it's all usesless because of tiny data caps. As far as I've heard, data caps of <10 GB per month are extremely common in the US, for very expensive plans (not counting the phone).

-- Follows report about broadband and cellular in my home country --

Serbian incumbent majority-government-owned carrier mts used to offer 1 TB of data before you're throttled (called "Unlimited Falcon"), 100 GB before you're throttled was the previous plan that was extremely cheap (~10€/mo without a phone), and in the end they cancelled that plan, cancelled the Falcon plan, and instead offer Falcon at 100 GB before throttled, but it costs twice as much ("original" was €40/mo, "new" is 80€/mo without a phone with 10x less data).

Vip mobile (owned by A1 Telekom Austria) offers up to 200 GB data for ~€15/mo, and Telenor (owned by Dutch PPF N.V. but the offer was the same a year ago when they were owned by Telenor ASA Norway) offers 150 GB fo 18€/mo.

Speeds are best on Telenor, in cities reaching >280 Mb/s on LTE-A, worst on Vip mobile, with country-wide average being 45 Mb/s and in big cities it's not uncommon to see below-3G speeds (2-3 Mb/s), mts has the best coverage -- because they government paid for it -- but has average speeds of ~60-70 Mb/s country-wide, usually >100 Mb/s but in large cities reaching >300 Mb/s.

It is quite sad that they (mts, Telekom Srbija) don't invest nearly as much into fixed broadband access development, where most of the country has ADSL2+ at 10/1 Mb/s, a small percentage VDSL2 (most at 20/4 Mb/s, some 50/8 Mb/s and an insignificant amount at 100/10 Mb/s), and an even tinier percentage of GPON FTTH (1000/200 Mbps).

"Alternative" ISPs like SBB (owned by United Group B.V. from Netherlands) and Orion Telekom (owned by Orion Telekom Holdings B.V. also in Netherlands) have much better developed networks, offering up to 300 Mb/s in case of SBB over HFC in most places Telekom Srbija offers up to 10/1 Mb/s on ADSL, and Orion offers up to 1/1 Gbps in an extremely large amount of tiny tiny villages (<2000 people) at extreme prices (~15€ for Gigabit, no installation fee)...

Yes, by default. But in some cities they have "enhanced" LTE, whatever that is, that can go up to 70ish Mbps.

That's sad, though. Nothing prevents a carrier in the world's most technologically and economically developed country to put more cell towers with more sector antennas targeting different, segregated areas, and use quality equipment from Ericsson, use 20+20+20 MHz 3-Carrier Aggregation, and achieve >1000 Mb/s on LTE-A. Which is what is being done in Croatia.

Info about Croatia: https://www.telecompaper.com/news/a1-hrvatska-increases-mobi...

(it's Paywalled though, and Outline doesn't help. -- here is the article in Croatian: https://mreza.bug.hr/a1-hrvatska-omogucila-mobilno-surfanje-... )

edit: Could the downvoter explain themselves, since I know every word of the HN guidelines, and downvoting for disagreeing is discouraged. Also, I don't even live in Croatia, I live in another neighbouring country.

Although the theoretical limit is higher I think 25 mbps ± a few is what you can expect in most of the world.

Here are some speed tests by country https://www.opensignal.com/reports/2018/02/state-of-lte

Erm,

the average results are off for Serbia. Our regulatory body for electronic communications does mandatory speed and quality testing for 4G networks of all 3 cell providers, and the results:

http://benchmark.ratel.rs/public/lp2018/src/measurement-scop...

Show that the maximum speed is 90 Mb/s and minimum speed is ~40-50 Mb/s. This is a chart for big cities, however, here are real-life some results:

https://imgur.com/a/LUyJlME

I can easily get >100Mbps here in Melbourne, Australia.

That said, my plan has a limit of 2GB a month (which is rather low; most people have around 7-10GB), so I can use a month of usage in less than three minutes.

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