The 'Race to 5G' Is Lobbyist Nonsense | Hacker News Reader

The 'Race to 5G' Is Lobbyist Nonsense

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226 pointsrahuldottech144 comments

The article is on point. 5G has an advantage in only a few situations:

- Very crowded areas, where you need lots of microcells so everyone can watch streaming video at once. Like stadiums. Verizon is making a lot of noise about 5G in NFL stadiums. Amusingly, latency for sports video is a big deal, because, in sports bars, not all the screens have the same amount of buffering in the path. So some people are cheering while others are waiting for their feed to catch up, and they feel left out and alone.

- Moderately remote areas where the capability to drop to the VHF bands will provide some service far from towers. That's actually useful.

Claims involving public safety and remote surgery are fantasy.

Besides, once it's going, it will probably be overloaded, and there will be rate caps and data caps. But the capped service will be called "unlimited".

5G is a strategy to replace wireline service and the regulatory limits imposed on them. Carriers selling fixed 5G will be able to monetize traffic more effectively.

Nobody is asking the obvious question: Why would you go to a stadium or sports bar to watch sports on your phone. Didn't you just travel all the way to the stadium/sports bar to not have to watch sports on your phone?

And also. So if stadiums and sports bars would fix their wifi, does that negate the need for 5G completely? Remote areas are soon to be better serviced by satellite constellations anyway.

> - Moderately remote areas where the capability to drop to the VHF bands will provide some service far from towers. That's actually useful.

It does? Wikipedia lists the lowest 5G frequencies at 600MHz, which is above the VHF band.

The point that 600Mhz has greater distance/range than the higher frequency 4G signals is still correct, despite the miss on whether it's VHF.

You can run LTE on 600MHz. T-Mobile US does for example. I don't see why this is an advantage for 5G?

>5G has an advantage in only a few situations...

That completely misses the point of 5G, which is capacity. 5G network capacity improves on 4G / 4.5G / 4.9G or their respective 3GPP Rel.

Most people simply look at 5G as mmWave + 4G when it is far more. The world is divided into 5G is overhyped useless pieces of junk, or overhyped to be using Level 5 AV and Remote Surgery.

Reality it is simply a much better 4G. And that is good enough as it is.

> in sports bars, not all the screens have the same amount of buffering in the path

Assuming we aren't talking about personal devices, could this be solved at install time by ensuring same-length cable runs the same way you would for e.g. HFT tenants in a datacenter? Or is this a different kind of problem?

In this case, it's not about cable length, but the number of boxes the data has to travel through before hitting the screen. Cable length matters on the nanosecond scale. For human-noticeable latencies larger than 0.1 seconds, you can only blame buffers where data sits around not moving.

It is essentially the same problem. A sports bar may have some tvs hooked up via Comcast and some via DirectTV with noticeably different physical layer lengths.

Additionally, the modern OTT services resemble personal devices and trade synchronicity for scalability.

That makes sense.

Assuming a bar probably maintains multiple subscriptions because they need access to both local and national broadcasts, I wonder if there's space to build a platform designed specifically to aggregate video content across providers and distribute it to commercial customers.

I'm imagining an OTT service that specifically bids for (or sublicenses) public performance rights for e.g. sports and sells only to public venues, with hardware designed for this purpose.

Thinking about it, this seems like the kind of thing that probably already exists in some specific niche.

"Overloading" will come later. Similar to LTE before, customers don't have 5G capable devices yet. There is also no need to buy one.

Just think if this level of marketing, lobbying, and energy was channeled into something like a national fiber broadband utility available to everyone.

"But," you may ask, "why would industry groups ever push something like that? Such a thing would cost loads of money and put market dominance at risk!"

And then maybe you start to wonder why they're in such a rush to fight for the subsidies, investment, and contracts for "more wireless, but faster and more G's!"

> Just think if this level of marketing, lobbying, and energy was channeled into something like a national fiber broadband utility available to everyone.

I mean this is pretty much exactly why the government shouldn’t be in charge of deciding how to allocate this investment.

Fiber is far less useful than fast wireless. 60% of Maryland has access to fiber. It hasn’t been revolutionary in the least. Most people don’t even subscribe to it, even in high income suburbs. Meanwhile, over 15% of high income households are “mobile only.”

I think it’s fair to say that if you are computing using a tablet, you’re probably not benefitting much from fiber. Well, global PC sales peaked in 2010: https://images.app.goo.gl/4jwgmheZhp1S39EZ6. Desktop PC sales globally are about the same as they were in 2001. The percentage of people using a computing device that can take advantage of fiber continues to shrink.

As one of the other 40%, I'd love to have fiber to my house. As you mention later in this thread, I pay Comcast more per month for a fraction of the speed and have no better options.

The vast majority of my personal (ie: not at work) computing is done at home. Whether I'm using my desktop workstation (wired), my laptop (either wired or wifi), or a tablet/phone (wifi), I would benefit if the WAN connection serving my home network offered gigabit speeds.

At work I already have fiber-level speeds. I don't need my phone to stream music faster in the car or pull up search results faster when I'm out at the store. LTE is more than sufficient for that stuff and I can buy a reasonable allotment of data (5GB) for $30 each month. At home I don't want my local network's connection to the outside world depending on signal strength, data caps, or the whims of cell-service-style billing practices.

And I don't care about TV packages or any of that. Between OTA (free), Netflix ($150/yr) Prime Video (included with $120/yr Amazon Prime), and whatever free stuff is on YouTube, PlutoTV, and news sites, I have plenty of stuff to look at when I feel like being a lump on the couch.

What is the cost for residential fiber there? In my country (Europe) it is about $9 per month for 1 Gbps, minimum guaranteed speed of 100 Mbps. For working from home it is way more than enough and much more reliable than "mobile only".

Verizon charges about $80 for gigabit fiber. But to put that into context, most of the states in Verizon’s footprint, like Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia, are richer than Switzerland: https://images.app.goo.gl/PeQYfKDsLkHoJ3787. It looks like prices for gigabit in Switzerland range from $65-140 USD per month (with the $65 figure being over Zurich’s municipal fiber system.)

At least here in Maryland, its not cost that limits the uptake here, it’s usefulness. Cable broadband here is very fast. Comcast charges more for 1000/35 cable than Verizon charges for 1000/1000 fiber, even in neighborhoods that have access to both (which is most of the state outside Baltimore and very rural areas). People just don’t value the extra upload speeds that highly compared to Comcast’s better TV packages.

This is off-topic but I found that the more you dive into the methods used to compare income on both sides of the Atlantic the weirder it gets.

Average tends to be skewed to America's favour because of an extremely rich top 5% or so. Median is closer to each other but also seems to favor the US. But then do you account for the fact that Americans work longer hours? Or not? In my country the average workweek is 29 hours. In the US it's 38 I think. And most Western EU countries are in between these two. And European also have more paid leave on average.

And you can also use disposable income, which is what you can actually spend, so seems like a fair comparison. Then the US wins again, but on the other hand Americans also have to use this income for stuff like out of pocket healthcare costs, education costs, emergency-unemployment fund etc, where in Europe these things are mostly covered by taxes. But that means your disposable income is lower.

But on the other hand buying stuff is usually more expensive in EU because of the VAT system.

When the "fast wireless" under discussion more or less requires deploying FTTC as the backhaul, consumers definitely stand to benefit from transforming that into a regulated FTTH network instead of being further subjugated by cellular carriers.

Isn't the cost difference between running fiber to base stations and running fiber to individual homes enormous? Just based on the economics: a fiber-lit base station serves anyone nearby with a mobile device, while the infrastructure to support FTTH is a risk (and, apparently, an unprofitable risk) based on how many homes sign up.

I don't think base station backhaul and FTTH are comparable investments.

If we're talking typical suburban housing density, deploying 5G mmWave will require digging trenches or hanging wires on poles through almost as many properties as deploying FTTH. A 5G basestation is going to be a lot more expensive than a GPON ONT, probably enough that the per-customer costs aren't a net win for 5G. (When the fiber is already at the mailbox, taking it down the driveway too just isn't that much more investment.) And the 5G basestation faces the same problem as FTTH that not every person in the neighborhood will be a guaranteed subscriber to any particular provider; even if Verizon/ATT/etc. already has you under contract for your smartphone, they have to work on convincing you to add all your wired devices to the plan. Barring detailed cost estimates to the contrary, I don't see how mmWave will be viable in suburban America. Sub-6GHz 5G will be, but that's not going to be providing dramatic speed upgrades or price/Mbps improvement the way FTTH has.

In a denser urban residential setting, mmWave certainly won't have enough penetration to provide solid service to high-rise apartments, and it's even less likely that sub-6GHz 5G will have enough aggregate capacity to kill off wired ISPs.

mmWave simply isn't viable for residential/fixed usage, and sub-6 is only an incremental improvement that brings cellular performance up to WiFi speeds, but not beyond.

> If we're talking typical suburban housing density, deploying 5G mmWave will require digging trenches or hanging wires on poles through almost as many properties as deploying FTTH.

This is far off base. Conservatively, a mmwave base station has a range of about 1,500 feet, covering about 7 million square feet, or 160 acres. Median subdivision density is about 2 houses per acre: https://www.nahbclassic.org/generic.aspx?sectionID=734&gener.... So one base station can cover 300 houses. For comparison, an N+0 cable node (a node where the fiber is close enough to the houses to require no amplifiers on the coax side) is 50-130 houses. Cable companies have been running N+0 nodes all over the place, but have been hesitant to build the fiber all the way to the premises. That should tell you a lot about how expensive that next increment is.

> Conservatively, a mmwave base station has a range of about 1,500 feet,

At what speed? If that's just the range at which it stops being an upgrade over current LTE speeds, that's really unimpressive. The figure of interest here is the range at which mmWave can reliably sustain WiFi-like performance, including enough aggregate capacity for gaming to still have low latency when all your neighbors and one or two of your family members are streaming video.

> That should tell you a lot about how expensive that next increment is.

Not really. Cable companies are upgrading their networks by replacing some of the coax in the ground with fiber, as necessary to get enough backhaul bandwidth to each node. The incentives there are wildly different than for a new ISP that's either deploying FTTH or short-range cellular, without having access to pre-existing last mile wiring that has no trouble carrying gigabit to each customer. For wired infrastructure, digging the trenches is a lot more expensive than the materials cost for whatever you're putting in the trenches.

Testing of the Houston Verizon deployment is showing near a gigabit at 2,000 feet: http://wirelessone.news/8-high-frequency-mmwave/981-2-000-fe...

As to your second point, the whole point of wireless is you avoid the need to dig trenches. Getting the last 500 feet through a subdivision is a huge pain in the ass. I had Comcast install fiber to my house a couple of years ago. It took the contractors half a day to run fiber 1,700 feet on the pole down the main road, another half a day to run it 300 feet to the pole outside my house, and another half day to run it 30 feet under my driveway. With 5G they could’ve stopped after the first step and served the whole subdivision (200 houses).

Yes, and I can't talk with other radios either, I need to talk to a provider's cell tower. I have to drop down something ancient like a VHF radio to do peer to peer communication at long range.

PS. If I'm wrong, please let me know. I'd love to hear about any developments in long range P2P wireless phones.

I do Aether (P2P Reddit~ish, https://getaether.net) and I investigated doing something like this over radio mesh networks. Specifically doing it over HAM radio was one of the possibilities. The plan was something like doing anycast over Radio.

Turns out, even those bands do have a lot of limitations. For example you cannot use any encryption, which makes most of the modern tools out of the picture because TLS is impossible. There are some workarounds like doing TLS with blank keys, but far as I understand it is dicey so far as legality goes. (The data on Aether is public, but we use encryption tools for authentication of messages.)

What does TLS with blank keys give you over plaintext?

I can see how it’s not obvious, but the parentheses at the end are the answer to that (or maybe they were edited in after your question). You can use TLS without ciphering but with signatures to authenticate messages.

That's a really stupid thing about cell phones. We all carry these amazing radios with us, but they become completely useless once there is no tower around. Why can't phones be used as walkie-talkies?

I understand they can: http://www.servalproject.org/

Thanks for the link!

Normal walkie talkies have much higher powers and/or different frequencies.

Most cell phones already have Wifi, we would need a mesh (or at least special ad-hoc) standard for this and there you have your walkie talkie functionality with a bit of software.

There has been little success pushing one of those as apparently nobody cares about this feature.

What would be really cool would be a protocol to use each other's phones as data relays.

It would be cool technologically, but there’s no way in hell I’d let random strangers use my phone as a relay. No telling what some of them would be up to or downloading.

If there were a way to whitelist authenticated phones of my friends, that could work.

Hm, good point. I'm sure there'd be a business model that could get around that, but everything I'm thinking of would require people selling the system to their friends.

Because the person you want to contact is unlikely to be within radio distance.

yes, but how cool would that be?

I think it would be pretty cool too. For those times when you are out of range of a tower and in range of each other, you could chat up your pals out at the campsite or whathaveyou.

And if you and your ilk load some kind of meshing or 'router app' on these advanced (non-hobbled) handheld radios, you might have a better chance of getting in touch with that out of range person by routing packets across radios until you're at the internet. Even if you limit the bandwidth to text messages for this feature, it could be a real lifesaver for folks needing to get emergency messages out.

You're effectively talking about APRS[1].

[1] http://www.aprs.org

Thanks, it's fun to read through these links!

What about the push to talk feature on some work phones?

> Just think if this level of marketing, lobbying, and energy

Just think if governments made decisions based on evidence, trials and what was best for the populace, not which industry backed lobby shouted loudest and hired the most politicians' friends.

What does 5G have to do with public policy? Getting the necessary approvals from the FCC seems like it would be a quiet, technocratic thing. Beyond that, cell carriers' infrastructure is their own business.

I remember being told that 5G wasn't about speed, it was about bandwith and every car would be transmitting 40Gigs an hour because of all the autonomous vehicles. That was the bullish picture.

If your bullish picture was "Consumers are going to get nothing and it's going to enable autonomous vehicles that don't exist" then you're probably in trouble.

The FCC is screwing hams, as usual, for 5G.

http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-formally-adopts-proposals-to-re...

Not to be that guy, but would we really expect anything else from Ajit Pai at this point? He's so far into Verizon, et al's pockets... it seems.

When 3G first came out it was a disaster for most carriers. The phones were buggy and hard to come by. More importantly there was no compelling reason to use data from your phone till the iPhone and then Android appeared. The previous generation of “smartphones” (like Symbian and NTT Docomo imode) tried to dumb and water down the Internet. 5G will present similar problems in the early stages. There are not enough compelling applications for the increase in bandwidth now, but there sure will be later on. So I don’t see a race to it now. It’s the next evolution in the cycle of faster speed.

> but there sure will be later on

Like what? I remember having a 3G iPhone and actively looking forward to 4G because bandwidth actually limited certain tasks. Since 4G has become widespread, I've never felt that way. The only time I notice my phone's finite bandwidth is when buildings are blocking my signal, which will only be more prevalent with 5G because millimeter waves can't penetrate materials.

There is literally no media that my device makes use of that it can't download in a comfortable amount of time. With modern compression technology, even streaming HD video is basically seamless over cell towers. Years ago I was able to play online games by tethering my Xbox to my phone. I just don't have a use for more bandwidth.

T-Mobile has launched 600mhz 5g which solves the 5g through buildings problem. Not as fast as millimeter-wave but will get 5g to everyone.

What's the difference to LTE+ though? You already get hundreds of megabits and a few ten ms of latency in the 600 MHz band right now.

Any idea what equipment provider built T-Mobile’s 600mhz 5G?

I think perhaps being able to replace cable is the biggest benefit. This will force prices down in certain markets and allow consumers to choose between more consumer friendly companies then comcast

This is more blurb ... you’re never going to beat wired. Simple physics. You can come up with more and more efficient ways to use spectrum but you’re always going to saturate the commons at some stage. With hard wires you can have as many spectrums to share out as you have wires .. running side by side if you like.

It's true that wired will always be faster than wireless, all things equal. But if you live in an area where there is a monopoly on wired internet, you would welcome competition from wireless players.

In the town where I live, in a very nice part of Silicon Valley, Comcast is the only option. Their pricing isn't horrendous if you hound them for discounts (I pay $30/mo for 20Mb service), but I'm sure their pricing would be better if they had more competition.

This is a policy problem as much as a technical one, and really spectrum is managed and licensed in much the same way so there's not much reason to believe you won’t get screwed that way too ...

Right. So why dish out spectrum and public space for cells to the same players without fixing the existing issues?

So yes, 5G will be slower then a wired but it will be much much cheaper to cover wider swaths of area because 5G doesnt need to dig up the ground to every house to install. For places where it is very difficult for broadband to reach, 5G speeds can be a suitable option.

At the very least, threats from telecom companies will force Comcast to compete

But 5G also has less range, and the tower doodads still require some flavor of backbone to be able to dish out internet. Generally that backbone is a wired connection, be that copper or fiber.

Competition for ISPs is definitely welcome (even if it's from the darn big telcos). I'm open to this idea even though it'll probably be worse latency.

> I think perhaps being able to replace cable is the biggest benefit.

At a comparable cost? I don't think this is going to happen for a whole lot of reasons, including that a whole ton of infrastructure has to be built to support that use case (such as fiber running to all those cell base stations).

I think that it will be possible, but it's going to be very, very expensive for at least a few years, and then the price will fall to approximately what you pay for cable now.

I don't see the customer experience being any better (in the US, anyway) because the companies supplying 5G will be the telecoms, and their history of being "customer friendly" is already very well-known.

The price of cable is primarily based on # of competitors in the market, and the income of the neighborhood. Moving from SF to Oakland dropped my bill in half.

Verizon/ATT/etc are certainly not my favorite companies, but if they could potentially expand their customer based by offering home internet over 5G, they would operate very differently to try and gain marketshare (plus Comcast would need to respond).

Cable? As in....TV? At a risk of sounding dismissive - won't TV be dead by then? I'm 29 and I literally don't know anyone who watches actual live TV anymore. Well, no, that's not true, my grandparents do. But even my mum and my wife's parents have already switched to netflix-only situation, regular TV is just so full of ads and nonsense that it doesn't make any sense to pay for it.

I think the parent comment was referring to hard-line internet, i.e. fiber and coax ("cable").

I like TV because it tells me what to watch. I don’t have to choose. I think other people derive a lot of value from this as well. I don’t have TV but I’m at a hotel right now and watching TV while drinking beer (and typing this I guess) is pretty damn nice. It’s possible that feeling would wear off if I had it around regularly, though.

But I bet TV will still be a major thing, say, 30 years in the future. Right now 75% of households in the US pay for TV, so I think your comment is a little overblown.

> It’s possible that feeling would wear off if I had it around regularly, though.

Over Christmas/New Years I was at my parents place, and they have DirectTV. The first few days were nice. After that I realized I was just watching for the sake of watching just to see what came on next, and it was all reruns of stuff I've already seen.

I am a big fan of curation, but I much prefer the curation of seeing what the programmers put on in prime time and then watching it on demand, or Netflix's recommendations.

I use streaming services in combination with over the air TV. After cleaning out the foreign language channels, sales networks and religious channels I have 40 quality stations worth watching. I certainly agree that paying to watch commercials is insane and cable TV originally didn’t have commercials to move people over from antennas.

I only watch TV for sporting events. In my area, there’s currently a legal battle going on between the “regional sports network” that has negotiated broadcasting rights with certain major teams and Comcast, to whom the RSN sells the programming. Comcast declined to renew their contract, so games played by those teams are blacked out for Comcast customers. The RSN is arguing that Comcast has a monopsony on the purchase of programming from RSNs, and that their goal is to replace them with a subsidiary of their own. The original complaint and Comcast’s quick motion to dismiss show, if nothing else, that the RSN is legally out-gunned. It’s possible that 5G could provide an economically viable alternative distribution method—i.e., “over the top”—for the RSN.

If their target demographic all have Comcast internet, couldn't this RSN just start an internet streaming service and stream their content to those same customers without Comcast taking a cut?

If for some reason they couldn't do that, why would 5G change anything?

Since you used the word "mum," I'll assume that you're British. In which case, 67 million Britons disagree with you†: https://www.barb.co.uk/tv-landscape-reports/tracker-uk-house...

Perhaps you should meet more people?

(† There aren't 67 million Britons. But TV viewership in the UK is 28.1 million households, and the average household in the UK is 2.4 people, so we end up with an impossible number.)

BARB is talking about a potential audience. In my building, for example, it would consider that there are 12 households with Terrestrial TV as potential audience. There's an aerial on the roof, and in 2018 when I last checked, the routine job to fetch the TV listings out of the data stream was still working on a PC I had connected to the aerial socket. That job may still be working but I haven't checked - like most people in this building, and your comment's parent, I don't actually watch live TV so I don't need the listings data any more if it's still being collected.

So that's 12 households you're counting as "TV viewership" that don't watch live TV. They could watch any hypothetical TV show or advertisement, but they in fact will not. They would not disagree with your parent poster.

My mother (retired) is the only person I know who watches live TV. My Facebook is full of people chatting about TV shows (Sabrina, Doctor Who, etc.) but none of them watch it live. Some of them have paid subscriptions to various sources of TV, and many of the same people also have "pirate" hookups to get TV that isn't available in a timely fashion, as described many times they aren't unwilling to pay they're unwilling to be inconvenienced.

> The only time I notice my phone's finite bandwidth is when buildings are blocking my signal, which will only be more prevalent with 5G because millimeter waves can't penetrate materials.

I'm pretty bearish on 5g in the short/medium term, but if carriers do deploy 5g it should mean many more smaller cell base stations. These extra stations should help in cities.

Lots of little towers sounds logistically more challenging than a few big ones. And it's the sort of thing that requires constant reevaluation as new large buildings go up, shadowing regions that once had good coverage. Will carriers stay on top of the matter, or will coverage start to suffer? I'd bet on the later.

I agree. That’s why I said “if” and “should”. :)

Real time AR streaming. We likely can't get glasses with the necessary processor down to the right form factor, but they could offload that work to a server if you had 5g in place

> We likely can't get glasses with the necessary processor down to the right form factor

That's silly. We're already pretty close, and if they really had to offload some things then the powerful computer that's a couple feet away in your pocket would make much more sense. Plus, as I said we already stream HD video on 4G networks without much trouble.

Moreover we don't have to cram all the silicon and batteries into the glasses themselves. Some of it, especially an extended battery pack, wifi and storage hardware, can be stored in a small, lightweight, slim-profile backpack that's wired to the AR glasses. Probably the rendering silicon too if the short-distance bandwidth between backpack and glasses doesn't induce too much lag.

Wearing small backpacks and fanny packs while urban adventuring is not uncommon. AR companies could just bootstrap off that already existing "infrastructure" with small backs that can still carry stuff, but with AR tech also inside them.

I keep hearing VR and AR listed as reasons we need 5G, but literally no one I know in this industry is saying that. If anything, VR is going to reduce bandwidth requirements for things like teleconferencing.

You aren't going to stream anything to a headlocked headset over anything bigger than your LAN. Network latency will make you ill. And no, async timewarp is not the answer. That only gets you incidental movement from user to view. You still get massive latency in reactions to input, which can't be faked.

Oh, I suppose maybe someone is thinking of 360 video. Not anyone I know. But could be someone.

I feel like the last few years have been a constant letdown when it comes to consumer AR or VR. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of appetite for it even if you look at more powerful home systems.

With Carmack leaving at Occulus and a lot of the startups not really amounting to anything I'm not so sure that this is just an issue of not enough mobile bandwidth.

> There just doesn't seem to be a lot of appetite for it even if you look at more powerful home systems.

Speaking for myself, I have no actual interest in AR/VR. It doesn't bring me anything that I need or would use for more than the novelty factor. I suspect that I'm in the majority here.

Where this tech shines is in niche markets -- gaming, industrial uses, and so forth.

I feel like you don't actually pay attention to VR and are just saying what you hear in the tech press.

that feels unreasonably abrasive. I know one or two people in the industry who have recently left VR firms and they painted a pretty pessimistic picture for me, so I'm not just going by what I read in the press.

Using cellular for home internet is what I hope 5G brings us.

5G is fast enough to the point where I could just ditch my cable internet line, assuming there's an adequate bandwidth cap.

I haven't had DSL for 4 years now. 4G rocks and is cheap, at least in France!

I would honestly much rather have consistent 4g speeds than try to jump to something faster.

In the middle of Seattle there are still holes in coverage where I data speeds slow to a complete crawl.

> In the middle of Seattle there are still holes in coverage where I data speeds slow to a complete crawl.

Ironically, this is the one situation where 5G is actually useful. The unambiguous benefit to 5G is that it increases the total load capacity of the cell network. People who live in areas where the network operates at capacity large amounts of the time (such as Seattle) will see an increase in reliability even if they don't see an increase in speed.

Coverage holes are the real problem in American wireless.

It's awful in rural areas, and often still pretty bad around big cities.

When carriers claim they have coverage of 300 M pops, I wonder if it is more like 220 M pops. All the time I go to places that the carrier maps say have coverage and there is no signal.

Efforts to parcel out money to improve rural cell service fell through because there are no useful coverage maps.

I spent last weekend in a town with no cell service.

Amazingly, every person there didn't suddenly die. There weren't pedophiles crawling all over the place looking for children to snatch. The town didn't burn down. None of the fears that cell companies have put into us came to pass. People simply didn't have a phone stuck in their pockets everywhere they went.

When people wanted to communicate, they went to the little bar/restaurant next to the sheriff's office. Lots of people talking. Trading jokes. Watching sports on satellite TV. Kids outside playing whatever shouty games kids play.

Not one cell phone. And somehow the world didn't end.

Go figure.

I think it is just a factor that limits the business.

I don't own a smartphone or even a dumbphone. At times I had two prepaid phones, one on the Verizon network, one on the AT&T network. Neither one worked at my house. Between the two prepaid phones I could sometimes talk on the phone while traveling, whether that means driving around Upstate NY or visiting big cities.

At one point I was about to put another $100 on my Tracfone for a year's service and realized I'd accumulated 4500 minutes.

Given that I don't talk on the phone much and that the coverage is poor in places where I go, I don't even have a cheap phone plan, never mind an expensive phone plan.

So in my case, U.S. carriers could increase their revenue if they improved their coverage.

Fears nobody except you brought up, so why are they relevant to a discussion if people would prefer more coverage to greater speeds?

Exactly. And of course the situation is much worse anywhere outside of a major city. Pushing a newer, faster, shorter-range technology is the opposite of what needs to be worked on.

Isn't this exactly what 5G offers? The mmWave stuff is largely a sideshow, but the big win was supposed to be allowing more people to share LTE frequencies without interfering with each other as much I thought?

Since these towers have shorter range and less penetration, worse coverage is next to certain.

> I don’t see a race to it now

I think it would actually be better to slow-walk 5G and let other nations work through all of the inevitable problems the initial deployments will have.

This "race" to 5G has never made any sense to me at all. What is the advantage to being the first to roll this stuff out?

Selling very detailed location data.

Whoever gets it first will build apps for it first and have a head start.

I don't understand this argument.

First 5G is just a comms channel. What "apps" would be built for it? The only things I can think of that might be special are things that would require a large amount of bandwidth (that most people won't be getting anyway). You can easily write such apps without actually having 5G at your disposal.

Second, even if the first point is off the mark, why does it matter who builds it first? Everyone else can still write apps for that system, and those apps would then immediately work on the others as they come online.

> The only things I can think of that might be special are things that would require a large amount of bandwidth (that most people won't be getting anyway). You can easily write such apps without actually having 5G at your disposal.

one could even imagine prototyping these things on existing high bandwidth networks. or porting all the great apps and such that demand high bandwidth over to the new environment.

or maybe there'd be some papers or demos or conceptual whatevers about what these magical applications would be.

> there was no compelling reason to use data from your phone till the iPhone and then Android appeared.

> So I don’t see a race to it now.

I'm confused at your argument. The first part of your comment is "build it and they will come". That no one was able to take advantage of 3G until someone found new things to do with that data. Then your argument is "ehhhh... not that important because we don't have enough compelling applications."

You're saying that no one will be able to take advantage of the new badwidth because current apps aren't designed to use more bandwidth than the system they are running on can provide.

3G was particularly bad in dense urban areas such as Los Angeles and NYC. It wasn't so bad if you were in some heartland city like Rochester, NY. 4G increased the ability to handle high density to the point where NYC quit making excuses about how their infrastructure was wiped out by the flood.

It sucked battery life out of phones, carriers had to pay huge licensing fees for the spectrum and build the new infrastructure and the only promise that it kept was lower latencies and more bandwidth for people using 3G PCMCIA modems for laptops.

Most of the killer features only developed after UMTS with HSDPA.

I'm not familiar with 5G infrastructure at all really, but a friend of mine brought up that they were worried about China beating the US to 5G deployment because if China did so, other counties would be more likely to use Chinese tech to setup their own 5G networks. This in turn would pose security issues as there seems to be concern over whether or not China could be trusted not to use their tech as spyware. Is anyone familiar with the issue who can speak more on this?

I'm not familiar, but it was US's own NSA that was caught red handed. China has an aura of non compliance and state sponsored hacking but I trust them as much as the US.

I wouldn't trust the US govt (where I live) with my personal secrets, but I would trust them to protect the trade secrets of a business based in the US (yay corporatism!)

I don't think China cares about my personal secrets nearly as much as the US does, but they are pretty actively engaging in state-sponsored corporate espionage.

The CCP is compiling a database on everyone in the developed world, from sources as disparate as their Chinese visa info, to hacked/leaked data from various websites, to social media posts, to surveillance video/audio/images.

Eventually they’ll be able to analyze it with AI, and use it to advance their own agenda. Whether you consider that a good thing, or a less bad thing than whatever the NSA does, is in the eye of the beholder.

But make no mistake, the CCP does not ‘not care’ about your personal info.

> I wouldn't trust the US govt with my personal secrets

> I would trust them to protect the trade secrets of a business

Would you trust a US business to protect your personal secrets more than the US government? Why?

You misunderstand a bit. If I were Coca-cola, I would trust that the NSA would never ever reveal my secret recipe. But at the same time I wouldn't trust them not to read the private messages of my employees for other juicy stuff.

America cares more about corporate rights than human rights.

That's nice for the American company, but why should companies and individuals in the rest of the world trust this American private/public conglomeration with their data? Foreigners have no rights under American law, from what I gather.

Public distrust of American companies doesn't serve the USA when top tech companies have approximately half their revenue generated outside the USA.

They shouldn't? I don't think I ever made that point. I was only speaking to the motivations of each Government. If I don't trust my own gov't to respect my private data, why would I tell anyone else to trust them?

Foreigners have basically all the same rights as citizens under US law. Maybe you're thinking of the NSA's mandate to only collect foreign-bound US internet traffic, not domestic?

Ah. Reading more carefully, I see now that you were saying that as an American it might be better to trust American companies than Chinese ones. Sure, quite probably.

All I'm saying, and I guess this doesn't contradict what you were saying, is that for the rest of the world it makes no difference if we choose American or Chinese equipment since we'll be spied on either way.

Foreigners living/operating in the US have almost all the rights US citizens do, besides citizen-only things like voting or running for office.

> I don't think China cares about my personal secrets nearly as much as the US does, but they are pretty actively engaging in state-sponsored corporate espionage.

This is only scratching the surface. Don't forget their extensive tracking and imprisonment of ethnic minorities, political "dissents", etc. Seeing how they treat their own people, I can only imagine what kind of pressure they'll be able to exert on small(relative to China) countries that gave them control of their communications systems.

Oh yeah, they certainly are using the data of their own citizens. I meant my data as a US citizen.

Until you become a PersonOfInterest to them.

The solution is to have proper technical assesment of critical infrastructure/ equipment, both source code and hardware.

UK security services inspected Huawei course, and found it messy, but otherwise unremarkable. This should be standard procedure and we should be good at it.

the issue is much bigger than just spyware. If a nation allows Huawei or any Chinese company to build its future tech infrastructure such as 5G, they are basically signing over their national security and interests over to the Chinese govt.

E.g. your nation has someone who speaks out against the Chinese govt or something as dumb as making fun of the Chinese president. Hand him over or else we flick a switch here and the power grid in your city X goes down and there's nothing you can do about it.

Why do yo think China is pushing Huawei so hard and vowing trade punishment against any nation in the EU or elsewhere if they stop Huawei? They want to control the future of those nations. This will give China every leverage they can get in terms of trade, compliance, security, etc. basically making each of these nations a vassal state to China.

> Hand him over or else we flick a switch here and the power grid in your city X goes down and there's nothing you can do about it.

The issue in your scenario is not who built the infrastructure, but who has remote access to it. Why would the manufacturer of (for instance) the PLCs controlling a substation have remote access to it? Wouldn't they be isolated in their own subnetwork, firewalled so that only a few hosts in the substation operator's network can reach it?

You do understand that this is managed infrastructure, right? Logging in and managing it remotely is literally part of the deal. It’s not even a secret.

Makes sense to me ... I just cant get over how people are being labelled cranks for voicing what are pretty common sense concerns. I guess in the public mindset wireless network != critical infrastructure.

> This in turn would pose security issues as there seems to be concern over whether or not China could be trusted not to use their tech as spyware.

That's not special to China. No nation can be trusted in that way.

This article really missed the mark. Yeah, the 5G lobbying is using some really strange and confusing arguments that don't seem to make sense to DC outsiders. All you need to need to know is on the media page. Clearly Huawei is bad for business for the sponsors of this lobbying.

https://5gactionnow.com/media/

From the link:

> FOX BUSINESS: 74% of Americans think Huawei should be removed from U.S., poll shows

I don't think 74% of Americans have even heard of Huawei!

A couple of years ago a poll showed that 30% of Americans should bomb Agrabah, the fictional city from Aladdin. Not knowing what it's about has never stopped people from having an opinion about it.

8/10 dentists prefer Ericsson.

It's not implausible, it's been in the mainstream news a lot the past year.

When has polls and surveys for political reasons shown reality?

How much carbon will building 5G release? Does climate change make building 5G a bad idea? (Does climate change make any big new infrastructure project that isn't just a restoration of existing infrastructure a bad idea?) Also, it seems obvious that the smaller cell size means there will never be good coverage in even slightly remote areas, unless 4G also remains operational. In places like Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine 5G-only would greatly reduce public safety.

5G is all about greed: selling more cell-site gear and new phones.

If the goal were to actually improved coverage and spectrum utilization, it would be designed, engineered and deployed very differently.

From an end-user perspective, 4G is relatively damn good, perhaps too good, so they have to turnover the apple cart and replace it with something crappier.

PS: And yes, there are way too many conspiracy theories about 5G before it was even released that distract from the games hardware vendors and carriers wanted to play.

Remind me again why I need even 4G (which I don't have)?

You're getting downvoted because most people on HN have never experienced solid, reliable 3G.

There's a town I go to sometimes that has only 3G service. But because it's not oversubscribed and has the proper telco infrastructure it's faster and more reliable than the 4G I get at home.

From memory, 3G usually has much higher latency on network traffic. The bandwidth of 3G is reasonably good, but web pages usually load noticeably faster over 4G because modern websites usually need a lot of round-trips to load. (With the notable exception of HN)

I have no idea why it has higher latency. It might be because in metro areas its often oversubscribed or the bandwidth ends up saturated.

Where is the race to optic fiber?

I think the article does a fair work in answering this question - Optic fiber will not get the $ into the pockets of oem's or carriers. And it's already there in several metros(even in India)

Is 5g attractive to vendors because it’s harder to turn off than a plugged in wire? With landline you can unplug or filter within your premises. With 5g they can push megabit speeds without any of your own premises equipment.

It's possible that that would be a "benefit", but I'd expect that it's way down the list behind:

* infrastructure buildout costs in cities are reduced because you don't need to run a wire into each individual building,

* "fast enough" wireless could capture the usage/spend currently delivered by landlines, but the reverse isn't true because most people like to take their phones out of the house.

Can we get 4G in more places first before worrying about 5G?

Doesn't matter, they'll limit the amount of bandwidth you will be allowed to use under the "plan" and then charge you crazy for the overages. Which would make it damn near unusable to begin with. Hell, I read an article that ATT cap theirs at 15 gb a month plus $10 each gb you go over. I'd burn through that in 1 day, shit maybe 1 afternoon.

Hard to get excited about anything when the prune juice posse creates policies for this stuff and have no idea how a family uses or consumes data anymore....

Well, I'd like to take this moment to announce 6G, which on a logarithmic scale is twice that of 5G. 6G is the future of being a G; it'll be so much more G-like than current G's, you won't be able to keep from throwing your money at us. Soon, 6G will be in your home, offices, cars, underware drawers, lawnmowers, fireplaces, cerebelli, quants, and everywhere else as well. 6G is the ubiquitous marketing campaign that you didn't know that you both don't want and can't resist! 6G, coming to a dimension near you soon!

Except rural areas.

5G will need it's iPhone moment.

In my opinion that will be gaming, sports and live events in cutting edge quality VR applications. If consumers can buy a 'digital ticket' and watch the World Cup, Superbowl, Indy 500, Le Mans, etc. in whatever cutting edge quality exists at the time in VR you'll have that moment. You'll be able to buy digital season tickets for the NY Yankees right on the 3rd base line (your friends will be there next to you represented by their memoji or the like so you're still watching the game with your buddies), buy a ticket for an Indy Car race and be able to watch the race in VR as if I was sitting in Alexander Rossi's seat from start to finish. The next question is how much will I have to pay to not have commercial breaks...

I just don't understand what that has to do with 5G. You could build such a thing already just using WiFi, and yet....no one has done so. I mean, where are people likely to sit and use that VR headset and watch a world cup? On a sofa in their home where they have fast wi-fi, or on a park bench where they have to rely on 5G?

If you have 1M people around the world checking into a VR camera atop a car going around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at 200MPH you need bandwidth and image quality. I want to see what the driver see's in near perfect image quality and be able to look around when he goes wheel to wheel around a turn. The entire layer of crap that's fed from whatever service, NBC, ABC, ESPN, etc will flatten and the consumer will be able to watch the event as if they were in the action themselves. 5G will help in driving that engagement.

EDIT: Given how crazy America is about football, my guess as well is the NFL could sell millions of VR related tickets to the Superbowl in a similar scheme. The hitch in my opinion is commercial breaks will ruin the experience if commercials as they're broadcasted today happen in VR - people will want to plug themselves into the action with no obstructions.

Again, you're just describing Wifi plus unspecified VR magic. Why do you need 5G for this at home VR thing?

Please explain what this has to do with 5G. Be specific.

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