I have yet to hear anyone who's not a telecom CEO or a politician say they actually want 5G
Edit: I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go. I want ultra fast reliable telecom in crowded cities. I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet. I want bandwidth available for IoT devices.
As someone living in NYC and using 4G daily with few problems, I suspect this is a problem of your telecom provider not having adequate infrastructure or having a bad configuration for handling many connections to a few nodes.
Which they'll likely do for their 5G network as well because, well, telecoms do the minimum possible.
Regarding the earthquake, yes it is common that you can't access SCEC website right after an earthquake, but this is not a problem with 4G. You can have 10 gbps over fiber and the site still won't be accessible, because the site itself is bogged down by the traffic.
I’m honestly tired of all of these ‘but why do you need it?’ arguments. The same was said about electricity, long before anyone envisioned dishwashers, game consoles, blenders, etc. But why aren’t gas lamps good enough?
Heck, the same thing could be said about WiFi. 10 years ago no one would think a WiFi network should need to support 100+ devices, but here we are in 2020.
We aren't talking about the difference between electricity and gas. We are talking about the difference between a fast cellular network and slightly faster cellular network.
I understand that the GP's argument is that the effects of a particular technological advancement cannot always be understood at the time of, or before, its introduction. But we aren't talking about gun powder here... We are discussing an incremental change to an already existing technology.
As Asimov explains, the velocity of "progress", specifically in areas we already have come to understand in some way, diminishes with each step forward.
Also, if you're interested in deploying longer-range wireless around a large property for things like weather sensors and other smaller data rate devices, cut out the cell network and go with LoRa. You'll get a few km of range for a tiny amount of power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
Weather sensors and such are pretty low-bandwidth. Why not just get a 3G/4G hat and a SIM with <1GB monthly bandwidth?
It never will be though. Whatever frequencies you can do wirelessly you can do over a wire without the interference of other users using the same frequency at the same time.
Also a lot of promises 5G offers only sound good on paper. The higher frequencies don't travel well through walls (that's why it uses lower frequencies as well) and the maximum speed being talked can only be obtained during tests, but in the real deployment it has to be shared over all users.
Another problem is that the speeds don't mean sh*t if we have the same data caps, in fact higher speed is worse, because many applications will switch to a higher bitrate and consume more data, even when there's no noticeable difference on a phone.
> It never will be though. Whatever frequencies you can do wirelessly you can do over a wire without the interference of other users using the same frequency at the same time.
this is true in principle, but not necessarily in practice. I suspect it will hold for the near/medium future, but I can imagine a world where much more money is invested in improving mobile networks than home cable connections, causing the latter to stagnate.
most "normal" people I know don't even own a desktop computer. there are no devices in their homes that connect via ethernet (or even have an ethernet port without a dongle!). at a certain point, it might make sense to ditch the home modem/router altogether and scale up wifi networks to the point where they basically merge with cellular.
I think big fiber backhauls are still going to be a thing though.
absolutely, I'm just talking about wired vs. wireless as available to the typical consumer. the fiber would be the backhaul for an entire city block or neighborhood. just speculation.
This seems like a misunderstanding of the technologies. Mobile networks modulate RF and emit it via antennas, cable networks modulate RF and carry it via RF cables (aka coaxial cable, or "cable"). Its the same technology from a fundamental standpoint, but the latter has superior propagation characteristics and dramatically reduced noise. Wireless can't be better than wired - if it was, you'd just connect the LTE or whatever transceivers to the cable plant and be done with it.
You listed the theoretical advantages of 5G. Whether or not the practice mirrors theory is debatable. But I can't help but noticed you missed listing any disadvantage. Most people are completely unaware of any because they don't make it in the marketing leaflets.
When you say 5G I can just as well read: I want close range, LoS connections, substantially higher power consumption for devices and increased complexity, higher costs, security concerns, and the inability to take advantage of the speed not only because it's purely theoretical but because data plans did not keep up in 99.9% of the world.
Listing only benefits can make even an amputation sound like a great way to keep weight off. I'm all for new tech and advancements but if it feels like 1 step forward, 1 step back then it's not much of an advancement. It's half baked and pushed just to sell "the new stuff".
Line of sight connections are great in crowded cities. Large venues can install cells locally for even better performance, and wide deployment of these cells is an accepted part of the deployment.
Power consumption is an issue, but that’s an issue that will improve over time and also applies to any technology upgrade in modern devices.
I don’t list the downsides because each one is either so minor as to be a non-issue, is totally hypothetical and didn’t apply to previous generational upgrades, or a downside that applies to literally any new mobile technology and therefore doesn’t need to be said.
We also don't know how fast and reliable 5G will be (beyond the severely limited range) but it was at the top of your list of advantages. Some of the disadvantages of current Gees you mentioned seem to be exacerbated by your mobile carrier and they may very well apply to 5G.
> each one is either so minor as to be a non-issue
For the purpose of making your argument you were willing to just downplay every disadvantage, ignore it, or just glance over it, and pump up every advantage. Many others aren't. The reason 5G is going ahead as such (half baked and expensive, more so than 4G was in its time) is that most people don't know what they want, or what they get. But enough have the money and the promotional material says it's the thing to get. If it weren't for the slowing smartphone market nobody would have considered going ahead with this. But the phone market is catatonic so suddenly here you are convinced that your RPi with sensors can only work over 5G, ignoring that LoRa may be an even better choice for such applications. LoRa doesn't have great marketing though.
WiFi is genuinely better for some of the applications you listed. Voice is still 4G. And the law of diminishing returns strongly suggests that the jump brings less noticeable real world difference than the numbers suggest.
Don't leave the city then. 5G has very limited range and doesn't work in rural areas where there aren't enough customers to provide needed geographical coverage.
That's expensive. What's also expensive -- sometimes even more expensive -- is running wiring to all those places to connect those radios to the backhaul network.
I frankly do not expect US carriers to go to that expense, at least not universally.
Already possible with 4G/3G in many Asian countries. Your provider just sucks.
> I want ultra fast reliable telecom in crowded cities.
See above.
> I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet.
Not gonna happen. FFTX is already at 10Gbp, and it is going higher as time pass.
For context I pay a lot for 150 Mbps and really don't have any choice in the matter.
We don't have this today mainly because wireless carriers do the minimum required to compete with their minimal competition. It doesn't have that much to do with 4G vs. 5G or whatever. Even living in a city, I don't expect 5G to improve the situation all that much, unless carriers start really spending on their network.
The ubiquity, reliability, and bandwidth will only be there if carriers make huge investments in their networks, which I don't expect will happen.
You can certainly get what you want today, with 4G/LTE. You just have to go to a country with carriers that actually prioritize that, like Taiwan or Japan (and probably several other east/southeast Asian countries).
And IoT devices typically require tiny throughput. Is your electricity meter pumping out 4K video?
s/more power-efficient/better/
5G is better. When the vision is finally realized. In the meantime you get a brand new washing machine that costs double, only works when you're next to it, and the spin cycle must be done in the old one. And by the time it's actually better you have to buy a new one anyway.
5G was rushed in a way 3/4G weren't because smartphone sales are slowing down. This is not the usual "there are some hiccups at the beginning" type of thing. As it is today it's rushed and half-baked.
You just described early GPS receivers.
- It's shorter-range, so coverage will be spotty for a long time
- It doesn't go through buildings, so even the urban centers most likely to get the first towers will have spotty coverage
- It will require buying a new device, which OEMs love but the average person won't
- That device will take a hit in battery life
And all of this for ludicrously-fast new speeds on mobile devices that we'll use for... what exactly? We can already stream HD video over 4G. What experience is 5G, assuming you actually have access to it, going to improve?
I'm sure we can contrive some use-cases like streaming VR video or whatever (even though all current phone-based VR platforms have been sunsetted), but I'm extremely skeptical that it will do anything to make the average user's mobile experience better in any meaningful way.
all new modern phone models have 5g, what's the problem? Huawei, Xiaomi
I have great experience with 5g, it's way more faster than LTE
Maybe don't make blanket statements about a standard you clearly aren't familiar with.
Also, as far as I'm concerned, the latency gains are much more interesting as the ludicrous speed, and then not even exclusively for phones and new types of apps, but for IoT as well
The one you are talking about is millimeter wave 5G.
The other one has pretty long range, goes through building, doesn't use up that much more battery and is overall a better technology (higher bandwidth, better congestion control and overall capacity for more connections in a crowded area, lower latency, etc.).
Remotely operated robotics due to the much lower latency. Think near instant reaction times while operating a drone with VR goggles, and all the implication this could have.
Also many other use cases become more feasible:
- Self driving cars with human fallbacks
- Safer car racing
- Actually smart delivery, where a single person can manage a fleet of vehicles
- Search & rescue operations ...
There's a relative to this already with first person view drone racing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZLimUDUJTA
4G was a real battery drain at first
Within the last year, we denied Verizon's 5G proposal. They want to run fiber and wireless backhaul to provide indoor access for some buildings. It's also important to watch which door these proposals come through. It's a tell as to what their actual agenda is.