At this point, 5G is a bad joke | Hacker News Reader

At this point, 5G is a bad joke

computerworld.com

50 pointsCrankyBear20 comments

I am personally fine with my current phone speeds. I even use my phone as a hotspot for my laptop when I do coding at the park.

Curious what the bottlenecks for people are that make them want 5G so urgently?

Our phones can't upload all the user data they could collect.

Our phones can't download the all the ads that could be sent to them fast enough.

For one, many people don’t have data fast and low-latency enough to make hotspot usage a good enough experience.

If your signal levels are poor enough that 4G is slow, 5G isnt going to help unless you happen to be extremely close to a mmWave access point with nothing but air in between it and your phone.

It isn't just Signal, but Network Capacity.

The point of 5G is to allow carriers to serve more data with the same amount of spectrum. Usually that leads to consumer benefits in the form of a cheaper rate per megabyte. That's basically it.

I disagree. I think the purpose of 5G is to allow carriers (formerly known as The Phone Company) to sell value-added services to other companies large and small. IoT, video-on-demand, Big Data, AI, automation, etc. The bandwidth story is the distraction.

Guess who pays?

I think the term is more use cases rather than value added services.

Parts of the 5GC specifications such as URLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication) allow for far more safety critical solutions to be back-hauled over a mobile network. Autonomous driving, critical industrial control systems and remote surgery solutions are some I've seen.

Even standalone 5G networks are now specified, they use unlicensed spectrum and give you the freedom to not even include a carrier in the equation at all.

IoT devices are cheap and tiny and so are rarely on the latest cellular standards. Your typical IoT use case is smart metering and logistics - hardly big data users.

In most of those other use cases, the carrier serves as basically a big dumb pipe.

Yes and the cost models are being driven down even more by Cat-M and NB-IoT.

I've been working in the IoT space for some time and there's now a real shift into these technologies for large scale telemetry deployments like you described. The shutdown of 2G networks across the world have ruled out a lot of the cheaper modems.

There are other benefits, such as enabling a larger set of solutions to be battery powered and for an increased lifespan.

High density, sparse traffic solutions like you described are often termed as mMTC (Massive Machine Type Communications). The main benefits to 5G in these regards focus on the mobile network and their ability to manage a higher volume of subscribers and therefore lower their costs to the end customer.

In newer LTE standards there is LTE-M, which is a special lower power mode. So while they are not big data users they do benefit from lower power usage. Even without LTE-M, devices that will use LTE will be more power efficient

That story was the same for 3g and 4g. And why would they want to sell ‘IoT’ to ‘other companies’ while the poor consumers foot the bill? That’s just conspiracy theory.

It also allows wireless providers to directly compete with cable for home internet access. It could also help in many rural areas that still lack cable.

Or investor benefits in the form of stock buybacks, rise in share price, or dividend payments.

I have 5G home broadband in London and receive 700Mbps down with no cap. There's service from multiple operators. Yes we've had teething issues but they were all resolved.

With who? I've never seen unlimited data only sims in the UK.

Three provide exactly this.

http://www.three.co.uk/unlimited-data

There may be others: I didn't look.

Feeling somewhat validated in my choice to upgrade to a discounted phone from 2019 rather than spring for a newer phone with 5G support. I just had a feeling 5G was going to be something I would certainly eventually want to have, but wouldn't make a huge practical difference in the short-term (the next couple of years).

There is a 5g specification called 2D2 which is an acrobym for device to device. Could we create a "p2p" network so we don't need to all pay provider to get internet but rather share bandwidth ?

The pop up ads from the site is very annoying and out of date ...

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