Understanding operational 5G: a first measurement study
blog.acolyer.org
blog.acolyer.org
The problem I face today, at present, is a fluctuating carrier signal. I get mostly 1-2 signal bars. The data signal changes from H to H+. (Since I have set it to accept only 3G signal).
I live in a grey area; the leeward side of a small hill. Beyond that hill is the town's primary hospital. Without the vegetation, it might look like I live right in the middle of a (semi-moon) crater. The cell phone towers are on the outer periphery, servicing the hospital sides mainly. There is no scope of a tower coming inside this crater since it is a residential area.
So is this going to change when the current towers upgrade to 5G?
Legally people here are not allowed to retransmit a mobile carrier signal. There are many spurious products on Amazon India that claim they can boost signal strength. Several Indian youtubers, demonstrate they hacked something up to boost the signal...no science in it...all hogwash.
I am waiting for the day there is a solution to this. After that 5G is most welcome...
An argument can be made for this being a better use of spectrum.
For a 500M file:
* if you download it at 10M/s, it will take 50s to receive, where you are using radio spectrum;
* if you download it at 50M/s, it will take 10s to receive.
By downloading it faster you can stop using radio spectrum sooner, which allows other people to use it. And other people's greater download speeds allows your phone to send/receive traffic sooner as well.
Operating a radio also uses up a lot of battery, so the sooner your device can reduce power, the longer your battery will last.
5G will not make this better. The problem for your (our) part of the world is coverage, and that needs to be dealt with using more cell towers. A 5g transition will possibly compound this problem, by needing more towers for the same coverage area, and by making those towers and the infrastructure for data transport to them more expensive.
IMHO 5G is a great idea for cities, ideally mini building-as-a-city size projects, where you can provide coverage to a lot of people really fast. But for penetrating and providing reliable coverage for wider areas, 5g isn't the right thing. Hopefully the next iteration works towards that.
It's also been interesting to see Kerala change over the last decade - I see things change as snapshots everytime I'm there, so I feel it more keenly. Speeds are a lot faster when they're available, but tower-to-tower and carrier-to-carrier handover is still a massive problem. Part of it's hardware, with the signal just not reaching you. The other part is still software, where some towers just won't let you go, or refuse to upgrade you. I've sat next to people who were getting 4g on the same carrier, same phone, while I was getting 3g and had to restart.
My understanding being that for 5G to work well it needs more but smaller cells deployed around cities. I don't think 5G's strength is signal distance. Just given its higher frequency therefore it might make your situation worse.
If you deploy 5G on the 2G or 3G bands, you get roughly the same coverage. The 5G speeds in these bands are limited, because the bands are limited.
machines can talk to each other. If your tv won't do telemetry, maybe you neighbor's device can relay your telemetry for you?
"In a web browsing test, 5G only reduced page loading times (PLT) by about 5% compared to 4G. This is because most of the time goes into rendering, i.e., is compute-bound. Even if we just compare download times, 5G only shows a 20.68% improvement over 4G."
25 Mbit/s is fine for streaming one 4K UHD video with surround sound.
It is mainly just large downloads where speed matters. Downloading a new game, or a big update to a game you have, or a major OS upgrade, will usually take longer on a slower connection. (Not always, because the server might not be fast enough. Not everyone pays the bandwidth costs to allow their download servers to support a bazillion simultaneous gigabit/s downloads).
When I dropped cable TV/phone and went internet only, I decided to cut my speed from 600 Mbit/s ($90/month plan) to 100 Mbit/s ($55/month) to see if it was good enough. (If not, it could be raised easily just by placing an order on Comcast's website. No need to even interact with a human--they only make you interact with a human if you are trying to do something that will lower your bill).
That was 6 months ago, and it is still sitting at 100 Mbit/s. I almost never notice that it is slower than it once was. Most large downloads I do are things I download in the background while doing other things, and then get to sometime later. For most of them, all the change from 600 to 100 did was mean that the gap between the download finishing and my getting around to wanting the data is smaller.
One other important consideration is uploading. My old 600 plan had something like 25 Mbit/s upload. My 100 plan only has 7 Mbit/s upload. That sometimes is noticeable, such as when I need to upload a file to a server for work, then ssh to the server to do something there with the file.
Connection issues at home is probably a Wifi issue. They might have a poor signal to the router. Devices on the same channel will interfere with each other. As will the neighbors' network. And these days there are a lot of networks out there that interfere with each other.
The other option is that the shared line back to the ISP can't handle the traffic. That's something that definitely can be happening due to covid. Traffic patterns are quite different and it's possible that things are getting saturated. But it's probably the wifi.
For video conferencing you should have about 3 Mbit/s upload for a group conference. That's where you will probably hit lower speed plan limits if you have multiple separate people doing group conferences, or one person doing a group video conference while 2 or 3 others are doing big downloads or streaming 4K video.
A lot of residential internet services seem to set upload speed to not much more than is necessary for the ACKs needed when someone is downloading at the maximum download speed, and so someone doing an upload focused activity can have a big impact on other users in the household.
That'll be first generation i-Device with 5G support. There will likely be 2 or 3 generations before the next-G.
An iPhone 15 will definitely benefit from higher bandwidth.
5G made the bet that computation becomes more energy efficient in the future and I think it's very good bet.
5G NR frequency bands covers also the same frequency ranges as 4G/LTE not just the new high frequency channels.
Some carriers are already using low-band spectrum (600 MHz) and mid-bands.