Comment by deostroll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deostroll | Hacker News Reader

I hail from Kerala, India. I read the first section and stopped. There is no new feature here. 5G boasts to bring better bandwidth. But is that really useful? Perhaps you can stream, movies and web meetings, faster. We can do this today, albeit a little slow.

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...

Great to see another Keralite on here!

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.

> Perhaps you can stream, movies and web meetings, faster. We can do this today, albeit a little slow.

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.

The solution to this might one day be Starlink and Wifi calling?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink

5G is substantially cheaper. Your carrier can send you femtocells for free and you can populate your surroundings with these femto cells and get really good connection everywhere. Think of it like WiFi service provided by your carrier. Of course this would also mean your ISP and carriers will now merge

5G might make your situation worse.

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.

It depends on the frequency, not (mainly) the protocol used.

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.

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