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Comment by chki | Hacker News Reader

Very impressive technology: With those 4GB per second download speeds I can use up my entire month of data in 250 milliseconds.

On a more serious note: what technology advancements will there be in the next 10-20 years that actually make 5G technology useful?

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5G is for the cell carriers not the customers. Towers can simultaneously transmit to a certain number of clients at a time, so if you can get latency down and bandwidth up, you can service effectively more clients in the same period of time. With that said clients benefit too since they can shut down their power-sucking radios sooner. Think of it like turbo boost for CPUs: it's all about racing to get the link to sleep.

Thanks, that sounds very useful indeed! I had only heard about impressive download and upload speeds so far but this makes a lot of sense.

5G also enables internet of things to finally happen.

So like, my toaster can finally get hacked?

I hate conspiracies but I honestly think the IoT concept is an extremely terrible idea and perhaps even a cultural and societal nuclear bomb.

IoT is much more useful for business than consumer use. For instance adding tons of sensors to expensive equipment like a fleet of trucks.

It also would allow to release product with buggy and incomplete firmware because you can always push an update, right?

so like like your appliances will be dumping usage data 24x365.

Not if it runs NetBSD.

I don't actually want to live in a world where everything with a battery is connected to the internet.

We all know that the manufacturer will stop updating the firmware after a few months, leaving botnets to pick them up.

Has the network ever been a problem or bottleneck for the deployment of IoT, or is it just yet another bullshit buzzword pushed by the telecoms industry, similar to remote surgery/telemedicine? Most current IoT is using 2G cellular modems and seems to be fine with it given that the majority of devices don't need high bandwidth and the carriers themselves are not rationing the amount of SIMs that can be active, suggesting that there's plenty of capacity left too.

It's not about network speed, it's about the power requirements, range and iSIM.

With LTE-M (not sure if it's considered 5G, but it's a new LTE standard being rolled out at the same time anyway) or NB-IoT you can have devices using way less power to stay connected to the internet, and the range can be very impressive too. Of course, the bandwidth is also very low. But that's OK for things like tracking devices (they're making reindeer trackers in Finland) and basic smart watches.

With eSIM or iSIM you can also make the device smaller

> is using 2G cellular modems

I think carriers really want to discontinue 2G eventually. It's really inefficient. They've already dropped support for 3G around here.

I'm guessing it's also way more power hungry than LTE-M/NB-IoT

Can you make something like this with 2G? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/airbolt/the-airbolt-gps

I don't think so...

I’m a layman on this topic but watching the Apple video it sounded like 5G has higher power requirements than LTE. He even explained how it switches between them to conserve battery. LTE when you don’t need speed and 5G when you do.

Do not be confused. These technologies are very different to the 5G technology (called “New Radio”) the new iPhone and 5G phones in general are using. They are designed around using as little energy as possible and maintaining connectivity in very difficult conditions to the expense of speed and latency.

The reason IoT hasn’t completely taken off yet is simply because it’s still developing as an industry. There are lots of open questions about maintenance and architecture and how cloud IoT services should work. As it becomes more commodified it will become widespread.

[edit - noticed sibling post... “smart toasters” etc total BS nonsense, but IoT for business will be transformative]

Do you mean LTE-M? Is that considered 5G?

Both LTE-M and NB-IoT are considered technologies of the 5G family. Technically they are way simpler versions of LTE, but they can coexist with "normal" 4G and 5G. A 4G / 5G base station can allocate part of its radio resources to these mobile technologies. In the future, with slicing this allocation can even be dynamic.

Most of the times, when people discuss how 5G will serve "massive machine type communications" they refer to LTE-M / NB-IoT.

Is that a good thing?

Gotta counter that with few JavaScript timers continuously checking for new ads every 200 ms.

This isn't strictly true, consumers will benefit with better signals and less slowdowns in dense areas such as sports stadiums.

This is likely correct, although I suspect that would be as a result of the aforementioned, rather than incompatible with what I suggested.

It will become cheap enough (both hardware and subscription wise) that companies can include them in basically everything. That way you can't prevent your TV from uploading data to the mothership by not connecting it to wifi.

It's not a consumer technology.

I am hoping that SOME TV manufacturer SOMEWHERE follows Apple's lead and markets a privacy-conscious TV as a feature. I have never bought a smart TV (I last bought a plasma 12 years ago), so I have managed to somehow skip the whole smartTV thing. And I'd like to continue avoiding it.

I doubt this will happen but I’m sure there will YouTube videos on how to eradicate your tv of this plague

we've got one and have never used it for anything other than plugging in the laptop via hdmi. it just happened to be a decent deal and nice picture - the "smart" aspect was completely ignored.

I have a feeling that the concept of TV will be phased out.

There will be iPhone, iPad, iOS-based computer, iDesk, iWall, and finally, an iHouse.

You wake up to a big ceiling made out of ceramic-enhanced scratch-resistent glass screen, which artificially has emulated sunrise, so your experience of waking up is natural and absolutely amazing. Siri greets you, plays you a song, and while you brush your teeth, calmly tells you about your day, which is of course planned by an intelligent algorithm powered by the latest A42 neural chip.

Bacon is crispy, and eggs are tender. What a breakfast prepared by iChef! Not to mention the special sauce that is part of your weekly gourmet discovery program. Just savory.

The wall is playing you your morning news.

"What day is it today?" asked Siri, cheerfully. "It's Apple Event's day!"

Phew, for a second there, you thought Siri has asked you a real question. Turns out it's just rhetoric.

The new A43 chip is going to blow A42 out of the water. The trade-in program is amazing.

You look around the house, and the iWall looked bleak. The screen contrast-ratio on iChef is lacking. Your iToothbrush doesn't have a speaker as booming as the one in the advertisement.

"Hey, Siri. I'd like pre-order the new iHouse package!"

"Of course. Do you want to enroll in the trade-in program to exchange your current iHouse with a discount."

"Yes, please."

"Done."

A month later, the trade-in team has taken away the iHouse, yet the new iHouse isn't there. There has been a delay; the iHouse was supposed to be transported by the Pixel automatic railway, but Google just cut the project last week, so everything is stuck in warehouse for now.

"Damn it!"

You cursed, reflected, and walked into a Samsung shop.

GoogleMind notices your entry to the Samsung shop and expands the pervasive storage field, incrementally improving its probability of extracting money from you in future. "AndroidHouse had toothbrush features years ago, moron" says the shop assistant in lieu of a greeting. Looking around hoping to see some example appliances and integrations you are puzzled that most of the store is given over to themes. In the distance two people are cheering because the washing machine has dark mode. Presumably the lights in their house don't work.

A customer wearing a V for Vendetta mask locks eyes with you, they start to say something about a YouTube video they're following to upload a custom firmware to their cooker which lets the gas burners override the legal safety limits and double as a room warmer, but at the mention of YouTube a solid sheet slams down from the roof in between you blocking the conversation. "Get the best YouTube experience" it ... instructs? Demands? The place where it should take a response from you is missing. You turn away.

The shop assistant invites you over to the VR counter where you can tour the AndroidHouses on offer, several tens of thousands of makes and models all alike, and hands you a pair of carefully cleaned and sanitized VR goggles, which you put on. "Please select all images of brutal murder scenes or books on leopards" the familiar captcha test prompts. You go through the motions, accepting that it's perfectly reasonable that you might be a spam customer. Nobody has been able to speak to a human about the captcha contents for at least a decade now.

The VR goggles go blank, then show you a scene from a Virtual Reality headset of the 1980s. "I thought Android VR was quite good?" you mutter. "Mandatory Samsung overlay" says the assistant, "runs all the same apps". Data gathered by the headset arrives at the nearest orbiting FaceBook point of presence, sneaking past the privacy filters. Which privacy legislation applies to the satellites is still being fought. You tour some houses, you watch some ads. It's terrible that Apple doesn't let you block ads properly. You watch some more ads. Disgusting Apple blocking third-party plugins. You ask if AndroidHouse allows third-party plugins, but it doesn't.

Leaving the shop, undecided, you glance in the door of the GNU/OpenLibreHouse Organization. "Our houses would have electricity now if it wasn't for Microsoft!" you overhear. A large and intimidating man walks up to you and grabs your arm. "If you want to see your daughter again, come with me and move into your new OracleHouse". He moves and you go with him like his grip was iron. It might well be. Your wallet is missing. He nods at a crowd of people standing nearby and your heart sinks. Consultants. "We can have your toothbrush setup within six months - a Gartner leading average time" one of them says. You never asked for this.

THANK YOU.

I don't think I've commented here for years, but had to dig out the login credentials for this one.

I recently spent 20 minutes looking at TVs on Amazon because the NBA finals were happening and I figured it might make sense to finally get a TV. Every damn TV I saw either had Alexa built right the eff in or it was Alexa-or-some-such enabled.

It's frustrating. I'd like to have a "smart" TV because having Youtube, Hulu, Netflix or Spotify on it is fairly useful, but the divide between smart and dumb TVs is now too large, with nothing sensible in the middle.

I'd definitely pay extra for a privacy-oriented TV, but I fear that a handful of privacy nerds willing to pay 20% or even 50% premium is not enough to offset the economies of scale and make this a reasonable proposition for any PM at any existing TV manufacturer to bring up.

Every single smart TV I have owned was complete and utter garbage and I am a tech person who carefully reviews what they buy.

I went with a Sony for the display tech but dear God is AndroidTV hot garbage. Interfaces, UX, everything terrible. Worst of all are the $20 main processors used in these things. They feel as if they're run on a 2007 BlackBerry.

The lackluster solution is to get a TV box (AppleTV, Xiami stuff...idk) but why is that even necessary.

If you have to ask why, the answer is usually always money.

Buy a computer screen + the $100 AppleTV module. At least Apple is privacy-serious, and you get Netflix-Hulu-Youtube. It doesn’t give you a classic tuner though.

Buy a dumb TV and plug a set-top box or HDMI stick in (I still prefer Chromecast the most). Whenever you don't need it, remove its power plug.

How about Apple actually make a God Damn TV set.

>It will become cheap enough

I hope that would happen but nothing on the technology roadmap suggest that is possible. Even if 5G patents were free, i.e you paid Zero for all Wireless patents cost, Antenna, RF Front End and 5G Modem is expensive.

Even if you somehow Apply Moore's Law, it will take at least 3 Gen reduction in cost. ( That is 6 years ).

That is why everyone continues to improve WiFi.

The next big JavaScript framework.

The original iPhone was 2.5G and could load webpages just fine. But when a modern iPhone only has a 2.5G connection, it’s useless. All we need to make 5G critical is for webpages to start being 500+ MB for basic text plus all the associated ads, trackers, and other important features.

> All we need to make 5G critical is for webpages to start being 500+ MB for basic text

I see you've never used GitHub before.

I just measured 1.36 MB total transfer for a full reload on GitHub.com. Five avatars were cached in memory; their total size was under 1 MB.

I'm using Safari 14.0. Do you have any measurements (maybe on another browser) that show GitHub serving particularly large pages?

It was just a cheap dig, but try combining this page https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/2907 with this extension https://github.com/findepi/user.js/blob/master/github-expand... to expand all of the missing comments. You'll get a lot of xfer for what is effectively just some plaintext.

Okay, that is a valid point. There's clearly a lot of unnecessary overhead with the expand button in issues.

A good chunk of the data transferred in that issue for me are images, not plaintext. Lots of screenshots of the videogame.

Wirth's Law, applied to networks? Ad-filled javascript bundles will expand to take up as much bandwidth as you give them

Just looking at "mobile-optimized" web pages from now compared to a few years ago proves this in spades.

You're off by an order of magnitude, because it's a max speed of 4Gbps. Not 4GB/sec. Bits and not bytes.

Your overall point is still valid, though. Most users will get essentially zero benefit from this and data caps or throttling will kick in hilariously quickly.

The theory here is nice, but who here on HN does actually get good unthrottled speeds on 4G now? Will carriers just magically stop throttling 5G after they sell it?

Most non-americans probably? :)

A few days ago I downloaded a 4.8GB MacOS update over a 4G connection. That took 25 minutes, which is an average of 3.2 MB/s. My provider claims 30 Mbit/s, so that is pretty reasonable.

That's great and all, but that would leave me with 0.2 GB of data for the rest of the month (Germany). Great now I just have to disable downloading of pictures and videos in Whatsapp.

I had unlimited data from O2 in Germany earlier this year. It was something like 55 euros/month without a contract.

In Denmark, I get unlimited data for 18 euros/month. I don't have a wired connection; I just use my phone as a hotspot.

(Both were really 1TB/month before throttling and not truly unlimited.)

Top speed of LTE is about 300Mbps. Meaning you got about 10% of maximum bandwidth availble on LTE.

Which kinda tells how 5G is also a marketing gimmick - it's theory of 2Gbps will be hugely different from actual reality you'll get when using it.

I get ~100mbps at home over LTE, which is the same as my cable connection.

Edit: In the US.

Which means you're still getting about 1/3 of LTE's maximum bandwidth of 300mbps.

I get unlimited, unthrottled LTE + 5G for £24/month in the UK.

Arguments like these have been argued since dial up :) Probably longer. Don't worry, it won't be a problem for consumers

Mostly it's only a problem for North American consumers. Customers in the EU and Asia get true unlimited data for a pittance.

Not really, unlimited data for cell service is not common in China.

There was a lot of talk about how the number of sensors on autonomous vehicles meant many gigabytes of data per minute would be produced and transmitted by 5G back to servers to help train the systems. I'm not sure if I actually believe that, but that's certainly what people were claiming.

The claims are even more dumb, that it enables automimous cars by connecting them - would you let a car drive you around if it required a mobile connection to work properly? Nope. Note that Elon Musk / Tesla nor any other self driving car uses anything of the sort. It all needs to be running on the car. And they're managing to do self driving already without any 5G. For uploads you can just wait til the car is home and use the wifi, or slowly (though not that slowly really) upload with 4G.

I think this is a futurist persons painting a sexy picture. In reality, it would be cool if - as we slowly approached a self driving world- the vehicles could relay real time road conditions to the cloud. This of course would enable the vehicle to be aware of upcoming road conditions. It’s not so much that the internet connection is doing the driving but it could aid it. Something simple like potholes. They show up after a rain and get fixed a few weeks later (if you’re lucky). If the car knew there was a pothole ahead and knew to drift to the left portion of the lane to avoid it that would be nice. The vehicle wouldn’t have to do real time jerky swerve reaction because it knew it was coming. Maybe next month a vehicle notices the pothole is gone, the cloud forgets about it. Something like this is the practical use of IoT on the roads.

Yeah that would be great - but the point is it in no way needs 5G. Putting a flag in the map where there are some potholes can be done with 3G.

Certainly not this one simple example in a single device (vehicle). I don’t know where our 3/4 G limits are but I think if you multiply the data transmission by many millions of devices and many millions of reasons to communicate, it’s possible it would put a strain on our present network capacity.

5G in the case of self driving cars is meant to have an auxiliary role. For example, it may warn surrounding cars for pot holes or even notify instantly of a sudden breaking.

> what technology advancements will there be in the next 10-20 years that actually make 5G technology useful?

Real-time 3D/VR video streams. I think this will start happening immediately after release since the Pro models have LiDAR. Expect weird, interesting things to happen in games and streaming.

It’s 4Gb/s for Gigabit

Think AR glasses constantly updating with new 3D data as you walk around town.

E.g. Apple are rumoured to be working on their own AR glasses for release within the next couple of years.

The demo stated that iOS will only use LTE by default and only kick in to using 5G when it needs it. It will be interesting to see how it makes that decision.

5G unlimited on verizon is actually not deprioritized after any GB amount.

Yet.

They’ll likely have to change that if for no other reason than someone will use their plan to run some servers using many TB/mo of data or something crazy. Like how MS needed to cap “unlimited” OneDrive because a few people were storing 100TB of system images.

Tinfoil hats, cancer treatment, self driving cars or perhaps platoons for highways, smart homes that are easily hacked, wireless low powered implants that cause benign tumors that sue a tech company into bankrupty, but the shell company opens another 5g implant company.

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