But the whole 5G hype is lost on me. Specifically, none of the carriers or handset makers are telling me how much the data will cost. Maybe I'm a little price-focused, but that determines for me whether I'm excited about it.
If I'm just burning through my existing data limit faster, what's the point? What's the pricing of this new data capability?
Cell size matters because there is a ceiling for how many devices an LTE cell can support in a certain range. Thats why you get crappy speeds/connectivity’s at concerts/events/crowded areas. As I understand it, 5g can support more devices per cell, and also can have smaller cells for more connection density. With latency, LTE has a baked in 300ms min latency that 5g does not, so 5g can be used for latency sensitive applications.
It will be a slower rollout due to the costs and infrastructure requirements, but 5g (from Verizon at least) will be faster than your home cable connection. That's a big deal.
The problem with mobile data has never been the raw speed - that is already fast enough. The problem was always how it's being sold (whether data caps, the overall - terrible - customer experience and the BS the industry is constantly pulling like AT&T sharing data for marketing purposes), and switching to a different technology won't magically change that.
First, remember that speed is shared with everyone using the same tower (sector) as you. As data usage goes up, that will drop. In a major city where cell density is high it's less of a problem, but it's already an issue in more rural/suburban areas where cells are larger. There are plenty of places in the US that have LTE coverage, but the speed is actually pretty poor.
Second, there are some limit on the number of devices each tower can support. With embedded devices increasingly relying on cellular, we're expecting to hit those limits. So 5G allows for future system growth.
And as for data caps... more available bandwidth does help lower prices. Those prices are, at least in part, set in order to manage system load. More capacity means they can relax the pricing and/or caps.
Data caps do nothing if everyone in a crowded area has plenty of "data" remaining and start using it all at once.
The reverse is also true, you can have towers in a low-usage area at night that are basically just burning energy, and yet if you run out of "data" you can no longer use it; so the RF airtime is essentially wasted as the only customer wishing to use it at that time & location is unable to.
Furthermore what about the "data" that somehow "expires" at the end of the month? That doesn't make sense either and proves this pricing model is just a bullshit extortion strategy and is very bad at actually addressing the problem of limited RF airtime.
The proper solution is to charge for a bandwidth, not data. The more you pay the more bandwidth you get allocated, and users can choose which plan they want based on their usage patterns.
But 5G does make a difference, that's what the parent comment was trying to tell you. It allows high-density crowds to continue having high-speed access, something that is not possible today. You can barely make a phone call on NYE.
Is that an actual problem that affects many users and currently can't be resolved with LTE? I don't disagree that 5G will benefit carriers, but the hype around it being some kind of a revolution for the customer is overblown. The customer's problem is very rarely a technical shortcoming of LTE or the earlier technologies and more about how the service is sold and priced, and so far despite 5G indeed allowing much higher capacity there's no evidence that the industry as a whole is moving away from the user-hostile "data cap" model.
> You can barely make a phone call on NYE.
Isn't that a failure of the switching/call control equipment or the inter-carrier peering as opposed to tower capacity?
US telecom companies in particular have always been at loath to share any cost savings with the end consumer - so I don't think consumers have any reason to be exited over marginal 5G gains on efficiency.
But I agree with your broad point: pricing is way more important today than speed for most customers.
I wonder if there isn't going to be an outside 5g to inside wifi bridge as a thing.
I guess in the future operators will use both frequency ranges in parallel in a macro/micro cell format. If you happen to be within the range of a mmWave micro base station you will use it. If not the sub6 macro base station will make sure you remain connected with “good enough” speed.
I'm not going to be one of those "the eye can't even see 60fps" people but lets not pretend that 5g is going to be anything but an incremental infrastructure upgrade that won't affect people in a non congested area.
But otherwise it is a serious and legitimate leap forward.
Of course it's nearly impossible to tell the sales people to keep the expectations in line with reality. Which I'm sure Verizon/ATT/etc all had engineers who knew the reality.
It's just business from hyper competitive companies where most customers won't see much of anything for years.
Customers will figure it out down the line, the companies are just kicking the can to try to exploit it for now before the other guy.
It's cynical but predictable.
who are the ads supposed to be targeted to? why should I, as a consumer care about 5g remote surgery? it's not like only at&t subscribers have access to remote surgery.
Less sensationally, OP might not believe that 5G has economic and strategic importance to the US. We would disagree on that, but that argument is not very interesting to rehash.
All of this buzz so that a bunch of nerds can do speed tests and post them online.
What's the use? Youtube vids a second faster. Upload stuff to instagram .5 sec faster.
Nobody wants tech to be so intrusive in life anyway.
But it's in the intermediate stage when things are scarce that the price matters, or rate-limiting/throttling/etc matters.
You go to South Korea, and they would laugh to think that the US has monthly bandwidth limits, or is talking about net neutrality. Speed and pipe size take care of all issues some distant day in the future.
Yet here we are, living in the past.
But if everything is 'unlimited' and they're differentiating based on amount of hotspot or throttling after a certain point, they're effectively charging you for high speed without making it seem like a surcharge.
After 20 seconds on the phone I knew it wasn't for me. I rarely leave the house during COVID, so I hardly use any data. I'm saving 50% going with a different company.
Data is included in my contract where I live - is that not the case where you live?
> If I'm just burning through my existing data limit faster, what's the point?
To get the same data... faster? Isn't that good? And is your data limited in some way? I never ever reach my limit no matter what I do.
I honestly wouldn't mind slower than 4G speeds. With 4G it's already bordering on ridiculous how quickly you can burn up a data plan.
Or the limits are going to have to become ridiculously big. You could burn a 30G/month limit in 10 seconds in “ideal conditions”.
Tethered phones are considered Ethernet interfaces by many operating systems so they would typically take priority over a wireless connection, unless the system has an explicit override for it like macOS does.