Has anyone ever had awesome lte and said “I need more bandwidth” on their phone? Idk I just don’t see the need for 5g but I’m definitely not a phone power user.
First, there are situations where it's hard to get "awesome LTE" because there's a lot of usage. Getting more bandwidth is important to handle situations like that.
Beyond that, we don't know what the future will offer if we build greater capacity. When Apple launched the iPhone, we didn't know that we'd be changing the way we live our lives. Things like TikTok wouldn't exist without the abundant bandwidth offered by LTE. We don't always know what greater bandwidth and capacity will offer.
We are seeing some things already. We're seeing wireless home internet become available to a lot of people. For cell carriers, this is a new stream of revenue. For customers, this can be increase home broadband competition and for many rural customers the first chance at broadband.
We're seeing things like Nvidia's GeForce NOW allow you to play games that are being run on the cloud rather than your local device. Lower latency and greater bandwidth/capacity means a better experience. Nvidia recommends 50Mbps which LTE can do, but won't have as much capacity to support as many simultaneous users. 5G will also drive down latencies which are important for gaming.
It's possible that self-driving technology might take advantage of this in the future. I'm not someone that promotes self-driving tech, but one can see how lower latency and higher bandwidth/capacity could mean being able to send more data to the cloud both for computation and also for storage/learning.
A lot of people are talking about VR and meta-verses. Again, I'm not necessarily buying into this yet, but it seems like greater bandwidth and lower latency could make things better.
Heck, even video-conferencing on mobile can benefit from more bandwidth and lower latency. While LTE can accommodate it, there are times when networks get congested and less congestion is a good thing. Lower latency also offers a better experience.
Do you need it? No. But you don't need a smartphone. At the same time, it's possible that someone will create something that you won't know how you lived without that's made possible by more bandwidth/capacity and lower latency.
3G(HSPA) to 4G(LTE) was huge. I happily upgraded.
I think it's easy to forget that LTE wasn't as big a jump initially as we see today. Back in 2012, T-Mobile's HSPA network scored 5.5Mbps in PC World's testing against 7.4Mbps for Verizon's LTE and 9.1Mbps for AT&T's LTE. In PCMag's 2013 testing, T-Mobile's HSPA got a similar 7.7Mbps while the 4 LTE networks got 5.1Mbps, 10.3Mbps, 13.1Mbps, and 16.0Mbps. Again, LTE networks were seeing marginal improvements. Over time as network deployments matured and new LTE releases came out, LTE's improvements went way beyond HSPA.
But the first round of LTE phones on Verizon were terrible - way worse than any 5G device we saw. Some people wanted to be a first adopter. I think waiting a generation or two gives you better results, but some people always want to be first.
I actually think the reason the US pushed LTE so quickly is simply because Verizon didn't have an upgrade path for their 3G network which was stuck in the 1Mbps range while HSPA-based competitors were pushing into the 4-8Mbps range. In Europe, carriers could delay a year and offer dual-channel HSPA service in the meantime.
LTE was still better even in the early days, but the fact that CDMA didn't have an upgrade path put Verizon in a tough place. They could either watch AT&T offer 5x faster speeds than their HSPA network (at a time when AT&T had an exclusive on the iPhone) or they could be an LTE early adopter. I think AT&T would have liked to milk their HSPA investment a bit longer (as many carriers did around the world), but once Verizon started marketing LTE they had to follow.
And you're saying that the upgrade was huge - and it certainly has been. However, it was more marginal at the start. That's not to say it wasn't a good upgrade even initially, but it wasn't anywhere near the 40-50Mbps that LTE averages today in the US. If 5G can follow a similar trajectory, we'll be able to support a lot of things we can't today.
The point of 5G is better quality of service. Marketing people of course dumb down the improvements to "it's faster" but throughput is actually the least important thing. Though of course a better QoS means that operators can guarantee a bit better throughput as well.
Better latency, improved scaling for operators (more connected devices in an area), lower power usage, and more reliable connections. That is a big issue for me with 4G. Coverage here in Germany is not great and even in areas that are covered, the quality of service is pretty bad and I often struggle to get it to work at all even in places that are supposedly well covered. E.g. the are around the TV tower in Berlin (i.e. the largest FFing antenna in the wider area) is pretty bad because the area is full of tourists usually and the local base station ins hopelessly oversubscribed.
That's the kind of stuff you could reasonably expect to improve with 5G.
True but isn't wifi already lower latency and greater bandwidth? What things can we do on wifi that we can't on mobile data?
So a solution in search of a problem, then?
Bandwidth usage globally has been growing at around 30% per year for a long time now with nothing showing it would slow down (obviously not all of this is wireless). LTE will sooner or later run out of bandwidth and thus 5G basically allowing more mpbs on the same radio spectrum (and also rolling in new frequencies)
Even today in relatively low population density country like Finland (where I live) LTE connections in cities are slower during peak hours due to the radio frequencies just being full. (In general most plans have unlimited data so people use them a lot)
And this is valuable? If you dig a big hole in a public space people will fill it with garbage before long.
Technology should be driven by need. Building bigger pipes, bigger roads and bigger holes is just asking for more garbage to fill it with. Let's start with problems that are worth solving.
The long overdue update came and went. There just isn't the pressure built up for the next one.
I get the idea of incremental capacity and quality updates. But it's drudge work. What business models are people contemplating that has them so horny for 5g?
Was it ok? Sure, you can stream video just fine (my mobile isp didn’t force 480p video). But for anything behind basic browsing and consuming content it was a pain for example playing multiplayer games.
I was very happy when I moved back to a fixed line connection. So yeah, I would have been very happy with more bandwidth, lower ping and a more stable connection.
The range of 4G depends a lot on which band you pick, but these C-band frequencies should go several miles, maybe half as far on average.
Just out of curiosity I tested my 4g speeds/ping - I got 30mbps and an average of 35ms (6.4ms jitter) here in the Netherlands (KPN network). Given by test results I certainly think you could have had a better network.
But even with a good 4G connection, I think 10ms is better than 35ms and I think 300Mbps is better than 35Mbps. I think our current 4G networks work well, but higher speed and lower latency will improve the experience even for our current use cases and even when a person has a good 4G connection already.
Yes, lower frequency networks offer better coverage. It's why we see sub-1GHz 5G deployments from the 3 US carriers. These networks are offering marginal improvements (say 30% at present, but probably more in the future). As 5G standalone (rather than anchored to LTE) becomes common, they'll also offer significantly lower latency.
A lot of of 5G deployments are likely to be from 2-4GHz which is higher than most 4G deployments. However, in a lot of cities carriers are already splitting cells to get more capacity so the higher frequency doesn't matter as much as you might worry. Carriers are also working on 5G carrier aggregation which will extend 2-4GHz coverage a lot farther by allowing lower frequency signals to handle the uplink. Towers can put out more power to push their signals farther so the limitation is usually the uplink. If that's getting handled by lower frequency signals, it will effectively extend the range of 2-4GHz networks.
Yes, 5G is better. It's definitely not fully realized right now with a lot of carriers putting out very basic 5G networks partly for marketing purposes. However, 5G offers better spectral efficiency and it does offer opportunities to extend the range of higher frequency signals via carrier aggregation.
So sure, "excellent 4g" will do a good job, but you still need to expand into the C bands to make that happen.
If OP was talking about 4g vs. 5g with everything else equal including frequencies, then it's not necessary but 5g is somewhat better with basically no downsides.
When I tested 5G, I got 1Xms (forgot exactly what, but lets say twice as less - maybe more). Anyway, latency was noticeably better (at least for RDP session). So that is single best improvement for 5G. Download speed was 320Mbit wired, 250Mbit wifi, but only 20Mbit upload - not so great.
Ofcourse it all depends on ISP, configuration, etc. When I first got modem, upload showed 10Mbit, complained to ISP, then it was 20Mbit, but depending on time of day 16-20mbit.
Anyway I don't understand the reasoning "why do we need...?". With that reasoning why bother going past 100Mbit ethernet? Oh, nice we got 1Gbit, so enough. I mean we may not saturate the channel, but it is nice for ISP to have the capability + some nice capabilities when we need that bandwidth (some huge transfer or whatever). + Streaming is data hungry, you may have multiple streamers at home.
Does it deserve all the hype? It doesn't really seem like it. But cell infrastructure is definitely used well beyond phones, so I'm trying to keep an open mind.
Also 4G made decent YouTube streaming possible. It worked on 3G but was horrible. Now people can't do without it. We won't even know what 5G will bring us until it does.
2G: Slow WAP internet browsing 3G: Better internet browsing, maps, basic audio 4G: Stream video and better audio
5G:??
All the above were known beforehand because allowed for current apps which were on broadband to be used out of the house. I would be more convinced there would be everyday application if there was current technology that is on broadband that I can take remotely.
I actually think that there are a couple of solid examples of this:
* Console/PC videogames: people wanna play God of War on their bus ride, as evidenced by the massive success of the Switch and the growing excitement for the Steam Deck
* High-quality video calling: latency and bandwidth increases in 5G are both huge for the experience of FaceTime/Skype/Discord/etc.
* VR/AR: again, applications that are seriously harmed by both latency and bandwidth, and ones that have many concrete, business-value use cases in a mobile / non-living-room setting.
and my "dark horse" candidate:
* Machine learning applications: any "AI"-powered product or service has a quality that is pretty directly proportional to the amount of iterations it can perform. Self-driving cars have the capacity to gather gigabytes per second of environmental data; the ability to stream this data back to a central e.g. Tesla datacenter, rather than just doing procession onboard, confers a pretty serious increase to model quality.
I think a "local" network-free source of computing is unavoidable, and once it is available, I just don't see the point of setting up a complicated (and error-prone) infrastructure to make computations remotely when it is available and fall back on-the-fly when not. Given the amount of regulation this kind of things have to comply to, and how error-proof they must be, I wouldn't think anybody would be happy with this cascade approach...
Basically the cell companies outbid the homeowners for control of the last 100 feet between the house and the nearest utility pole. Now the auction losers will proceed to get screwed.
5G will help alleviate the strain on LTE networks in the long run, so I want (and have) it for that purpose.
I’m sure 5G will help, but unless I’m missing something I would suppose LTE could provide far better access in UK cities today.
When a friend moved to London for six months, a 4G modem & router was the cheapest option, (not least because rolling 1month SIM plans are common here, but ISPs like twelve months, and charge exit fees or a premium for a shorter plan), faster than the cheapest ISP plans, and delivered next day vs. two weeks' wait for an 'engineer' to visit and mess about with 'master sockets' and 'lines'.
I highly doubt it. There's only so much capacity per base station, so the amount of base stations needed would be prohibitive in urban settings.
I honestly don't think this is a serious plan even by cell companies, except in rural settings. That isn't to say that they won't dupe some number of urban dwellers into it, too. Enough to earn some money, not enough to overload capacity.
I can't speak for their seriousness obviously, but EE (major provider in the UK) is advertising wait-list sign-up/'coming soon' in London.
I recall tube ads years ago (it was probably 4G, but certainly not 5) for a minor player that sprung up using someone else's network (Three/EE/O2/Vodafone, I don't know) specifically to provide home internet. I think they got killed by uncapped/high cap data becoming more common, tethering being more allowed; so anyone who cared could use any provider (and any modem) directly - and most people don't care they just want it to work at a good price and be easy.
I think EE will make it an opt-in up-sell for now, but that eventually they (and others) will just send SIMs & modems out instead of 'engineers'. No more copper lines to faff about with. If the customer wants a landline number, well that's just adding minutes on to their SIM plan. (And for a while they'll get away with charging through the nose for that, like the old £15pcm line rental or whatever, until the masses realise that any SIM would work, and most high/unlimited data ones have lots of if not unlimited minutes included anyway.)
This was previously the dream with 4G/WiMAX, but ultimately they weren't able to have enough bandwidth per tower to make it reasonable. 5G has much better efficiency enabling way more clients per tower and far more throughput.
And its definitely a serious plan by cell companies. Several companies are already selling this. Obviously, they're not exactly planning every home, but enough to actually market it as a real service.
https://www.t-mobile.com/isp https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/
But yeah, I don't doubt that they'll try to lure a good amount of people in. Enough to make some free money, not enough to have to actually invest more in the network. Kinda like how ISPs (at least in Europe) were heavily pushing ISDN onto people as we stood before the dawn of DSL.
I doubt it'll be a large proportion of urban users though. I must admit I lived for a year on this kind of service, but this was because the town I lived in had some strange some strange local government monopoly on ISPs, and the monopolist delivered service that was barely usable (not hyperbole). The mobile providers circumvented this by "not being ISPs", and while what they offered was as terrible as everyone else in this thread has related, it beat out the even more terrible monopolist cable offer. I switched to fiber as soon as the monopoly was lifted.
1) In the US, its stupid expensive and difficult to be yet another provider laying cables to people's homes. When it comes to coax and fiber, there aren't local exchange carriers in residential areas; the company who laid the cable is the only one able to offer services on that cable. For another ISP to come in to compete at all, there's a massive amount of red tape and cost to lay essentially redundant cabling. Launching a new wireline ISP is stupid expensive and there's a lack of viable competition in many markets.
2) Cell companies have spent years splitting cells and making smaller and smaller cells in suburban areas. They've been building small towers all over the place and just about every water tower and office building these days has tons of antennas on it. So there's plenty of places to stick new equipment in suburban areas.
3) 5G is both a more efficient protocol and also a lot of new spectrum. So they can continue to use the low-band frequencies they're using for 3G/4G service for mobile users while then offering new services on the newer bands. Since they already have lots of places to stick antennas with fiber already laid, this is overall pretty cheap to more than double the capacity per tower. In reality, its far more than double, probably several times as much bandwidth per tower as the newer frequencies can help split the same tower into smaller sectors per tower.
4) A lot of those new bands are pretty much trash for mobile users in suburban settings. Low on the ground, in a car, deep inside a home, you're not going to get much service. However, if you put a small antenna near a window facing the tower, you'll get excellent service.
So to recap, there's a good bit of room for more competition in home internet services. There's already lots of places which are already set up to hang antennas with plenty of backhaul connectivity, so adding a ton of capacity per existing cell isn't terribly expensive for the carriers. 5G allows for more bands with far more bandwidth available overall. A lot of the new bands are trash for mobile users in many spaces, but are very practical for fixed wireless. This means fixed wireless 5G could become very competitive with wireline services in suburban and rural residential internet markets.
I was under the impression 5G is pretty worthless outside densely populated areas
Other comments mention fixed wireless which is also big (home internet access)
One challenge in rural broadband deployments is there are only so many good locations for the carrier to actually stick antennas. Maybe a water tower or two, you might get lucky and have some tall radio tower at the edge of town. So then all the customers in the area are essentially sharing a single tower, all needing to point their CPE to that one point. You can only slice the tower up into some number of sectors and once you hit that point the tower is saturated. Every additional customer is now diminishing the service for every other customer.
Having better spectral efficiency per sector means you can service more customers, have better service per customer, or even both depending on how you balance it.
You can already pretty much get what you want by going the other way. Get a fast home internet connection, use WiFi at home and at work and get the cheapest available pay per use data plan for the small percentage of data you use while in a car etc. Doesn't work for people who use a large amount of data while traveling, but that's not actually most people.
The idea is that you’re going to pay one cell phone bill for all of your devices if you want to get them online. I don’t know anyone stupid enough to pay for a SIM card for their personal iPad currently, because you’d prefer to tether off your phone instead of paying $10 a month. But in the future you might see people drop their home internet and just go with SIM cards in everything.
I mean, maybe, but more likely to just be a 5G modem with wifi/ethernet, like has been available with LTE. I've got one with a $5/month plan as backup for my DSL, because my DSL is unreliable, and the local cable company doesn't service my house, and municipal fiber installation is unsubsidized and the actual installtion costs are too high, IMHO.