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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Why is 5G being treated like a big public decision that we're supposed to have an opinion on, when in reality it's coordination between chipset manufacturers and cell tower operators that hardly involves us at all? It doesn't even seem like it's worth marketing to me, I'm not going to go out and buy a cell tower. Even selling me on 5G so I'll buy a new phone is unnecessary, the phone manufacturers could sell me on the improved performance directly.

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Spectrum allocation in licensed bands is a public decision. The public literally decides what use those chunks of spectrum should be put to. Only the free bands (like 2.4GHz) are a pure matter of cooperation among users and hardware manufacturers.

I thought it was decided by an auction?

Who gets specific assignments is often done by auction, but how the overall spectrum is allocated is by the FCC. In theory they're responsible to the public.

That implies 1) the FCC listens to the public and 2) the public understands the technology and 3) the public will vote for what's good for themselves in the networks domain. Arguably 2 and 3 are false, and 1 we know to be false depending on the admin (see: net neutrality)

I'm having deja vu, didn't Ajit Pai ignore all that public input from the web forms (blaming it on prank submissions)?

I don't think it implies any of those things. If something is regulated by the FCC, it's regulated by a public agency, even if that agency disregards public opinion or public interests. If an anti-5G sentiment caught fire, the FCC could be directed by an administration or Congress to move in a different direction.

Anti-5G sentiment shares a lot of DNA and membership with antivax sentiment which seemed like a vocal fringe minority 20 years ago, but may end up being a majority of voters in the next election cycle. It's not completely out of the realm of possibility that you could see major anti-5G political candidates and/or notable incidents of anti-5G violence and terrorism.

Carriers & phone makers need something to talk about for marketing. The iPhone 12 was unremarkable, so they had to lean on 5G as a reason to upgrade. 5G in my experience (latest iPhone 13 Pro on one of the largest US carriers) is broken/underwhelming, so I've turned it off.

I agree that there is a lot of bikeshedding regarding 5G and countless other topics (microservices vs monolith, electron vs native, etc). There are lots of topics that drive heavy user engagement while never answering an actual question.

~~Couriers~~ Carriers shouldn’t be in the business of selling phones at all, but that’s a different discussion entirely.

With net neutrality gone, once the dust settles they will also be in the B2B business of selling internet speeds to corps such as Netflix etc. There are already are so called fast/slow lanes

> broken/underwhelming

Really? It's been great for me. Tested it the other day and got 30 megs down.

I get flat out insane speeds on 5G. Must faster than any home internet I have ever even had the option to subscribe to. When it works.

When it doesn't work, my battery life goes to shit & I cannot check my email because no data seems to get through. I disabled it about 3 days after buying a 5G capable phone. I've never turned it back on.

I checked, 5G on and off. My battery drops 20% more when on 5G. iPhone 12.

So I wonder if all you smart people can do the math, how is that going affect power use and climate change when everyone has this new demand for power?

30mbps or 30MB/s? You can do 100mbps+ on LTE...

I get 300 MBPs download speeds on 5G - that might be a San Francisco thing?

Can't wait till its beamformed right into my eyebrain. If you are ever bored just look at the nearest tower and donate your wasted brain cycle towards SETI while you stand motionless drooling at the sky.

MB/s

Will it still be 30MB/s when 100,000+ people in your 5G cell are using it though? I don't understand the tech. 100k people in San Fran pulling 30MB/s would require 3 TB/s of spectrum bandwidth. Isn't that a lot, or am I just way out of the loop and still thinking in 1990's units. :)

Spectrum is weird. Technically WiFi is also spectrum and it supports every household in SF with way more than 30 MB/s each.

So it’s really just a matter of how many antennas and how “far” (including walls) can the frequency travel.

Oh that's a great example. The 2.4 GHz IMS band used by Wi-Fi literally serves hundreds of millions, but only have a radius of about a house. I heard 5G cells have smaller diameters, so that makes way more sense. Thanks!

The reason why mobile internet in rural areas is bad is because carriers are too cheap to put cell towers every few kilometres.

They should really be forced to in the same vein as how telephone companies are forced to run service anywhere.

Broadband should be declared an essential service, like power and water.

iPhone 12 was huge upgrade from 11 even without 5G. It adopts OLED. slim bezel, became lightweight. iPhone 11 was tiny upgrade from XR but people think tend to think it was big. It was just a recovery from failure of product naming of XR/Xs.

Don't think it's the whole story, but 3g, 4g and now 5g were used as big selling points for new phones and plans to consumers.

If people start buying things based on the name, they'll form opinions on it.

Most consumers purchase based on buzz words like 4g and 5g. They barely pay attention to bandwidth.

Age of social media. Everyone discusses topics they have zero control over to hell and back.

"Hey look, we're doing Democracy with thousands of people and everyone agrees/disagrees" - it really tricks the brain into thinking it's doing something.

Everyone's busy talking and believing they're doing something, we all feel good about it, there's no real need to actually do something.

Carriers are marketing 5G as a public facing feature so they can charge more for it.

"Even selling me on 5G so I'll buy a new phone is unnecessary, the phone manufacturers could sell me on the improved performance directly."

If 5G makes it cheaper for the carrier, they could make plans cheaper for folks whose handsets support 5G, i.e. penalize people who don't upgrade.

Wait, did you just suggest a carrier would make something cheaper, voluntarily?

I seriously doubt that. Even if it does lower their operating costs, why would they lower their potential profit padding?

Competition.

Why do Visible and Mint offer cheaper plans than the Verizon and AT&T brands?

To attract customers from other carriers.

Do either of Visible, Mint, etc install their own infrastructure or buy bandwidth from ATT and/or Verizon?

Also, their services are spotty at best compared to other providers. There's a reason for their prices being lower similar to how Spirit Airlines is cheaper than other carriers.

Mint uses T-mobile as its underlying carrier.

"their services are spotty at best compared to other providers"

How so?

AIUI the only time Mint customers would have worse service than T-Mobile customers is if there's network congestion. e.g. at a crowded sporting event.

I have friends with Cricket (not sure which carrier they attach). In the city that they spend the majority of their time, the service is fine. We went on a road trip where once we left the major city's coverage, their signal was no longer very good until reaching another major city. My phone with one of the main companies where they own their network never lost signal.

That's the anecdotal consensus I've heard from all of these smaller vendors.

Visible is part or Verizon, i.e. it's just another Verizon brand. I'm guessing they save a lot of money on customer service, as only relatively savvy customers will sign up for a mobile plan online, without talking with someone or walking into a store.

The top line metric that the financial markets care about for the major postpaid carriers is ARPU (average revenue per user). As soon as this number goes down, so does the company’s market cap. The C suite really cares about making sure this number continues to go up.

The easiest way to improve ARPU is to raise all existing customers' prices to current ARPU, and hope they either accept it or churn. Either way ARPU goes up, whilst revenue and profits go down.

I'm pretty sure the carriers want both ARPU and profits to increase.

If a carrier CEO has two options, with the following estimate outcomes:

A) Profit +10%. ARPU -1%.

B) Profit +5%. ARPU +5%.

Do you think they might choose A?

There is little doubt that both of those companies are lowering prices because of the data they collect and sell.

> Wait, did you just suggest a carrier would make something cheaper, voluntarily?

Comparatively cheaper. You can do that by raising the price on the alternatives.

Adjusted for inflation, mobile internet has been decreasing in cost - I pay the same price I did a decade ago and have much better coverage and much better speeds.

Because Chinese companies developed 5G before American companies did. American telecarriers not only didn't initially research the technology, they refused to even agree to a standard definition. IIRC, AT&T marketed their 4G network as 5G for a while. As a result, Chinese companies had an opportunity to enter western markets with superior, government funded technology. They started making sales, notably in Canada, IIRC, before Western pushback started. From the private sector, telecoms pushed on the government to ban the Chinese technology, to buy them time to play catch-up with China. Politically, the need to protect the inadequate technology (not) developed by the private market, from a government funded program doesn't fit with the current US ideological model, so a different excuse was found. The legitimate reason: "Telecommunications infrastructure is a national security priority, and Chinese technology in this arena, due to its ties to the CCP, is a national security threat" was used. Again, a legitimate reason. It even has the bonus that it implies the current western ideology that governments should not direct private research. But this sort of market protectionism makes 5G a public policy and national security interest matter. So in order to ensure there is public support for such a policy, one of the easiest things to do, is convince the bottom-information tiers of society with conspiratorial, xenophobic, nonsense. Which is where the 5G conspiracy theories come from. You will note that the 5G conspiracy theories can be generalized into the statement "5G is evil, and is used for mind control / cancer", which really, is a dumbed-down game of telephone (pun) away from the original source material: [5G is evil] <-- The CCP is bad / national security and we must reject their tainted technology; [It is used for mind control] <-- CCP = big brother, Chinese 5G = surveillance, national security; [Cancer] <-- more tangible than 'mind control'.

There still isn't a standard for what 5G is. Unlike 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE, which all have very specific technological definitions, 5G could be edge computing, MIMO, small cell, beamforming, and so forth. No one has actually created guidelines about what it is.

At present, it seems any kind of 5G service you can actually buy is at best just new frequency spectrums that the government auctioned off in recent years.

> There still isn't a standard for what 5G is. Unlike 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE, which all have very specific technological definitions

In common usage, these "generations" always match a change in the low-level protocol used by the radios. For 1G it was analog, for 2G it was GSM, for 3G it was W-CDMA, for 4G it was LTE, and for 5G it's NR. So distinguishing between 4G and 5G is simple: if you're using LTE, it's 4G; if you're using NR, it's 5G.

This is not really true – "5G" is pretty universally accepted to refer to 3GPP Release 15, defining 5G New Radio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR).

actually there is, ITU-R recommendation IMT2020 is 5G and only 3GPP Rel15 and following release satisfy this.

A lot of 5G conspiracy theories might also correlate with incumbent ISPs (especially cable ones) who can block new wired ISPs but they can't block mobile phones - so a lot of the conspiracy theories included things like "wifi connected by cable to internet is fine" :V

And 5G includes technologies that allow for much denser mesh, higher throughput, lower latency, and more clients per cell enjoying good service. So it could start supplanting wired broadband services.

I think expecting that most laypeople connect the Huawei ban to 5G as a technology is really strange. The conspiracy theories about 5G all relate it to wealthy Westerners like Bill Gates, not meddling by China.

It seems there are multiple consipiracies about it though. The Gov't is pushing that CCP will use it to infiltrate. This is more of a polictical paranoia consipiracy. That is quite different than the oridinary wacko crazy conspiracies being pushed by whomever is pushing them to say things like Bill Gates is going to do whatever for whatever reasons.

It is clear to me that the "5G conspiracy theories" were fabricated by American interests when Huawei were 5 years ahead of them and it was very possible that Canada, Australia, parts of Europe and a whole lot of Asia would install Huawei's 5G infrastructure.

It did backfire a bit when the American companies rolled out their half-baked 5G (which is absolutely horrendous and you are much better off disabling 5G on your phone for better connectivity and battery life)... but it was only a few burnt towers and not much else.

"Because Chinese companies developed 5G before American companies did" - just No.

5G as deployed today is a 3GPP (== driven by Europe) standard and yes, Chinese, American, Australian, Asian etc. companies contributed to system architecture and RAN (radio access network) which is a domain of the old-schoolers: Nokia, Ericsson, Qualcomm, Samsung and since a few years also Huawei-EUROPE (not Huawei China).

I remember there was a EU report that was suggesting Russia was spreading anti 5G conspiracy theories to slow 5G adoption so they could get ahead sooner. I searched for it a while ago but couldn't find it quickly.

The majority of the core 5G patents came from Qualcomm, Samsung, Ericsson, etc. Huawei filed a metric ton of land grab incremental patents on non essential details which is why they get less than 1% of 5G patent revenue.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1237450/global-ip-revenu...

What you’re doing is running with this nationalist rhetoric on the Chinese internet that China “invented 5G”. Sorry, but 5G was not invented by Huawei. It’s fair to safe they rushed how a huge deployment of the technology, but mmWave is economically inefficient and most of the 5G benefit for China was increased subscriber density.

The reality is, the US doesn’t have the subscriber density problem China does, we are far more spread out and mmWave is much more useless to us, so one of the core bragging rights of Huawei is not relevant for our use case. The other 5G bands <6Ghz are much better for the US.

The costs to carriers will be going up and by marketing they are subtly letting us know the cost of our service plan will be going up.

Microcell deployment, regardless of whatever protocols they’re using, is part of the “5G” push. If carriers suddenly put one in your front yard [1] what are you going to do, be against technology and progress?

[1] https://abc13.com/houston-homes-seeing-5g-boxes-placed-witho...

Not to mention the ecological impacts of the density required.

Looks fine to me. Doesn't really stand out among similar utility boxes you find around for electric or gas. I'd love to have a 5g tower by my house and not need my repeater.

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