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Comment by rexf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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~~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.

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