5G is a joke and the iPhone is the well-timed punchline | Hacker News Reader

5G is a joke and the iPhone is the well-timed punchline

macworld.com

36 pointselorant67 comments

I use TMobile Home Internet that includes their 5G, both 600 Mhz (Band N71) and 2.5 GHz (Band N41). This means I don't see multi-gigabit speeds, but I routinely see 250-500 down/50-200 up on Band N41 and 15-30 mbit down/ 5-10 up on Band N71.

TMobile's 600 MHz signal just goes forever. A single tower can cover hundreds of square miles providing "LTE Speeds."

We live a mobile lifestyle, and 5G has been a massive win for us. We get LTE speeds out in the middle of nowhere and amazing speeds when we're closer to a tower. Last year, we spent a bit of time about in the desert 10+ miles outside Ely, NV. I was able to stream YouTube at 1080p without issue in the middle of nowhere thanks to 5G technology. Looking at CellMapper's data, we could have easily been much further out and still been fine.

I don't need multi-gigabit. I just need useful speeds, and personally 5G has been awesome.

So, when you’re 10+ miles outside Ely, NV how is 5G a material improvement over LTE? I’m not understanding your point.

Not the GP, but I think the point is that he can’t get LTE at all in the desert 10+ miles outside of Ely, NV, because there are no cell towers within range. He doesn’t get 5G speeds there, but he does get LTE speeds on the 5G bands because the range is so much better. Full disclosure: I am a 5G doubter, so this is interesting to me, and I am by no means a 5G expert, so I could be totally wrong about this.

Yea, I don’t get it. I have no problem streaming 1080p movies over LTE well over 10 miles from the tower in the desert…

On what carrier and with what device?

AT&T, original iPhone SE

Because for a given amount of physical bandwidth & power, 5G is going to be faster. 5G utilizes the available spectrum much more efficiently to give greater speeds on a given signal.

There's no way I would have been able to stream 1080p videos on TMobile's LTE 600 MHz band at that distance from the tower.

I think I read too much into the desert. I imagined line of sight, but you didn’t imply that.

Yeah, that's one of the things that's great about the 600 MHz spectrum. While it can't penetrate mountains, it can penetrate lots of other stuff. It's the old spectrum formerly used by UHF analog TV.

Don't get me wrong, I really prefer being on their 2.5 GHz when I can get it. It's way faster, but I'll take "fast enough" over nothing.

In my city (Europe) many ISPs have stopped offering fiber and are now mostly pushing 5G "broadband connection". I moved last autumn and had to get 5G. I can attest that it is pure garbage. Connection drops several times a day and I have never seen speeds any faster than 4G, often dropping to ADSL speeds during high congestion. The modem is also buggy as hell and needs to be rebooted at least weekly (believe it or not - it even came pre-installed with a setting that reboots it every night!)

I am currently negotiating with two ISPs to get private fiber, because I simply can not work from home with this unreliable connection. It's going to be expensive, but OTOH adds to the value of my home.

> In my city (Europe)

As a fellow European, please don't do this. There's a bunch of very different countries on that continent, so the information provided by "Europe" is extremely limited baring rough geographic area. Plus you sound like an American who doesn't know anything about anything but claims "Europe does this so communism" and similar, you know the type. If you don't want to dox yourself, you could at least state "Northern Europe" or "Southern" or w/e and rough size ( mid-sized). ISPs in a small town in Germany doing only 5G wouldn't surprise me; in a big city in Bulgaria it would.

Wow, an entire article about 5G with no mention at all of all the new frequency that's been going along with it. Yes, existing frequency is no faster, and MM wave is not terribly useful, but that mid-band spectrum is pure gold. When people say 5G, I just assume they are talking about mid-band. It's like when we got 4G and all that new 700mhz spectrum opened up. It's all about the spectrum.

5G is fantastic, maybe the author’s experience is limited to some part of America?

I (UK) replaced fibre with a 5G router at home where I get around 200Mbps. I was recently in London, put the SIM card into my dual-SIM phone, and was walking around with a 300Mbps connection in my pocket. It was better than the internet offered by the shared office space I had to use.

All this for £27pm, unlimited data.

Cellular technology, like most technologies controlled and implemented by a group of large companies, is always disappointing at first. The 4G rollout wasn't any better.

1. 4G rollout was late. There was a two year period where iPhones/Smartphones had significantly faster 3G on some carriers who offered HSPA+. 2. 4G killed unlimited data. The same is happening with 5G. Carriers will only offer it as a premium service if you give up your grandfathered unlimited data or high-capacity data plan. 3. 4G modems and drivers sucked so bad and were tied into carrier-specific apps. Custom ROM? No 4G for you. Old phone with a really bad android skin? you get either flaky 4G or supper batter consuming 4G.

5G is still pretty new and it's purpose doesn't lend well to the same massive 4G rollout maps we are used to seeing. It's primary purpose is higher bandwidth in dense areas. Since most carriers are turning off 3G, 4G/LTE is going to be the common denominator for a long time.

How does this work with data caps? I had to use a 4G hotspot for work for about a week and had already reached the point where I was getting throttled. Won't applications of 5G just hit this point more quickly?

Or, let's blow the carriers' minds here, they can lift the data caps and just charge you little extra for a fixed subscription, as a good chunk of Europe's carriers already do.

An executive of the carrier I use even said in an interview that it's much easier that way for them, and they are not worried that people will stream 4K video 24/7. Few years down, turns out he was right to be not worried. I can stream a 1080p Twitch gaming video just fine -- and that's in a local mall with a very polluted radio spectrum.

I’m on an iPhone 12 Mini on T-Mobile 5G-UW and don’t agree with the sentiment here. Most of the time my phone feels like I never left my home’s fiber connection. I get a full day of use from my phone doing mostly email, slack, and the usual aimless browsing between life/meetings/chores.

The original “5G” that is just faster LTE? That was pointless.

Their 5G-UW seems to have a better reach than the LTE deployment so I’m generally happier with their service than before.

I've had largely the same experience. The only issue I live in a t-mobile 5g deadzone about a mile wide, so when I get into my car, I have to drive like a mile before my music will play. My gf uses verizon and has had no issues so I've been thinking about switching for that reason alone.

Do you have 5G set to “5G automatic” or “5G enabled”?

5G in a lot of ways is a Solution in Search of a Problem. I think that's certainly the case for consumer cellular. In my mind, we already had enough bandwidth for almost everything that people do on their mobile devices, including streaming video. There are certainly advantages to some of the new spectrum (penetration of 600Mhz, for example), but that could've just as easily been rolled out as part of the existing generation.

There were supposed to be improvements that would help carriers with network congestion, by allocating large chunks of bandwidths to clients with the highest SNR to get them off the network faster, but anecdotally I haven't noticed anything significant.

There are some super cool high performance applications, though: fixed-point and point-to-point wireless can be vastly improved with the new spectrum and higher efficiency modular ion techniques. But of course that often gets abused by carriers and deployed in unsuitable environments (I'm looking at you T-Mobile Internet) causing poor experiences for customers.

There should also be some cool applications in automotive eventually (C-V2X: cellular-vehicle to everything), especially for self driving, but things seem to be moving especially slow on that front.

I do have to say, though, that working on some 5G projects has been incredibly challenging and very rewarding. There have been really cool innovations in circuit design to make things work at these (theoretically) high bandwidths.

Disclaimer: Qualcomm employee but opinions are my own

> In my mind, we already had enough bandwidth for almost everything that people do on their mobile devices, including streaming video

That's what people said with LTE too, and then video consumption exploded with Tiktok. Who knows, maybe 5G will enable 8K video streaming for VR/AR for everyone.

Have you watched what people do with their phones? We went from scrolling through 140 character tweets to scrolling through autoplaying video. Video calls while walking around.

Honestly, lately when I’m having poor loading times and latency on cellular data I often look and I am on 5G.

I've had a 5G phone for over a year, and have been ON 5G for maybe 45 seconds.

Said it before: Switched carriers to make the new one pay off my phone, then switched back because they didn't have 5G either, and their signal was worse.

We were promised one thing with 5G, and the end-user reality is much, much different.

You in USA?

Here in Sofia, Bulgaria (Eastern Europe) 5G definitely improved the latency of my connections, like a lot. Speed seems to be the same or slightly higher than 4G (which was also excellent but latency was sometimes erratic).

Yes, Los Angeles. I have to stand in a certain spot, facing a certain direction, and hold my phone above my head to get speeds faster than 4G. I've got wifi at home for my phone, and can't get 5G there to get rid of the wifi.

5G may be for some things, but those things certainly aren't our smart phones.

Nah, I'd say it really depends on your carrier and/or radio pollution. 5G definitely was a boon here in Eastern Europe, maybe the US carriers cheaped out or they simply have to compete for spectrum too much?

> We were promised one thing with 5G

Could you state what that one thing was?

Yeah, the phones were supposed to be fast, you were supposed to download a movie or videos in seconds. My phone is slower than the 4G one I still have. And I can't have it with me at all times, because the battery life is terrible, and phone is sometimes so hot I can't hold it.

I get 600 Mbps down and 32 up on my 5G in London. The US’ problem is the Pentagon is squatting prime spectrum allocated elsewhere to 5G, giving carriers no option but to use the DOA mmWave which literally can’t punch itself out of a paper bag.

5G speeds are improving rapidly.

https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states

Verizon launched mid-band 5G in Q1 2022 and saw its average speeds increase from 79Mbps to 107Mbps. That might not seem like much, but it's also barely deployed. T-Mobile has seen its speeds more than double from 82Mbps to 191Mbps over the past year. That's going to keep increasing over the next couple years as they continue to upgrade their networks (AT&T is mostly waiting until new equipment becomes available for them in the second half of 2022).

I think a lot of people forget the 5-8Mbps that LTE launched with - which seemed barely better than what HSPA+ could offer.

This is such a weird article for April 2022.

> 5G does seem to offer advantages for a limited number of customers and you can really get great speeds if you’re able to connect to mmWave, which is rare

Except that it's offering a 5-10x improvement a lot of the time on mid-band and T-Mobile now covers 210M people with mid-band and Verizon covers 100M (with T-Mobile targeting 260M covered by the end of 2022 and 300M covered by the end of 2023 and Verizon targeting 175M covered by the end of 2022 and 250M covered by the end of 2024). 200-500Mbps mid-band 5G is very different from 20-70Mbps LTE.

The article is right that Apple wasn't late to the party, but the article is very wrong that 5G isn't offering anything meaningful. If you're on AT&T, you aren't seeing it yet. If you're on Verizon and not one of their 5G Ultra Wideband plans or not in their somewhat limited mid-band coverage area, you aren't seeing it. If you're on T-Mobile, most likely you are seeing it since they cover a decent majority of Americans (over 60%) and it's available on all their plans.

5G was hyped a couple years early for sure. I'd totally understand this article in 2020. In 2022, it's really weird given given the abundant evidence that 5G is coming along nicely. Sure, it was hyped too early and for most Americans it'll still be a year or two (given that around 2/3rds of Americans are on AT&T and Verizon and even T-Mobile is only covering around 60% at this point).

Why not write this article in Fall 2020 when Apple introduced its 5G iPhone? It would have been relevant and meaningful then. Today, it feels like someone wanted to regurgitate a criticism that was valid at one point and isn't valid anymore. Let's write articles about how consumers won't want touchscreen keyboards on their phones and how the BlackBerry is here to stay. Let's talk about how social networking is a fad. Let's talk about how Tesla will never be successful because the cars take too long to charge. All of those could have been fine articles at a certain time. Writing them today would seem really weird given that we now have evidence to the contrary.

They did write it in 2020(too): https://www.macworld.com/article/234134/fast-cheap-and-out-o...

I do get excited when I happen to find a mmWave hotspot and can pull 2 gigabit on my phone (for what purpose, I don't know), but after that, life proceeds as normal.

Do the 2 gbps speeds ever translate to any uses besides speed tests? I have gigabit fiber for my house and whatever CDNs are on the other side rarely seem to take advantage of the full bandwidth. For instance OS updates, Steam downloads, these all come in around 20-40 MBps (yes everything is wired not over wifi)

Where are you located? I'm in Singapore and Steam downloads are usually about 800 Mb/s, and PS4 downloads are at 500 (probably limited by the disk in the device). Linux software updates are all over the place, which really isn't really surprising given that you never know which mirror it'll use.

I've had Xbox downloads use 1Gbps, once ( i had to triple check because i thought my router is only capable of 300/300 and i thought my plan allowed for 300Mbps down max). And outside of that it's always nice to be able to stream Netflix in 4K while doing Steam downloads and OS updates etc. simultaneously.

I can get an mmWave connection inside my apartment (just, if I stand by the window). If only Verizon offered home 5G in my area, I’d be able to get a dramatically faster connection. But no, slow cable it is…

For real

I figured mmWave would be blanketing most major cities by now

Here in SF it’s really only noticeable on a few blocks downtown

If 5G is going to be a game changer, we need the actual infrastructure to power it in major population centers

Is the slow rollout in part caused by apple's slow adoption of the technology?

If you're in the USA, heres a fun fact: your city and/or county helped pay for the 5g infrastructure out of tax payer dollars.

Next fun fact. All those telecommunication cunts lobbied to greatly lower the lease rate for those paddles to be put on tax payer infrastructure.

Next fun fact. A majority of 4g infrastructure bonds and other loans cities and counties took out back in the day are about to be fully paid for, on average, between 2025-2030. Depends on the area.

Another one. They had to take out new loans for the 5g. Replacing soon to be freed tax payer revenue back to locked up.

Next one, a bunch of Florida special interests groups noticed this and countered the telecomm lobbying because 5g is pretty much fucking useless.

That all I found out from an in depth article in a business trade magazine called Florida Trends. Laying out a lot as to why FL voters should call their reps to stop telecomm lobbying.

It was a month or two later, "those dumb Floridians think 5g causes cancer and brain control" or whatever that stupid wave of propaganda bullshit was.

"But I can download Fortnite in 43 seconds with 5g!" Literally was everywhere as an argument FOR 5g a while back.

Congrats, your tax dollars went to the toilet so you can stream a 4k movie on a 4 inch screen.

Am I bitter, yes. Especially when on HN i kept reading you lot thinking all tech progress is good at any cost. Whatever conspiracy crap was bot trolled clouded the money aspect of the argument. But hey, whatever. Voters had the chance to free up tax revenues for public benefit. Nope, need that sweet sweet "high speed". That's not the "rich" or "capitalism's" fault since it was an obvious, stupid ploy. Except the general public is just dumber and more self interested.

All these statements and not a single source, reference, etc. This, coupled the very emotional tone, gives it zero credibility in my eyes.

> 5g is pretty much fucking useless.

And this one is just flat out false. The massive amount of additional spectrum afforded to 5G means carriers can service way more customers in the same cell without degrading performance.

I have to wonder who is benefiting from all this 5G FUD. Bizarre conspiracy theories do not spread like this without some financial or political interest pulling the strings.

What's with the defensive tone over a corporation? The only way I could understand it is if they had a large stake on the company.

Really, where? Serious question, no down-voting, I'd really like it pointed out at me. I only see sarcasm towards alarmist statements that "Apple is falling behind".

I mean, clearly this is a Mac enthusiast website enthusiastically defending apple. The point stands, imo.

If I remember right this website's reporters are banned from Apple promotional events because of their earnest (and colorful) reviews of Apple products. Humor reminds me of The Register.

What point though? Regardless of where an article is coming, it should be judged on merit, not on prejudice.

The point of "it's defending a corporation" is the part I am literally (as in, with my eyes) not seeing.

The only way someone could defend a corporation is if they were attempting to manipulate others for financial gain?

It's Macworld. What do you expect?

It's like going to Fox and being surprised they like Trump over there.

Hmmm... Doesn't stand the test of time your statement. They have been also very critical and honest with reviews of shit apple devices.

I remember the same type of articles in the early years of 4G.

4G definitely enabled video. We’ve yet to have the app that 5G enables, not to say that something won’t show up eventually.

What killed 3G for me is that they artificially slowed it down to give 4G priority or something.

Without a doubt.

I recall in 2011 using a 3G tethered connection to play low latency games with people across the world. It worked incredibly well, and never failed.

Nowadays, that’s not possible. I am not even sure how well it would work on 4G in some areas, given how congested a lot of networks are.

5G enables more capacity. A carrier can service more clients in the same area without degrading performance than they can with LTE.

This is not something that is obvious to the end user. There is nothing exceptional about your phone working as expected, and the explosive growth in bandwidth usage and the number of active cellular clients over the last decade is not on most people's minds.

That fits with what I’ve seen - the carriers love 5G and want it everywhere, and the advertisements struggle to explain why I want it.

oh great, more capacity for the use case when we're all streaming 1080p video at a soccer match, over cellular.

The most important thing to do at a live sport event is watch some other sport event elsewhere apparently.

5G near me is something like 15x faster than wired broadband. I don't care about it for mobile, but I'm excited to finally ditch my landline and crappy 20mbit line.

That's great. 5G can work if it's deployed well and with sufficient capacity. Unfortunately, that's not the case everywhere. For example, there's no 5G in my area at all and even the 4G coverage and speeds suck. Thankfully, in my area, I have 200mbit cable internet and WiFi calling. So to use a cliche: Your mileage may vary...

> We’ve yet to have the app that 5G enables

Eventually we'll be pixel streaming real time graphics and workstations (eg. Mighty) to our phones and tablets. This will enable entirely new types of content and productivity tools.

Power can live at the edge and stream to cheap, easily replaceable consumer devices.

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