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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The real problem with 5G is that it only has a few use cases. The big one is stadiums. Tens of thousands of people watching the game on their cell phones, each needing an independent video-bandwidth channel. (Anybody ever consider WiFi multicast for that? Most of them are watching the same stream, after all.) To get all that bandwidth in one place is the use case for line of sight millimeter microwave with large numbers of small base stations. The first places to get 5G base stations were stadiums.

After that, it tails off. Convention centers. Busy downtown intersections.

Of course China is ahead in this. They need it. China has ten cities with more people than New York. Most of the US has nowhere near the population density of coastal China. Not much of a use case for short range millimeter microwave.

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5G isn’t just mmWave. The protocol stack is designed to be adaptive and capable of handling frequencies from the traditional 4G spectrum as well as mmWave. It’s also a rearchitecting of how network components are distributed that is intended to allow easier federation of services.

Regarding use cases for mmWave: mmWave exhibits the classic tradeoff of range vs bitrate. mmWave makes a lot of sense anywhere short range, high bitrate communications for the bill, such as home WAN, for example. When it comes to RF pollution, the short penetration of mmWave is actually better than the sub-6Ghz band of classic WAN (wifi).

Edit: one thing I am curious about is how energy consumption and EM pollution actually compares across a 4G and 5G stack. I could see it going either way depending on protocol differences alone, but physically speaking, allowing higher frequencies and faster bitrates should serve to (1) reduce EM pollution (2) improve energy efficiency of actual wire comms.

The USA 600MHz band is a good example of 5G on the very opposite of mmW frequencies.

>Tens of thousands of people watching the game on their cell phones

I don't know that technology is really the solution here. Why bother going to the stadium to watch the game on your phone?

Probably for things like replays, commentaries etc.

For the ambiance and the community.

I’ve never hear of people going to a game to watch the same game on their phones. That’s not what it’s for. The real use case is for communicating with others and uploading selfie videos

Yea, nobody does that. They do keep track of the other games happening at the same time though.

China has not deployed or even allocated mmwave yet https://5gobservatory.eu/eu-and-china-lagging-behind-in-mmwa... They are deploying mostly MIMO. MIMO can waste a lot of energy when capacity is not an issue. To save electricity carriers would sometimes turn off 5g functionality at night in the beginning (they probably have better fixes now with equipment upgrades) https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-08-01/Is-5G-a-waste-of-elect...

Those seem like important use cases, no? I was at Pokemon GO Fest in Seattle recently and they had a bunch of 5G antennas. For those that may not know, Pokemon GO Fest is a big in person event that concentrates thousands of people in a small area in order to play a AR phone game. 5G is what kept me and my group online. Previous GO Fests, before 5G was widespread, had lots of connectivity issues.

This argument strikes me as an analog of the "Nobody needs a gigabit line, 25Mbps is enough to stream Netflix in 4k." That position doesn't leave room for future use.

Pokémon Go fest wouldn’t be what I’d cite for importance.

I think the idea is that service providers should be able to support elastic bandwidth consumption including phenomenon such as Pokemon Go festivals, without impacting other, more critical communications.

Stadiums designed from the ground up with Wifi in mind are able to cope in a situation with lots of people using their phone at breaks in the action.

5G ultra wide band has to be one of the most over hyped technologies in recent times. It has stupendously bad range and made zero improvement to a person’s daily use of their mobile phone. Embarrassing it was hyped as much by Verizon and the like (I don’t hear about nearly as much now).

I live in a metropolitan area and I don’t think I have ever had an ultra wide band connection.

Even 5g promises like putting compute closer to edge fall short. Edge computing is merely sending packets to a Verizon data center in the local area: https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/, which is only slightly better than sending to a computer running on something like cloudflare that works independently of the cell phone network.

5G isn’t just about phones. It’s about IoT and all sorts of mobile (and non mobile) devices. Having the ability to transmit more bandwidth albeit at a smaller distance is a big deal. Edge computing helps on the latency front which is also a big deal, information needs to travel less of a distance than being routed over the internet (the laws of physics, particularly the speed of light is the constraint here). In the communication world I’m not sure what could be more important than bandwidth and latency.

"5G isn’t just about phones. It’s about IoT..."

That line shows up in press releases:

"Imagine a world where car accidents are a thing of the past; where chronic health conditions like diabetes are managed 24-7 without blood sugar highs and lows; where smart homes unlock doors with a face scan, and then automatically adjust lighting and temperature and even order groceries for delivery before you run out of milk."

None of which require 5G. Those are all low-bandwidth applications, or even ones that run locally.

4G was heavily hyped for IoT as well, and even has specific standards: LTE-M and NB-IoT.

IMO the ongoing push to make IoT happen is less about the technology and more about trying to get the next 10B devices online and paying network access fees, software license fees, etc. As you mention, a lot of the proposed use cases are very low data (maybe a few MB/day on the higher end).

The latency to a Cloudflare or Cloudfront POP is going to be very close to a Verizon 5G data center.

The question is really what applications require such low latency?

AR? Gaming? Perhaps.

But most applications are fine with 10-50ms RTT. I think edge compute will happen but it won’t be as ubiquitous as the telcos would like.

there is actually a standard for video broadcasting over lte: eMBMS

I've replaced fibre internet with 5G. It's great, short duration contracts with 500Mps speeds (I even got 1Gbps at one point while on holiday), and I can take it anywhere

Do you play video games at all? I imagine the latency is much worse on 5G vs fiber. Have you noticed that?

Just did a speedtest.net run on my 5G link- 14ms ping, 1ms jitter, 500Mbit/s downlink. It’s pretty good.

It’s definitely worse, you’re not going to get single digit pings. That said, I used play Battlefield a fair bit on it and it was largely fine but crapped out occasionally.

When my wifi breaks while playing Dota 2, I quickly USB tether my phone and use my mobile internet to continue playing the same game. Even with 3G connections, I only get an additional 10-15 ms of latency.

I use 5G a lot when I'm "working from home", and my area has pretty good coverage. The one thing I've noticed is that unlike LTE there doesn't seem to be a correlation between connection quality and bandwidth. I can have a full 5G connection indicator on my phone in some places, but get slower speed than if I switch to 4G/LTE. I'm guessing my phone shows the connection quality to the local 5G node, but can't tell me when that node's uplink is degraded.

If they are at the stadium why they need to watch it on their phone? I think that is a misunderstanding of the stadium use case.

When I went to games as a kid, you would frequently see people watching the game with a radio and ear piece to get the commentary.

Right but they want to take pictures and videos which then automatically get uploaded to Google etc.

Not a big problem if they can't do that. But since they are trying to do that it means anybody who truly needs to make a phone-call, or video-call, might not be able to do it. That may not sound so critical, but it can mean whether a phone-company keeps a customer or not. Customers pay for perceived value including reliability.

I'm under the impression there is bearer priority so you would not be able to clog up to a certain point of voice, supposing that is how its configured. But yea, the use case is basically density.

Have you been to a football game (or equivalent) in a big stadium? Depending on where you're sitting, the television experience is often quite frankly better than the live experience in many regards. If you're way up in the nose-bleed section, the cameras are definitely going to give you a better view, in terms of up-close shots, and angles you can't see from your seat. And some people want the commentary from the TV announcers as well.

Honestly, watching football on TV is better than the stadium for many reasons. Yet people want to go to the stadium to be part of an immersive experience (and so they can tell their friends "I was there when so and so broke the NFL rushing record", etc.). So going to the game and still watching a broadcast of the game simultaneously is a desirable experience for a lot of people.

And I'm reasonably sure the same basic principle applies to most other sports that are played in large stadiums.

As someone who doesn't go to any sport events - that's so weird. Also feels like an absolutely monumental waste of time.

To clarify a bit... I'm not saying people are watching their screens the entire time or anything. Although some might depending on their view of the field. But it's especially cool for looking at critical plays and potential (or actual) "video review" situations, where everybody wants to see "did he really get his foot down in-bounds?" or whatever. And of course the stadiums usually replay a lot of that kind of stuff on the big jumbo-tron deals that are fixed in place in the stadium. Still, there are plenty of times you might want a closer look at something and want to check the television broadcast (or some stadium specific internal feed, or whatever).

Whether it's a "waste of time" or not probably depends on your perspective. Some people think watching sports in general is a waste of time. Others think playing D&D is a waste of time. Somebody, somewhere, probably thinks posting on HN is a waste of time...

Someone mentioned they had the Formula 1 live stream on their phone as they were sitting in the grandstands. They'd listen to the commentary, and could watch instant replays with better details and possibly rewind if needed. Best of both worlds kinda.

A lot of people are watching highlights of other games when they are at american football games since there's a bit of downtime between plays and most games each week happen at the same time.

Right, I'd say specifically the big problem is the "Gs," which to me appear to be fundamentally marketing and handwaving to distract from the much more efficient ways all of this could work if we could get incumbent telcos et al out of the way.

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