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Comment by ec109685 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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

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